kontextmaschine

kontextmaschine:

So yesterday I remembered that Slate and Salon had been around for like twenty goddamn years, and I thought it would be funny to go back and check their early stuff and see how much had changed and how distant the past seemed

I settled on this issue of Slate, April 26, 1999 which of the earliest Wayback Machine archives was the first one to be something useful, sooo, let’s take a look

First off, it leads with a bunch of features that are really just summaries and links to other publications or websites - I forgot before social media platforms and blogs, really, how much websites were just daily-updated lists pointing you to interesting things elsewhere. It’s interesting that many of these summaries don’t have any links, I’m not clear whether that was because they were of dead-tree media that didn’t have websites or because of journalistic etiquette policy.

I remember that back then old-line journalism was kind of daffy about the net, and I know some places at least frowned on linking to internal pages, because they wanted you to approach and navigate through the front page, paper-style. So as to prevent someone from undermining their advertising model and system of cross-promotion and cross-subsidy exactly like Facebook did maybe, so.

The big news of the day was NATO’s war in Kosovo and the Columbine shooting, which had just recently occurred (and seemed to be shorthanded more as Littleton than Columbine at this point). So, what kind of OC do they have on the war?

Ah, hm. Masha Gessen kinda mawking us towards Eastern European war, William Saletan meandering in circles stroking his chin, Jonathan Chait (in an installation of regular feature “Crapshoot”, tagline “Dumb Ideas Exposed Here”) dismisses the notion that soldiers are underpaid and in need of the raises they recently recieved

The 13 percent “pay gap” represents the difference in the growth of military versus civilian wages since 1982–that is, civilian wages have grown 13 percent faster. This does not mean that soldiers earn less than civilians, because it does not take into account the pay differential from 1982. If my wages have increased by 100 percent during the past five years while Bill Gates’ have increased by nearly 50 percent, this does not mean that I am earning 50 percent more than Bill Gates, since he was making more to begin with.

So, the more things change, I guess. What else, what else? Oh, “Explainer” was them. That wasn’t cited enough as a precedent to Vox, at least their early intentional style, the modest height they dived off to chase clicks

Looking around in other links there ARE some really striking bits in here though.

Students at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., staged a protest March 3 against one of their fellow students, white supremacist Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a Web-savvy junior who runs a neo-Nazi organization from his dorm room.

man was just ahead of his time

A University of Arizona student who enrolled in a class called “Women in Literature” was dismayed to discover that the class addressed gay and lesbian issues. As a result, the Arizona legislature is now considering warning labels for courses with potentially “objectionable” content. Says Arizona Regents President Judy Gignac, “The students are our customers and they are paying to be taught. They need to know in advance what it is they’re paying for.”

ditto

Confronted by an increasingly vocal faction of rabbinical students and liberal rabbis, New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary may be forced to reconsider its ban on admitting homosexual students.

That’s Conservative Judiasm, if you were curious

The Matrix (Warner Bros.). Keanu Reeves stars in this complex, dystopic sci-fi thriller. Critics give high marks to the computer-enhanced special effects but are divided on the merits of the ambitious plot and the everything-but-the-kichen-sink filmic provenance, from Soylent Green to Terminator 2 to Hong Kong actioners. For some the effects are enough…

nice

(To see the trailer and some fine Keanu pics, visit this fan site[)]

NICE

Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman writes [10 Things I Hate About You] “may be the cheekiest ‘literary’ update yet–a post-riot grrrl gloss” of the play. Many gush over the foxy young star, Julia Stiles. Complaints are mainly a result of critics’ upscale-high-school-caper-film fatigue.

yeah, I guess those were two actual movie trends

A Walk on the Moon (Miramax Films). Mixed reviews, tending toward the negative, for this tale of sexual liberation set in 1969. A 32-year-old Jewish housewife who married too young is on vacation in the Catskills with her two kids and mother-in-law when she meets a sexy, young blouse peddler. The rest? As the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert says, it’s “one small step for the Blouse Man, a giant leap for Pearl Kantrowitz.”

