Fox News won’t drop Tucker Carlson over a commercial boycott cause it’ll be short term and in the long term he’s making the turn by which they (as a political machine or profit-seeking enterprise) renew their 65+ audience with 18-49s
At a unionized site, there’s some attempt to control the editorial line, prevent the editors from covering some figure, or covering them favorably, with threats that they won’t put up with this
The money files a complaint
A capital-friendly NLRB finds the union implicated in illegal “secondary action”, the union is decertified and its strike fund and operating accounts seized
(since Taft-Hartley ‘47, American labor law is directly oriented against allowing labor to leverage its position in keystone industries to turn other entities and ultimately the country leftward)
Writers are on notice they get economic security and entry into the middle class OR they get to be rabble-rousing ruffians
So as far as I’m told there are three ways left in which more than a handful of people can survive as workaday writers, they are
Women’s blogs that cover supermarket checkout topics
Algorithmic content, creating crappy 20 minute how-to listicles from and for the internet, forever
Recapping television shows
(Technical writing is still okay if you have a security clearance, everything else is going to India)
Now as an American without a security clearance who is not yet a beloved Hollywood darling and might like to work by writing anyway, that sucks but it’s a lot of other posts.
What I want to raise here (and leave dangling, without much resolution) is that last point, TV recapping. It is now a thing! But I don’t really hear anyone thinking or talking *about* it. Maybe ‘cause it’s not one of those three. Maybe I read the wrong tumblrs.
But isn’t that weird?
That we’ve outsourced TV watching? Moreover that we’ve outsourced TV-watching-for-cultural-fluency-and-status? The business of sitting through an episode, and developing opinions about the action, and the characters, and the writing, and the performances, and rendering those opinions witty?
Maybe it’ll turn out like book reviews were from the ‘50s-'90s, half way for people to pretend to have consumed esteemed culture they hadn’t, half weird and nonobvious form where for economic reasons all the best essayists pitch all their best ideas pegged to tenuously related (b/h)ooks.
Like how modern blockbusters are stories pegged to tenuously related internationally bankable stars.
And another way to look at it is that just like medical care, or childcare, or cleaning, or sewing, or food preparation, or the ur-example, food production, television watching is a domestic activity we less and less find worthwhile to do ourselves - Baumol’s cost disease cheapening it minute-for-minute and pushing it under the respectable threshhold - yet still find worthwhile enough to Have Done.
Just wanted to mention that two of the coolest magazines from the 1980s-1990s, Black Belt magazine and the Weekly World News, are now readable in their entirety from archives at the Google Books service.
So Penthouse Magazine is relaunching with an antiwoke editorial line, opening with a package going after Judd Apatow for, basically, betraying (his own) comedy to perform wokeness in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the mob
Penthouse Australia I hear has been running a while as a lad mag with an alt-lite tone, I don’t know whether there’s a relationship, Penthouse has been bought and sold and licensed out a few ways in the last decades
This represents the second publication (after Quillette) I can recall to specifically launch as antiwoke (since Trump’s election there has been a subtler shift in tone from The Atlantic and Harper’s and NY Mag, and indeed the linked author’s has a column at NY Mag’s women’s vertical), meanwhile you may have noticed woke brands shedding writers as they slim or close
Again, I don’t know the relationship to other institutional manifestations of “Penthouse”, but when you think of publications capable of keeping their funding and distribution channels open even in the face of moralizing activist pressure, you do kinda think of Penthouse, so I suppose there’s a synergy there.
Wonder if it’s possible to merge the left-journo “online journalism is in dire straits because it’s all ultimately run for the personal gain of oligarchs” with the right-journocritic “online journalism is in dire straits because no one wants all this leftist pap”
Into like, “a central purpose of journalism is manufacturing consent to the regimes its owners are aligned with and online journalism is failing at that role because it lost the social technology of balancing ‘afflict the comfortable’ idealism with grizzled veteran editors who internalize the money’s interests and keep the kids in line accordingly”
(Remember the dawn of online-first journalism was like, Bill Gates pouring money into Slate in the ‘90s so it could hire experienced editors from like the explicitly-for-its-owners-whimsy TNR to make a publication that assured us that dispassionate, clever white Gen X men had everything under control)
And maybe under current conditions they can’t rediscover it; with institutions shrinking there’s no room to rise the ranks and promotion is by lateral transfer, add in Twitter’s “national newsroom” and attention economy and workers at other pubs have a greater influence over your career course than managers at your own
At this distance all the street art I hear about in Shepard Fairey’s old Hollywood stomping grounds these days is right-wing, either The Faction or SABO.
