LOL. The future no longer seems very open; in fact, its contours seem very, very clear. What had once been a rat’s nest of 15 or 20 recognizable independent digital-media startups has been reduced, through purchases and mergers, to four consolidated brand portfolios that have any chance at medium-term survival: BuzzFeed-Huffpost-Complex, Vox-Verge-SB Nation-Eater-NYMag, Bustle-Mic-Gawker, and Vice-Refinery29.
What bloggers do you hate? Rarely seen you say you hate something here?
The Pandagon/Feministe/Feministing/Shakesville era (Jezebel started out decent, with Moe Tkacik and Slut Machine, but that was not the path down which money lay) it felt like “this is the internet future, where everyone is reasonable! If they’ve identified some unsatisfactory part of life, surely encouraging them to bring it to everyone’s attention so they can factor in those perspectives can only lead to a better and more harmonious culture!” but that did not pay off
Can’t help but think that the trans stuff is going down differently in the UK because like, it’s being done in public.
Like, I hear complaining that the BBC (a public body, duty-bound to serve and represent the polity) is balancing trans and “Gender Critical” guests on shows, which is to say “how society will parse the expansion of transgender claims since the 2000s” is something being hashed out on broadcast shows, and in newspapers, albeit maybe the educated-class ones
Like in college in the 2000s we’d all be talking Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and watching Paris is Burning at the campus theater but… I’m not saying we weren’t aware trans people still walked among us but they were like shiny Pokémon, and I was pretty unique among my American History classmates for knowing there had been an earlier transgender “moment” in the 70s.
And then around the turn of the 10s I saw some blogs from the kinda people who might well have been going to MichFest saying “this is about to be a thing again” and then [tumblr], (and I remember there was in the history of that a pretty genital approach, first leveraging off of intersex legitimacy, and then the move away from bottom surgery as end goal [decrying any expectation as “mandatory sterilization”])
And then it was like “Oh, hey, meet Caitlyn Jenner and also all your public medical, cultural, and psychotherapeutic-in-place-of-spiritual authorities suddenly flip to this understanding and feel like they have a mandate to keep you in line”
I mean past upstream of that might be the different ways 2nd wave feminism interacted with the conservative reestablishment politics of the time, under the Iron Lady it was given some degree of cooption as middle class women entering the fray; under Reagan there were alliances of convenience with the rising Christian conservatism over porn, not funding transgender stuff, eventually Bill Clinton being a skeeze, that gained them nothing, foreclosed other alliances, and was ultimately rewarded with Rush Limbaugh denouncing “feminazis”.
So they never settled into American society (from an academic standpoint the issue with Andrea Dworkin isn’t that she largely is the caricature of the man-hating feminist, it’s that no one else ever really built anything off her work). So without them around who would you go to for pushback? Media middlemen could only imagine some caricature of a bigot they thought they just finally defeated over gay marriage and didn’t have to face again, so they didn’t bother.
If Jacob Bacharach hadn’t started out in the blog era with Who Was IOZ he would absolutely be part of that Jonathan M. Katz/Michael Hobbes crew. Glad he came up closer to Pareene at worst, telling Pittsburgh nonprofit stories out of school, not Tom Scocca.
people cant just create a massively popular show/book that had a profound impact on popular culture and then just retire in peace anymore. they gotta wait until they’re older and get really mad about some shit that is not happening and ruin their own legacy by publicly humiliating themselves constantly
We don’t anymore have an information ecosystem where the acclaimed voices of one generation become the gatekeepers of the next such that they simply don’t let notions discontinuous ever become a thing, is the issue
the fascinating part about this is where they explain that theres apparently a bitter dispute in the nazi scene over whether Nazi Rap is a legitimate recruiting tool
Experts say the far-right rock scene tends to draw an older crowd, with the style of music generally holding scant appeal to a younger audience. To that end, a new generation of right-wing extremists has branched out into far-right rap, attempting to harness a more popular and contemporary musical genre as a vehicle to spread their ideology.
That, in turn, has sparked an ongoing debate within far-right circles over whether it should, or could ever, embrace “Nazi rap.”
“There’s one faction that says… it’s a Black tradition. And they don’t want to have anything to do with it,” said Hindrichs.
“There’s another faction that says, ‘OK, but hip hop is the most popular genre in Europe in the charts for the youth, and so we have to deal with that.’
