kontextmaschine

A eulogy for Shakesville (posing Melissa McEwan as sympathetically, fundamentally ridiculous) that’s basically a eulogy for web 1.5 and a reminder that life before social media was just the same shit at different scale

GMG is the clearest successor to Gawker, which for some reason was being underwritten by Univision for a while but no longer. As private equity realizes they’re past the buildout and onto the shakeout phase of digital media, the millennial media types who are into unionizing and being oh-so-woke are obstacles, and the money will exploit their audience-mismatch vulnerability of the latter to try and break them on the former.

The same forces of mindless capital that built woke media up are preparing to discipline it

In fairness this is far more timely, relevant, and appealing than anything else I’ve seen from Newsweek in 20 years.

kontextmaschine:

through the years realized that through whatever blind groping the ‘90s-ass “edgelords” were desperately trying to save us from this, through proper gatekeeping and filtering

and at first I’d thought it was gratuitous and supported it being relaxed, maybe not shaming everyone who publicly mourned a suicide, mea culpa, mea culpa, I have debts to pay

>@siliquasquama​ said: wait, what are we being saved from? The public mourning of the suicides of famous people?

exactly

>@tsukutsukuboshi said: seconding the question of what’s been so bad about the public reaction

>@russian-hackers-official said: yea what’s so bad about that

That was how we kept the internet culture from growing mawkish and cry-bullyish: basically, if you were so weak as to get weepy over corpsemeat you got cancelled, the shame would follow you forever and you’d never be allowed to forget it.

Like, you know how from now unto eternity, whenever Tim Buckley gets mentioned someone’s gonna heap shit on him for getting melodramatic and heavy about a character having a miscarriage? That but real. At the time I thought it was too much but ::gestures around::

One of the critical moments I remember most was when Gawker was young, still focused on Manhattan celebrity gossip and young-people-in-publishing industry news, and to comment on it you had to pass an “audition” and if your comments fell below par you’d be ceremoniously removed in Friday “Commenter Execution” posts

And there was some post about a toddler falling out of a high-rise Manhattan apartment window and dying, and some commenter referenced the classic Anal Cunt song “Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck” (about Eric Clapton’s kid, who died the same way, inspiring “Tears in Heaven”) and some scold huffed that he should show some restraint because A Child Has Died, and then that scold was not featured in that week’s Commenter Executions and I was like “hmm, this is an ill omen”, and it was

>  [same “less anger toward the left” anon] Even more speculatively, it seems like you’re less sympathetic toward the Right than you were, set, a year or so ago, less in the sense that you now back the actual agenda of the Left than that you briefly expected that the Right’s pushback would take a form more compatible with your own preferences than it has. Any of this onto something? [2/2]

You’re seeing something real but you’re not seeing it right.

If I’m more sanguine about the culture wars lately it’s because the wave already broke. In 2015 I was saying the other side walked off a cliff and just hadn’t looked down yet, well by now they’ve looked down.

And on the one hand meep meep, motherfucker, on the other hand this means the dumbest and gone-too-far stuff is gonna be coming in the other direction now as the backlash sets in.

Like, what’s the last time the cultural “left” tried to sieze new territory, and not just struggle to hold the line? MeToo? At the time I called it as feminism biting the hand that fed/off more than it could chew, and yeah, by all reports the “targets” there are being welcomed back and people notice that they were still viable all along, meanwhile the supporters are getting blackballed as risks.

(Meanwhile, the Republican supremes are expected to rule that no, protections against sex discrimination do not just imply protections for sexual/gender minorities, and wouldn’t you know it most “sexual harassment” law is leveraged out from similar implications.)

The next step in the culture war is just to make people realize this is already happening, the woke order’s plummeting, and all the stuff that’s been growing underground poised to benefit from their fall is going the other way.

I point out Stupidpol stuff to draw attention to how the new young avant garde in pretty much every subculture - even explicitly leftist ones - is increasingly anti-woke, and the invention of a typology - “radlib”, “wokescold” – by which their rivals don’t even have to be refuted, just identified, mocked, and dismissed.

I point out how all the woke take factories are exhausting their funders’ patience, pivoting to video and selling out to Bryan Goldberg (who made his name by founding a women’s vertical that wasn’t shrill feminist, an online Cosmo when everyone was trying to build an online Sassy), and how meanwhile the hot rising thing is a bro site with an editorial line somewhere between rape culture-tolerant and -positive.

I point out how not so much opposed but underneath consent culture there’s a flourishing ecosystem of Fsub kink as lifestyle (which was the other side in the ‘80s feminist sex wars, after all) and the rising smartphone generation grew up with “catering to the male pornographic gaze” as a popular hobby.