(Hollywood the neighborhood hasn’t equaled “Hollywood” the industry since the 1940s)
There is a tradition of Gen X West Coast counter/subcultural right-cynicism though, expressed through humor and cartooning – Jim Goad and Nick “A. Wyatt Mann” Bougas at Answer Me!, Suck.com (large portions of which was absorbed by Reason magazine), Peter Bagge and Hate, John Swartzwelter writing for Army Man and The Simpsons
Really it was part of the same cultural ecosystem as Fairey and Adbusters, honestly as Spy and Vice and Bloom County and Life In Hell and Calvin & Hobbes tbh, even Beavis & Butthead/Daria, a Gen X disillusionment with/loathing of the normie world
But then that became the culture and got its edges softened and everyone forgot how to operate as a counterculture
(I was lately like “wow, Hard Times and Reductress AND Babylon Bee are all really good rn, why is all the good satire subculture-specific?” Then I realized The Onion’s “overeducated college town slacker with Thoughts about pop culture” was subculture at debut)
But now we’re cycling back out and it’s been rediscovered
This is an interesting article presenting the (rightist-marked) “NPC” meme as the natural heir to the Frankfurt School critical theory critique of mass culture as a dehumanizing force of control
One more point in favor of “current dynamics are not aberrant but rather return to the norm after the aberrant postwar Golden Age” – go back before WWII and America was ABSOLUTELY a country of overcrowded cities full of hobo jungles and pompous elites and henpecking scolds and hordes of ethnicized poor and nervous young college graduates scrambling to hold on and taking their nervous energy out on sex with a demimonde of lipstick and dresses and testicles and dicks, all surrounded by a sea of rural tedium and despair.
So maybe all that was just a Boomer bubble. One that started before The Sixties, though. The postwar right realized that kinda society was a breeding ground of communism though and the first step was throwing off the Popular Front culture.
“Stifling mass culture of the 50s” gets coded right these days, but remember that Ayn Rand (who’d lived through a national culture going commie and stifling before) had big counterculture (yes!) hits in the 40s and 50s with books where a pompous, clucking clique of “progressive” mediocrities dripping syrupy moralism dominated popular media and used it to suppress the liberatory potential of superior individuals and their ideas.
The scene in Atlas Shrugged where the protagonists blow up a bridge and send a trainful of them plunging to their firey comeuppance was the Day of the Rope of its day; in reality the payoff was the McCarthyite Second Red Scare cleansing them from positions of cultural influence, clearing the way for the Counterculture
Which rose, struggled, got overconfident, got knocked back, but returned in the 90s to devour Square Culture for once and all, and dissipated as people no longer realized it needed investment in maintaining
Or were devoured by, “selling out” was really a much higher-profile concept before say 2005. Why’s Gavin McInnes scrambling to build an apparatus of cultural influence? He already built one, with VICE! And sold it out. (For like a billion dollars split a few ways, and it’s not like “magazine from 2008 with a website and publishing arm and events w/ party photographers” is a powerful form rn)
Also, recent revelations are implying that many major figures stopped pushing boundaries in public too hard in return for a lifetime supply of 19±5 year olds soooo
But ANYWAY, does show that the theoretical energy is more on the upstart right these days. Maybe that’s ‘cause theory is what you do out of power – at the same time last decade’s efflorescence of left theory, Jacobin to n+1 to Rhizzome, is being increasingly discarded by a renascent left infatuated with its own dynamic action.
So as someone who vastly prefers taking in information as text than as audio or video I’d been a little dismayed with the way the internet’s energies turned lately, I never “got into” YouTube and honestly resent untranscribed podcasts
But I did these days have an interesting new experience where the internet made something timebound video into a readable form, and that’s been “watching” the Surviving R. Kelly documentary as, I suppose, Black Twitter livetweets their reactions on the #SurvivingRKelly hashtag
I appreciated it better than last decade’s form of TV “recaps”, either the first-wave amateurs or the later entry-level writers of the magazineblog era. Which, at some level had to be about the recapper’s voice, or focus at least
Whereas these individual tweets in chronological order, in different voice but kind of in conversation with each other, usually a quote – or a labeled reaction, like “his brother tho: [reaction gif]”. It feels somehow less intermediated video-as-text, like I’m getting the narrative and arc and pacing of the underlying material itself, but in a text-novel-form, hitting the high points without the connective tissue.