uh

Economist, May 1
(posted Friday, April 30, 1999)

The cover story predicts that the disappearance of privacy will bring about “one of the greatest social changes of modern times.” Technology is destroying privacy that we took for granted 20 years ago, but the corresponding benefits–better government services, cheaper products, less crime–may outweigh that loss.

uh

New Republic, May 17
(posted Friday, April 30, 1999)
      The cover story describes the Palestinians’ shriveling economy and corrupt political system… …Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen asserts that Serbia’s crimes are “different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale.” He also argues that an allied victory could stimulate a postwar democratic transformation of Yugoslavia similar to that of West Germany after World War II.

…

New York Times Magazine, May 2
(posted Thursday, April 29, 1999)
      The cover story contends that eliminating affirmative action does not devastate equal opportunity in higher education.  …A Susan Sontag essay riffs on the Kosovo crisis, concluding that it is a just war to deter “radical evil” and that the allies will fail if they don’t oust Milosevic.

Time and Newsweek, May 3
(posted Tuesday, April 27, 1999)
      The newsweeklies reconstruct the Littleton massacre and solicit expert opinions on why it happened. Newsweek says that teen-agers kill when pre-existing biological flaws are exacerbated by poor nurturing. Biological warning signs: low heart rates and swollen brain lesions.

haha wut

Newsweek reports that black athletes are shunning white agents for black ones. Among the black agents courting rookies are Puffy Combs, Master P, and Johnnie Cochran.

When Dan Quayle announced his presidential candidacy late last week, he also announced a theme. He would run against the “dishonest decade” of Clinton rule.

As someone who has been more or less overweight for most of my life, I’ve noticed the increasing virulence with which TV and movies treat the issue of weight. It is rare, in fact, to see a portrayal of a fat person in which his weight is not the primary reason he is on screen. In the recent movie Office Space, for example, the heart-attack death of a fat marriage counselor is used as a pivotal plot point played for yuks…

…In a time when almost every deviation from the norm has been reclassified as a disability–you can’t even make fun of drug addicts any more–fatness has become the new Polishness: an all-purpose locus of fun.

One person caught unawares by the popularity of armed guards in high schools was Charlton Heston. Heston, the NRA president, told reporters just after the shooting that the presence of “even one armed guard in the school” could have averted tragedy. (For a Swiftian take on Heston’s comments, click here.)

…ah, I’m gonna regret it, arent I

Shoot Hooligans, Not Hoops
Stop school violence: Arm school kids.

By David Plotz
Posted Saturday, April 24, 1999, at 4:30 p.m. PT

THERE’S the Slate I knew and loved

ABC’s movie Swing Vote (Monday, April 19, 9 p.m.) plunges us immediately into a liberal’s fever dream: Roe vs. Wade is ancient history, and a black Mississippi woman has been convicted of murdering her unborn baby.

In The Simpsons, a donut is not just a donut. It is a semiotically loaded piece of iconography nine years in the making: We have seen Homer steal the huge metal donut from the parking lot of Lard Lads Donuts to exact revenge for its “false advertising” (they wouldn’t sell him a donut as big as the one outside). We have seen him pretend Grandpa Simpson was so senile he qualified for a helper monkey, which he then used to steal from donut shops. We know that at one point Homer actually sold his soul to the devil for a donut. In short, that small ring of frosted dough contains a universe of meaning for Simpsons viewers.

This detail goes a long way toward explaining the subdued critical response to the pilot of Matt Groening’s new show Futurama, which aired last Sunday.

So, takeaway lessons?

First, yeah, I guess Slate really always was a liberal hawk rag, getting high on R2P.