And I’m not just wishcasting here, even the perceptive people on the “other side” have noticed this – Sady Doyle’s looking back over ’00-’10s internet feminism and wondering if it even changed anything deeper than superficial fashion that will cycle back before too long (subtext here is she was a half-step behind the Marcotte/Valenti/McEwan coterie and tbh a better writer/thinker/intersectionalist but now she’s in upstate New York scrambling for enough child care to crank out work for lower-and-lower-profile outlets; if you’ve read her work long enough you know she’s acutely aware of how in the 80s second-wave feminism and radical feminists weren’t so much defeated as just… gave up on and left to wither.)

Like, “this too shall pass”, y’know? It’s passing. Which doesn’t mean the stuff that takes it down or replaces it won’t be dumb and fucked up. To the extent I had identified with the “cultural left” to begin with it was cause I came of age in the 90s after the ‘80s backlash had run through and the reigning “cultural right” was pretty dumb and fucked up. Weirdly sour in a sunny time, in retrospect I realize they were trying to drive a stake through the ‘70s so hard it never got up again and that excess probably did buy me some more time of comfort, but could get counterproductive too, you know if these are the guys trying to maintain their hegemony through suppressing left voices…

Plus honestly yeah I was invested in the fun-for-all ideal of Horny 90s Secular Culture as it portrayed itself, and if more modern revelations are that it was premised on hierarchies of power… Well, at some level I’m “ohhh, hierarchies of power, so THAT’S how you create the good times, they should’ve told us, no wonder we’ve been fucking it up”. But I’m still eagerly receptive to plans to bring things closer to the ideal, or at least avoid some of the worst failure modes and rig the hierarchies right by going in eyes-open.

Chris Arnade taking his fuck you money and driving across the midwest going to McDonalds vs. Rod Dreher making his fuck you reputation flying across the Atlantic eating peasant-themed cuisine

Something flipped in establishment media this week

The WHCD thing, the revelation major studios are pushing explicitly right-cultural media, NBC fighting back all “My hope is this is the moment that defuses #MeToo” over Brokaw, whatever’s up with MAGA Kanye, Douthat in the NYT saying the incels have a legitimate claim under modern rules

All of it signaling to anyone else that backlash is on the mainstream menu

NYMag/Tablet/Atlantic/NYTOpinion seem to have had a sense they need to step in to rescue the culture, this civic sense being tainted by dream of individual glory at the usual rate, more and more jumping on the bandwagon all the time

Now what I’m suspicious might be a cause, Gawker’s Children have been pushing newsmedia unionization for the last year or two, a few successes but even then the bossmen have pushed back more than you’d expect from the brands (exactly as much as you’d expect from bossmen)

But the unions of and by and for the kind of writers that write for Vox and Splinter and etc. have signaled that they want to aggressively move to control hiring and editorial lines, and also the uses to which they should be put (diversity! and fighting the patriarchy!, respectively!)

Which is to say they openly did the work of aligning the media capitalholders that’d been propping them up (since slate and Salon in the ‘90s, basically no online journalism makes money, it all runs off VC) with the reactionary grumbling audiences. In the face of industry contraction (coming after the Facebook realgorithmization, so many “pivot to video” failures, Buzzfeed missing revenue targets) they wrote their own damn Powell Memorandum, ain’t that something.

quoms:

When they don’t or can’t move people, demonstrations, marches and “occupy” movements are insufficient. It’s not enough just to be there: The movement has to join or become a political party, the street leaders have to become politicians.

anyone else ever think about how much anne applebaum just sucks

wasn’t there a day’s fluff last year when Julia Ioffe or Masha Gessen or one of The Atlantic’s post-Soviet R2P types was described as “a Russian (Polish?) Jew” somewhere?

cause that tag did read as coming out of nowhere, but on thinking there is something, along the lines of

“born into overlapping narratives of Eastern European betrayal and abandonment that none of the nationalist projects fully address, ended up with an emotional investment in post-Cold War NATO unlike basically anyone else in the world”

Seems like the WHCD gave the MSM bluechecks a taste of the viper cult’s venom and they spat it out, interesting to see what comes of that

Reminder again that at the start of Reagan’s term young journalists were in the same position - coming off a generational shift and the experience of previous replacement of a Bad, Not Us administration with a Very Us Thus Good one, with a mission that looked like “holding power to account” from the inside and “presuming to correct the electorate’s self-rule” from the outside

and when the pendulum swung back and The Smiling Fascist came to power they were Ready to Resist