(Like how people say a book adapted to a movie they cut stuff but no even if there’s less dialogue and plot points can you imagine if they described every single thing in frame in every setting and every action the actors performed? It would be insane. Picture worth a thousand words, you know.)
Anyway one thing I remember from college in a few different classes, it used to be typical to talk to your friends, and talk back to the performance, at the theater, and how training the audience out of that became a real class distinction preserved in the way black audiences related to performances in movie theaters
(I suppose there’s a similar class distinction in the energy in the pews in black and Pentecostal churches, or sporting events)
So I remember once telling (to Freddie de Boer, re: a fight with Sady Doyle in like 2008, cause I’m some kinda Zelig/Forrest Gump of The Discourse) about how Salon had started putting its woman-themed articles under the heading “Life” – which is a classic newspaper women’s section title, I think the Philly Inquirer used it growing up - even though the still-kinda-static early-CMS HTML publishing system kept putting them in the /mwt/ directory after the original branding, “Mothers Who Think”
Been thinking about that WB exec who told me around 2008 that the reason there weren’t more “black” TV shows even though there was a pent-up demand was that a network’s real customers aren’t viewers but advertisers and there weren’t enough that wanted a specifically black audience (tho there were for children, teen, young adult, elderly, male, female, rich, poor, etc.)
Makes me wonder how much the rise of “identities” in recent online media has to do with algorithmic advertising where the content and the ads are decoupled so you go for breadth and intensity of audience with a “black” or “feminist” theme (or any other vertical, like “sports” or “cars”) and then the algorithm serves each viewer individually optimized ads for like, Dyson vacuums or furniture or vacations, depending
(And also I wonder if something of the reverse didn’t happen with GamerGate, that games journalism turns on “previews” and insider stuff that’s advertising as far as the studios care, rare and in-demand content to readers, and cheap, subsidized content to the editors, with tighter ties and more effort than traditional media ad placement. So studios felt bound to Polygon and Kotaku cause they had the readers, and readers felt bound cause they had the exclusives, and as it shaded from “yay AAA vidya!” to walking simulators and colonialism thumbsuckers*, the entry costs prevented competitors from capitalizing and everyone just got angry and resentful instead?)
* ‘cause it’s come up twice, “thumbsucker” is an old journalism term for what today would be called a “think piece”
It seems increasingly likely that the rising generation is more likely to turn conservative not because they want to be rich, but because they want to be mean.
—
“We maybe have socially conservative ideas about gender relations,” said Nekrasovoa. “It feels very dangerous to talk about this.” Khachiyan is less shy, and began ticking things off. “I think that women want a daddy, a provider, whether that’s the state or an individual man. I think it’s positive or pleasing when a man pays for you or compliments you. I think heteronormative or heterosexual sex is mostly about the male physically dominating the woman in the bedroom and both sides get off on that, it’s not a shameful thing.”
Murnane interrupted. “I don’t. If I could just care of myself, I wouldn’t care if ‘Daddy’ could take care of me.”
“I would!” said Khachiyan, grinning widely. “I will go on record as saying that I would not be podcasting if I could be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.”
—
A friend of mine who was an early listener to the show explained that he had found in it “a thrill out of hearing these people who seemed to have no fear about violating the relatively new and very strict rules about how to talk and what to say. Not so long ago, I didn’t feel particularly constrained in how I expressed myself, and I didn’t feel out of step with other liberals.”
• Post-‘60s immigrants (two of the crew came from Russia) in the role played last cycle by the “white ethnics” unashamedly saying “miss me with that cultural leftism”
The Elizabeth Warren DNA test is interesting because for once blue tribe spokesmen didn’t at all congeal around a single talking point/position to slot it into their narrative but everybody went around pitching their particular local Schelling point with the same eye-rolling “as everyone knows…” tone anyway
tonight someone drunkenly quoted the Washington Post’s Trump-era slogan Democracy Dies in Darkness as Blackness Dies in Democracy and I’m gonna be thinking about that