Second those external links to essays from names you’d still recognize on the necessity of war in Yugoslavia are fuuuuuuuucking bonkers though. I forgot how crazy the ‘90s were when we had no idea what to replace the Cold War with

Third I forgot how much they were still running a literary tone carried over from “small magazines” - in the selection of culture topics and the general tone of writing

25 years ago!

There were two recurring themes some editor at Salon – around say ‘96 when it and Slate kind of were for-internet print media – was fixated on.

One was a child-liberationist one, like “parents can have people abduct their 'problem children’ to offshore reform camps like Tranquility Bay, and also often backwater areas of various states use 'Person In Need of Supervision’ structures to apply the state to control teens on parents’ behalf AND THAT’S FUCKED UP”

The other was “oh yeah remember how there was once a rich subculture of female Star Trek fans writing 'slash’ fanfiction?”

And it was honestly surprising to me it was the second one the culture ended up picking up as a major subplot.

Like, my post is entirely in reaction to the Facebook post included there as image that the new “hey here’s some stuff” feed showed me. (Not knocking, “hey here’s some stuff” has been the basis of mass media since newspapers)

I started checking out with DS9 and haven’t personally watched any since Voyager.

Oh, I realize it’s been a long time since this was in general circulation here, so for the newcomers: my media tag is #it’s media as a reference to this overannotated drawing:

xenosagaepisodeone:

in the next decade we are going to be seeing so many movies where characters have arcs about wanting to be accepted that are stretched out to vaguely resemble a metaphor about being trans with really no other narrative commitment to the concept. and all of them will read to me like this image.

Thinking about the classic “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline… do any topless bars still exist?

finder-plus:

(Game Informer #103, Nov. 2001)
TERRORISM’S EFFECT ON FUTURE GAMES
GAMECUBE vs XBOX

apostrophesandpronouns-deactiva:

this is like anti-clickbait. you could not have worded this more perfectly to deter me from reading your article.

Opinion | We’re Watching the End of a Digital Media Age. It All Started With Jezebel.

The media is still grappling with what Jezebel’s creators helped unleash, for good and ill. The era opened opportunities for journalists and creative people who, by instinct or practice, could blend their identities with the stories they told. The new generation of millennial writers at the Gawker sites, BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital projects challenged stuffy, insular and occasionally deceitful institutions that deserved challenging, but it also lacked, in retrospect, a sense of the value of having trusted institutions at all.

And those of us who came up in the internet media may have missed the biggest story of all. We took it for granted that this was a progressive medium, populated by young people who loved Barack Obama and culminating in some way in his election in 2008. We didn’t expect the true apogee of the new media to come with the election of Donald Trump eight years later.

kontextmaschine:

Taylor Lorenz pivoting to Covid hawkery in a ridiculous Taylor Lorenz fashion seems more likely to set up her haters to link that to everything else she represents in getting it all read out of the media mainstream than advance any of her own interests, but girl can’t help herself.

And it’s like she’s on a mission. “Insisting that people never breathe the same air again is just a natural extension of harm sensitivity norms in queer communities! You should apply your feelings re: one to the other!”

I will say though that yeah, maybe what we’re seeing now suggests that queer community norms around AIDS reflected that its harms were primarily to the small, embattled, and strongly distinct queer community itself, if having unprotected gay sex killed off random elderly people in 1987 you’d probably have seen bareback circuit parties for the purpose

Taylor Lorenz pivoting to Covid hawkery in a ridiculous Taylor Lorenz fashion seems more likely to set up her haters to link that to everything else she represents in getting it all read out of the media mainstream than advance any of her own interests, but girl can’t help herself.

kushblazer666:

femmenietzsche:

How Rod Dreher’s Blog Got a Little “Too Weird” for The American Conservative

“It never got weird enough for me,” once spoken by Hunter S. Thompson, is an apt mantra for the dedicated fans of eccentric conservative blogger Rod Dreher. Over the last 12 years, Dreher, whose blog at The American Conservative will post for the last time Friday, has built a cult following with some of the most bizarre diatribes in opinion journalism. He has warned that so-called sissy hypnosis porn is “profoundly evil;” detailed the “formal” Catholic exorcism of a friend’s suicidal wife; and recalled—in unsettling detail—the time he witnessed a Black classmate’s uncircumcised penis.