(I mean in fairness he DID take office using substanceless mass media charisma to push a vision of volkish renewal, delivering a program of aggressive militarism, labor suppression, and renewed repression of the subaltern-as-contaminant right when it seemed an alternative had taken hold)

And part of that getting cut off at the knees after a year or so was editors and other previous-generation gatekeepers reigning it in, not even on the principle of “These things must be respected”, but “Jesus Christ, take that shit to Village Voice or The Nation, our audience is the public not your team”

kontextmaschine:

years ago neontaster, Comfortably Smug, and one other name that’ll come to me were kind of in the same circle and on the same level as Ricky Vaughn (who leaned too far into the attention he was getting in the primaries and fell in)

kinda weird seeing them slowly integrate into right-bluecheck twitter

owen cyclops at least keeping it weird

wokieleaks, thats the other name

years ago neontaster, Comfortably Smug, and one other name that’ll come to me were kind of in the same circle and on the same level as Ricky Vaughn (who leaned too far into the attention he was getting in the primaries and fell in)

kinda weird seeing them slowly integrate into right-bluecheck twitter

owen cyclops at least keeping it weird

This is the Gin and Tacos guy, I’d started to write him off over too many years of sad essays about working at the University of Buttfuck, Sattelite Campus, but like Jacob “IOZ” Bacharach he’s one of my old regular reads who started getting commissioned this election cycle and seems to be freshening up a bit, tho I do expect a relatively low ceiling.

A thing here is that even in pushing-back, he accepts the “racialist” frame. That’s not “race realist”, but it’s something.

In the “commanding heights” of society, which is to say mostly on social media, the left is on the defensive right now, fighting over how much ground they’re gonna lose. They maybe won on Williamson at The Atlantic but that was a holding action, they maintained the status quo ante, for now, and at expense - Williamson’s cachet is up, those of his enemies are down, institutions are coming to bear to impose costs on surrender.

None of the social media fights are about establishing new left positions, which is the opposite of what I remember 2010-2016, getting ridiculously accellerated towards the end - like when I first showed up on tumblr the local avant-garde trans narrative was “we need more sensitive gatekeepers”, year by year working through “maybe SRS” (then ooga-boogaed as “sterilization”) “isn’t necessary”, “maybe the concept of dysphoria isn’t itself necessary”, and then they just dumped it all the normies in a bundle.

I didn’t expect “the return of race science” this week, even as a regular Sailer reader, that came outta nowhere. I remember him talking about the ‘90s as an “interglacial” when this stuff last got entertained, or rather a high point of right-culture, and did not expect it until after another 4 years of consolidation at least.

One of the low-key eyeopening things in my life has been seeing the “juicebox mafia” class of media journalopundits get into baseball just as dorky as George Will

(and the ones getting into basketball worse)

We need a name for the kinda channel drift where niche brands with existing name recognition end up degenerating to general-interest content farms

Like, Cracked, I remember that as Mad Magazine’s Pepsi, full of black-and-white puerile humor for 7-14 year old boys. And I guess making a comedy writing website from that makes sense, and I guess making individual voice central to that made sense, that was how the Something Awful frontpage went…

SparkNotes, the online competitor to Cliffs Notes, the condensed summaries and thematic analysis of literary works to fake your way through common English class assignments. It’s halfway down this road, on the one hand its content nuggets keep themed around “books you read in 11th grade” on the other hand I only realized this because I clicked through someone’s Twitter bio had her as their advice columnist

VICE, man, I’ve never really known what’s up with that, even before Disney sunk half a billion trying to make it Time-Life for the hipster generation, in the mid-’00s when it already had a reputation on paper and McInnes was like “wait it’s NOT cool to be a junkie, what’s COOL is being a RESPONSIBLE SKATEBOARD DAD” and the whole rest of the magazine was like “what’s COOL is being 23 and discovering cocaine 6 months ago”

(and then they sold their name as a symbol of “hip parties” to some iffy NY/LA DJ nights promoting Colt 45 malt liquor)

yo one of the subtler things of 2017 was watching all the other bluechecks take their distance from DeRay Mckesson once it was clear that #BLM was done throwing off energy and he wasn’t that smart or worthwhile otherwise

Paradox is putting some real money into advertising the new British-themed EUIV expansion, I’ve had ads following me around to places I wouldn’t expect for Steam DLC

“The top brass are clearly terrified of people discovering something they did — possibly a financial issue involving their Christian cult — and were willing to conspicuously fire the very reporters and top editors who dared look into their shady dealings,” one Newsweek Media Group staffer told The Outline.