“It’s half and half, I would say,”
Back in the mid-2010s I was in touch with some guys who wanted my insight on forming intentional communities and one said he had land in California’s Central Valley in a day’s range to both LA and SF where he could train up a “security” force of based stickmen, I pointed out that if you had open land in weekend reach of both and a trained security force the way to generate resources was as music festival grounds
Who is an article on vice.com that lists a value in euros and then notes the equivalent in pounds even for, though
I guess it makes sense given that the officer class of midcentury administrative liberalism basically was the local elite of Washington D.C. but it’s remarkable how openly, shamelessly, guilelessly the Washington Post positions itself as their house organ in the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” modern day
The Welfare State They Were In
Huh, that’s a point, while American “alternative” was significantly a shift to music by college graduates for suburbanites, Belle and Sebastian came out of the Scottish welfare state.
You will remember Trainspotting was a movie about a bunch of petty criminal heroin addicts who always have somewhere to sleep, even if there is a dead baby hallucination on the ceiling. Thatcher cut back but she left the “dole” as a buffer for the surplus population, even as gestures were made towards a future of new leisure careers.
On the other hand I don’t think it’s possible to write a better dismissive summary of that whole milieu than “Micah Uetricht attempts to hitch the welfare state to fondness for Belle and Sebastian”. Maybe if it had run in n+1.
Not enough attention paid to the fact that the Passionate Leftist critique of Matt Yglesias (that he’s a cynical opportunist who moves into and out of scenes and positions as their popularity waxes and wanes) and the Professional Progressive one (that he needs to “read the room” better) are directly opposed
My take is as the third generation of a writing dynasty that came out of midcentury NYC Communism he does, in fact, have a good sense of how to usefully advance his positions and interests by tailoring his efforts to the shifting correlation of forces in the discursive realm. That the Passionate Leftists are onto something, he is reading the room, and the Professional Progressives have just noticed him moving away from their consensus on that basis.
Some share of Vox’s output is now cottagecore daydreaming as lawnmower ads
“The media isn’t making a big thing over unrest in Minneapolis!” like yes, but if you imagine there’s a world where they do and the takeaway is anything but “stable Democratic administration operating under color of law is insufficient to restore and maintain order” you’re mad
“Well okay why is lab-leak stuff important?”
Mostly as a coordination point for the media people with a 90s sensibility to mount an offensive against post-2010s stuff on good ground, that’s worthy.
Coulda swore Naomi Klein was editing The Nation for a while, I was going to say it makes sense they turned to the author of No Logo after the only energy in ‘90s left publishing was Adbusters, but I guess I’m confusing Katrina vanden Huevel and the period when Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” stuff was big?
remember when “don’t drink bleach” was a partisan statement
I remember when at least Vice would…
Well no, they’d say castrating yourself with a garbage disposal is unhealthy but it would be Gavin McInnes angry at the idea you needed to be convinced.
This is either admirably self-aware or hilariously oblivious
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. PTTHERE’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
people don’t remember that in the late ‘90s Salon still had a hardon for child liberation and occasionally ran series on how PINS – “person in need of supervision”, the idiom by which judges were still putting slutty girl-teens under formal control – was bullshit
Or about how there was still a network of on- and offshore schools you could have your kids professionally kidnapped and sent to to treat them being incorrigible or queer – this was kinda what But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) was about
DAE remember when Megan McArdle first blogged as “Jane Galt” in the first blog era? I was surprised to later learn she was a 30yo professional writer already, because she was not an example of clear ideas clearly presented; her posts would end up barnacled with UPDATE: while I think/want this, I do NOT think/want this other thing that is a logical or practical consequence, which I think settles the matter, like 3 times worse than early Rod Dreher.
But she was a libertarian blogger when that was hot, and as a girl a rare bird (the pre-blog LP newsletter had one of Marilyn Vos Savant’s rivals as smartest woman giving rhetoric tips?), and well-enough networked in DC.
Which is a reminder that if the Twitter era dynamic doesn’t seem to promote the best takes, earlier models were vulnerable to ingrouping, the groups were just smaller, in person, and particular to the scene.
In the later ‘90s the libertarian magazine Reason and its pioneering Hit & Run group blog were staffed by writers who had spent the early '90s as expats in Budapest. Compare their post-Cold War “Right Here, Right Now” optimism with the crew coming out of Moscow’s The Exile half a generation later.
I lowkey love the contextual advertising such that every liberal article worrying about the breakdown of order is trying to sell me body armor