But one particular reader, upon reading the last of said posts, determined the blog had simply gotten too weird, according to two sources familiar with the publication. That disgruntled reader was Howard Ahmanson Jr., the heir to a California banking fortune and the sole benefactor of Dreher’s six-figure salary at TAC, which is published by American Ideas Institute, a nonprofit. This unique funding arrangement—a single donor choosing to cover one writer’s entire salary—was paired with an even more unusual editorial arrangement: Dreher was allowed to publish directly on TAC’s site without any revisions or legal oversight, according to the two sources.

Dreher, Ahmanson, and Emile Doak, TAC’s executive director, did not respond to requests for comment.

Ahmanson had apparently long admired the work of Dreher, who has authored numerous conservative books and previously wrote for the Beliefnet blog and The Dallas Morning News. But according to the two sources, Ahmanson began to sour on his beneficiary in 2021, when Dreher, in a blog post debating circumcision, wrote the following: “All us boys wanted to stare at his primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous. Nobody told us that wieners could look like that.” Incredibly, that was the “first red flag” for Ahmanson, one source told me, adding that the rift had been building for about a year.

Some of Dreher’s commentary on the gay and transgender communities also proved off-putting to Ahmanson, such as his lurid musings on anal sex, rectal bleeding, and the “partially rotted off” nose of a gay man who contracted monkeypox. “At some point, he basically decided, ‘This is too weird,’” the source, paraphrasing Ahmanson, explained to me. “‘I don’t want to read this or pay for this anymore.’”

…

As for Dreher’s future, he has said he plans to move his blog to a Substack while continuing at TAC as an editor at large and will “probably” contribute a column––this time, per the two sources, under an editor’s supervision. “I want to thank Howard and Roberta Ahmanson for their generous financial support of me at TAC for my run here,” he wrote in a Friday farewell he published after being notified of this story. Remarking that he wrote “important things” and “stupid things” during his time at TAC, Dreher closed with a nod to a post he said fit the latter category: “All you Mongoloids were the Primitive Root Wiener in my Lucky Dog, and I love you very much.”

*dying*

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

God, a “high-powered women are stepping back from the rat race” article, you used to see these all the time but I can’t recall one in ages! These were like 30% of Faludi’s Backlash in their own right.

NBCUniversal Studios, with the Katy Tur special effects show

Remember when there were articles about Western urbanites doing the Falun Gong Tai Chi stuff because “Free Tibet” was played out but They hadn’t realized to pivot back to Russia again?

benevolentfalcon:

kontextmaschine:

Cable television was perfect and we ruined it

This frames itself as “there’s so much good stuff I should waaatch! I miss vegging out on crap because it was what’s on!”

And that’s not wrong per se, but I’m thinking beyond that to the effect on the whole-culture that we shared this pre-internet experience in common, of taking in media that was not very optimized for us because it was around, and consequently having a lot of cultural background we were very lightly invested in, in common with the rest of the country, and that enabled us to build increasing elaborations on the culture while maintaining coherence

Like, there might have been a lot of webcomics, but honestly, there were a lot of newspaper comics. Like, on any given day I might read 18 of them cause they were just there. And we’d have that in common, like, not just the good stuff like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, we’d all recognize the Family Circle dotted-line meandering travel paths. And so someone could reference that and we’d all be like “ahh”. Or Dennis the Menace’s slingshot. That Liz Lemon “chocolate, chocolate, chocolate! ACK” cutaway works because everyone, including people who didn’t or still don’t care about the experience of unmarried single women approaching middle age, would have read enough Cathy to instantly place the reference and further, to process the twist, that yeah, it was awfully mannered and ritualized for a “relatable” comic. Garfield without Garfield works because we’ve all seen it with Garfield.

