frankfurtschooldropout:

Milo peddles a pageant of insincerity that is immediately legible to fellow Brits. Americans understand irony differently, and sometimes not at all. The crowd of excitable young and young-ish people gathered to hear him pontificate believe what he’s saying, even if he doesn’t. Which he doesn’t. And it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t mean it. It doesn’t matter that he’s secretly quite a sweet, vulnerable person who is gracious to those he considers friends. It doesn’t matter that somewhere in the rhinestone-rimmed hamster wheel of his mind is a conscience. It doesn’t matter because the harm he does is real.

Yeah, I saw this. Told you the British thing was key to Milo. Interesting Penny’s take on it tho

A certain school of spiteful camaraderie, of bloodless political jousting before dinner, has long been the form of political discourse in Britain, where the mainstream media is dominated by private school graduates who were trained to debate as if it were a bloodsport in which empathy is a handicap. London media wonks routinely treat one another as sparring partners and drinking buddies despite their political differences: after all aren’t we on the same team really? Aren’t we playing the same game?

She seems to be saying that a flaw of the US relative to the UK is that we treat ideas in popular media circulation seriously, rather than as a forum for the elite educated to play larkish status games.

That’s an odd thing for a self-proclaimed socialist to say, but hey, Laurie Penny*. Might not be wrong.

*did anyone else notice that time a few years ago she and Richard Seymour and China Meiville (the “Sino-Seymourists”, rimshot) tried to schism the Socialist Workers Party away from its fuddy-duddy elders? They used “rape culture” hysteria which was clever - British student governments are aligned with real parties and control real funding flows, a major base for leftists making undergrad silliness a vulnerability. Anyway they kicked up a big stink in public AND THEN WENT QUIET WHEN PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY SCHISMED THEIR FACTION OUT FROM THEM THE SAME WAY. It was kinda obscure which is a shame, wish more people knew cuz it’s a great fucking microcosm of something

“Milo is actually 44 boys in a trenchcoat” is kind of funny, but the mockery’s missing an important point.

(Assuming the thing’s not a damned April Fool’s joke)

Online publishing’s in an iffy place. A lot of money sloshing around recently but a lot of antsyness, and that’s only going to get worse come the inevitable app crash. If Milo’s gambit succeeds - and that gambit is NOT to get his guy elected or to make his ideas hegemonic, but rather to establish Breitbart as right-Salon or -Gawker by mainstreaming the alt-right and proving that ad-supported conservative content can draw a young audience - people are going to copy him.

People will found Breitbart clones. Institutional conservative media will realize they need some connection with Trump types to maintain their relevance, and the #NeverTrump dinosaurs aren’t going to do it. The investors holding the purse strings to Vox, or whoever owns a majority of Gawker now, are going to point out publishing a left-millenialbait site but not a right-millenialbait one is leaving money on the table, and they won’t stand for that.

And you’re going to need to staff up for that. And where better to find someone to do the Milo thing than people who’ve been doing the Milo thing?

“Milo has 44 interns” means he has 44 proteges loyal not to the Beltway, foundation-funded “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” journalism, but to Milo and the ad-supported punchmouth attention-seeking Breitbart model, and they’re ready to be seeded throughout the media firmament within the year.

Swear to god, if Gamergate turns out to be our Dreyfus Affair and he turns out to be our Zola…