what

apparently The Awl is closing soon and everyone is doing their memoir recaps so to remind

THE THING ABOUT THE AWL

IS IT WAS THE PRETENSION/AMBITION OF BREAKTHROUGH GAWKER

WITHOUT THE MONEY

BUT MATURED IN PLACE

it was a noble thing and not at all an evil thing but if that was your dream you saw in realtime why it was a doomed thing

(it was a great lake house circular)

The unfortunate result of that dynamic is that a new media order that should be teeming with more vibrant viewpoints than ever is at risk of calcifying into a staid landscape, where original thought is muffled by the wet blanket of political correctness. “There’s a funny, recurring instinct on the Internet now that if you don’t agree with something someone’s written, that it’s not fair or relevant and that it shouldn’t exist,” Jezebel editor Emma Carmichael said recently on the Longform Podcast. “Online feminism has more and more rules lately.” After editing out all of the statements that could be perceived, no matter how crudely, as biased or insensitive, “There are only so many things you can say.“ Even Suey Park, the creator of #CancelColbert who has drummed up Twitter outrage and caught her own backlash many times over, appears to be questioning the social media status quo. “I myself have mistaken pile-ons for justice when oftentimes there was a small miscommunication. I would assume the worse of everyone,” she tweeted this month. “But twitter can give you tunnel vision. It’s fickle, fast-moving, and full of miscommunication and fabrications. It can be self-destructive.”

Amanda Hess, “The Rigid Conventions of Identity Outrage”

I’ve been on the internet long enough now to have seen this cycle happen many times: someone (usually someone young) gains a reputation and attention for searching out and identifying terrible things, and writing cogently about why they are terrible. They do this for several years; it becomes a profession, or at least a dedicated amateur pursuit. Then, at some point, they talk about how this practice of publicly identifying and analyzing terrible things maybe goes too far sometimes. 

The conclusion we should take from any individual instance of “Twitter goes too far sometimes” probably shouldn’t be “internet outrage is about to chill out more.” People have been saying this for years, but the chill-out hasn’t happened. Instead, we should conclude that 1) people who feel comfortable and right generating internet outrage tend to lose this feeling over time, and 2) there will always be new people to replace them.

Or, to put it another way: the internet pays the young to generate outrage.

It’s not always the young, of course. But the young can more convincingly perform the sort of pure anger that online audiences most respond to, plus they have more time to find things and tweet about them and respond to tweets, etc. And the practitioners don’t always end up having doubts about it. But I think generally they do.

Which means we have a free rider problem. Online activism can have demonstrably positive effects that benefit everyone. But I gain those benefits regardless of what I do. I don’t have to do the hard work of sifting through the oceans of public statements out there to find the things that can really make a difference, if properly publicized. 

If that hard work is fairly distributed (you do the work on Sterling, then I’ll take Cosby while you rest up), it’s efficient. But we know it’s not. We know the work is done disproportionately by the young, or at least those new to the game. And we know that doing this work has negative effects on the people doing it. But we rely on that labor to bring us the positive effects, whether that effect is “real social change” or “seeing someone I dislike looking foolish.”

This work seems to take more of your self than traditional reporting does. For one, the writer’s identity is often part of the vector driving the outrage, and so the writer’s identity then becomes part of the argument, something that can be debated above and beyond the case they’re making. For another, much of the work is done outside any official organ; maybe a writer gets things started with a piece on The Root, but the argument develops through the writer’s personal Twitter account, which is often understood as a proxy for your identity. This professional requirement that your private self be part of the work means that the writer’s identity is there on the table alongside their actions as a member of the media. This seems like something that, prior to social media, journalism did not systematically ask of its workers. And it asks this disproportionately of people on the outrage beat, who have less power to protest that particular condition.

I’m not sure what to do about that; I’m not even sure if it’s bad or not. (Certainly many of the people on the outrage beat would have seen interpretations of their work tied to their identity before social media, too.) But I think when you hear people who have been laboring on the internet for years talk about how maybe it’s not perfect, the conclusion shouldn’t be that the internet isn’t structured the right way. It’s that the labor isn’t structured the right way.

(via barthel)

- Mike Barthel, 12/19/2014

One thing about reading overseas news, you get a better sense of the baseline level of national solipsism, the extent to which a culture will try to impose its own internal narratives on the world.

Like in Germany lately they’re like “How come we don’t seem to have soft power traction on anyone any more? No one wants to follow our leadership these days! Is it because we did such a shit job building this Berlin airport?”