Part of your contemporary social/identity/representation/ownership fights is just rehashing the 80s “Canon Wars”. What is authentic American culture, these works long held up for praise but dismissible as product of an old order and old demographics? These new works by and about the non-dominant that don’t even try and engage with the first tradition?

And that never resolved so much in either direction as all High Culture was deprecated in favor of a new American Canon of Pop Culture. One that could skip normative questions of merit entirely by being a descriptive canon of what the masscult Broadcast Era left us.

Like, The Brady Bunch wasn’t in the canon because it was smart, or well-acted, or well-shot, or had something interesting to say about society in the period where blended families and domestic servants were each at the edges of “normal”. (If it was that, lesser Norman Lear like Maude would be). No, the Brady Bunch was in the canon because it was ubiquitous. Everyone had seen it at some point, if you were Generation X there was a good chance you had seen any given episode at some point.

And this still represented a diversification. This new canon had a lot more “white ethnic” and particularly Jewish pillars, and blacks certainly had more pride of place in 20th century “pop” than “high” culture.

(This leaves Jazz and Blues in the interesting position of having been significantly intellectualized to “fit” the old High Culture paradigm before the new one came in, leaving them somewhat overlooked)

And with this stuff established as the New Authentic America you could appeal to it. With Rock as the National Genre, not just kids’ stuff, you could say that thru Blues and Motown the culture owed black artists more respect. (Where no one really thinks of contemporary American pop as Swedish-indebted).

Feminist and queer scholars pored over Hollywood camp, subtext, old “Pre-Code” work aiming to prove that gender variance and homosexual desire had always been an authentic part of American culture.

(I def. remember on multiple occasions apropos of I forget what the tale of “Fatty” Arbuckle trotted out as a moral condemnation and warning of the unscrupulous young women and tabloid press that for money and attention would peddle baseless rape accusations to a public of vulgar moralists, which today hm)

And past those knock-on effects on social health, the cultural output itself was great. I think that’s the defining factor of Long 90s culture, not only that it built off a shared canon but its creators and audiences recognized it as working from a shared background with traits and forms that could be played with, the meta-awareness of it all.

Xena: Warrior Princess, a syndicated swords-and-sandals actioneer spin-off attracting an ecology of academic conferences and journals by mashing up all of ancient mythology, Mediterranean history, and knowing Hollywood encoded/subtextual queerness.

Kevin Williamson deconstructing and rebuiding the slasher genre with the Scream series. And then, honestly, doing the same with the teen relationship drama with Dawson’s Creek, where the principals were always talking through what their character developments meant, seeing them through a cinematic lens in heavily referential dialogue

Joss Whedon and Rob Thomas (of Veronica Mars) wielding their audience’s genre-savviness against them, setting up scenarios that would “have” to end some predictable way that resolved everything by the conventions of five-act episodic TV with recurring stars and plotlines, and then just not.

In comics hitting earlier in the 80s, Crisis on Infinite Earths as a recognition at the core of the capes-and-powers mainstream that these disposable entertainments had congealed into mythology, proceeding by in-metaverse acknowledgement of extranarrative structure.

In more far-out stuff Morrison, Moore, Gaiman, and Miller going meta as hell, all “what if comics were myths, what if comics were real, what if reality was comics, what if reality was myth.” DKR as “if Batman was real, he’d be pretty fucked up”. Watchmen as “if Golden/Silver/Bronze ages were real, superheroes would be just as fucked up and unmoored by the 80s as we all are”. Sandman was “what if every human story and mythology was part of the same meta shared universe”

Even Star Trek:TNG was an attempt to realize the coherent universe that the fandom had mostly projected onto an original series that were really a stock cast and setting adaptable to filming any SF short story of the week. (Lurking in the background is the 70s-80s realization from Star Wars that coherent universes increase audience stickiness, and are a well you can go back to)

Then Ron Moore took his project of trying to give Star Trek coherence and weight to an even less respectable space opera reboot, and made the fact of an IP-driven rehash (“all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again”) a load-bearing religious theme of eternal recurrence.

Family Guy, the conceit of half the jokes was they invoked 70s-80s pop culture just the right amount of obscure so you constantly surprised yourself that you even knew enough to get them.

SeaLab 2021 repurposing a piece of establishment futurism to underscore how absurd the concept seemed by then was despite how nostalgic the aesthetic was, Venture Brothers pastiching postwar boys’ adventure fantasies to highlight their complete disconnect from any actual process of becoming a man.

I miss that, you know. That overlapped/kept going with the Early Internet, so I thought it would continue through and we’d just keep building on it.

I guess that’s what really sticks in the craw re: “cancel culture”, millennial insouciance, wevs. The blithe dismissal of a rich, elaborated, mutually supportive canon with nothing to replace it.

Also realizing you’re now the kind of person to levy that critique at The Youngs, I guess that sticks too.

I dunno, maybe that was because the Early Internet was full of people who got acculturated pre-Internet and carried that with.

Maybe it’s cause I’m not getting particularly acculturated anymore - I accept Pokémon and Spongebob memes and reaction images in their own right, maybe if I saw the underlying properties - or whatever comes after - I’d appreciate them more.

Maybe that shared culture was an artifact of suburban retrenchment and then the Early Internet narrowing the cultural/economic/political American subject to a narrow white UMC and adjacent band and allowing a generation of us to mistake ourselves for America entire

Maybe it was product of a bottlenecking that was still negative on net. Like, basic cable had more channels than the plain 3 network broadcast era, but in 1950 they were competing with like, the bowling league, the pool hall, the Elks club, the Masons, the ladies’ charity, the socialist meeting, the dinner show club, the Mafia nightclub, the gay Mafia nightclub, any of the 4 bars between your work and home, the “whatever’s playing this week” double-feature movie theater…

(And even then, more diversity between examples. If you started going to shows in like “the Washington punk scene” in 1989, that was probably a lot of hardcore if you meant “comma, D.C.” and twee and proto-grunge if you meant “Olympia, comma”)

I dunno. Still, I miss it.

An aspect I think of a lot is how network tv used to follow the seasons. You get 22 to 26 episodes spread over the year, and for the most part, shows followed that in real time. Halloween episodes at Halloween, Christmas episodes at Christmas, my tv school friends are starting and ending their semesters the same time I do, etc. And this was regardless of show; no matter what you watched, everyone did a Christmas episode. TV was connected to our own flow of time, it made us feel more connected. I think that’s part of why the last ten years have simultaneously felt like a few months and a century, our cultural output is no longer tied to the passing of time - it’s all ten-episode season this and limited series that, posted any time of the year, you can go back and watch it any time that works for you, etc. Not that there aren’t benefits to this model, but it has strange effects. Community might he the last show I remember watching thay really stuck to this model.

Hm I can’t think of sources but in terms of themes I’d look at Buzzfeed and clickbait, Gawker and the stable of feed “verticals” as a business model, and the professionalization of “feminist blogging” into identity media

I still remember Gamergate as when online media first started wandering away from serving its audience to indulging its sense of snobby, moralized superiority and when called on it tried to rally everyone against the audience

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

In the tow truck taking Darwin to the shop to be resurrected. Bluechecks might be scoffing at the Matt Taibbi “Twitter files” stuff about the old staff suppressing stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, but it’s on news radio at least.

They’re repeatedly wedging it into other things, even.

It is apparently the rightist news station though, it has promos for Lars Larson, the local post-Limbaugh bozo (I mean that literally, in the sense that the Bozo the Clown character was portrayed by various hosts as a local show in each market. This is what Krusty the Clown was riffing off.)

The ads include lawyers “that care as much about your gun rights as you do” or who do DUI defense