kontextmaschine

Gamergate was the canary in the coal mine for the current digital kulturkampf.

http://vice.com/en_ca/article/qvwv9d/2017-was-the-year-you-could-not-log-off

GAMERGATE CAUSED OPIATES WHICH CAUSED DRUMPF, AND ALSO CAUSED ROTHERHAM WHICH CAUSED THE BREXERT

(via slartibartfastibast)

Have you seen Nick Denton’s twitter lately? It’s straight him and his peers going “Oh God we created a monster with the Internet, Shut It Down”

Meanwhile, the, ah, Shitpostant Reformation has its head down, shoulder to the wheel for global ethnogenesis to the point they’re creating an honest-to-gods pantheon out of pop culture detrius

Flashback to like 2009 when media outlets were like ”were gonna make an extra effort to bring in smart voices from overlooked minorities”

And I was like “Ghetto nerds? The guys who are like 100% anime/Chrono Trigger fans and 0% their dad owns a dealership? I can’t wait! Man, glad we went all in on racial equality, now the reward is everything goes my way for a generation!”

hey if we’re eulogizing early localblogging I want follow-up articles on The Hipster Grifter and Kokies, the Williamsburg coke bar

argumate:

“you should treat her like you would treat another guy! a guy that you found incredibly hot for some reason!”

dat ‘90s promise that it’s not only okay but grrrrreat to welcome girls to guy stuff cause then they’ll be as good and worthy as guys but you can fuck them too

(that in retrospect was obviously subliminated gay issues THANKS Dan Savage)

(I mean, honestly, thanks, ‘90s “Hey, Faggot” Dan Savage* for trying, for making the case and for making it happen, those were a good few years)

* the reference is in the ‘90s Savage required (or edited) all letters to begin with the salutation “Hey, Faggot”, which was his original idea for the column title before “Savage Love”.

Which maybe inspired the “Ask a Mexican!” column that Gustavo Arellano just lost copyright to when he resigned rather than fire his staff under OC Weekly budget cuts

alt-weeklies!

nostalgebraist:

The newspaper:

“Mélenchon, a far-left candidate,”

Wait But Why post “explaining” the same news story:

“Okay, so.  To understand this, we’re going to have to zoom way out first.

The first thing you need to know is that politics is kind of like a line.  We could call it the Politics Noodle.  People like to yell at each other because they’re standing on different parts of the noodle.

[6-panel cartoon of stick figures standing on a piece of spaghetti and exchanging quirky insults]

Weird, huh?

Now, imagine that Hillary Clinton wakes up one morning, and finds herself standing in her usual place on the Politics Noodle.

[cartoon of stick figure Hillary saying something Hillary-ish]

She looks to her left and sees Bernie Sanders,”

femmenietzsche:

Meet The Artist Who’s Painting America’s Most Ridiculously Gerrymandered Congressional Districts With The Colors Of Various Pride Flags For Reasons We Were Unable To Completely Discern

The way this piece starts is startling precisely because it’s so predictable.

“This women’s magazine explores the rough truth: professional women coming out of their youth have it hard. They were promised they could have everything, but under the influence of feminist slogans they threw themselves wholly into their office careers. But it turns out their careers aren’t that satisfying and they’re coming unhinged. Now some are thinking of dropping out. Several of the author’s professional class friends are dreaming of leaving the city to live a more domestic life.”

These were exactly the Atlantic articles Jezebel was rolling eyes at in the 2000s, Susan Faludi placed them central to the “backlash” of the ‘80s. Adapted as a movie, they were 1987’s Baby Boom, with Diane Keaton.

But I haven’t really seen one since jeez, 2007 maybe. Certainly not since the media went loopy circa 2010 or so. The Cut is a New York Magazine vertical, and I’ve noticed enough examples I count it settled that NY Mag is trying to own the wokeness hangover and be the pre-2010 “liberal, not loopy” you loved and miss. So it’s significant exactly how they’re walking it back here.

Just like their “haha guess we fucked up with all the mocking misandry” piece it’s not a full mea culpa but an off-ramp, a way for people to rationalize and narrate standing down without immediately rejecting their felt values.

After that formulaic opening it shifts to some feminist lashing-out: we’re unsatisfied at work because of the sexisms! The wage gap! Women feeling undervalued! But these bits aren’t very well tied to whatever point is being made, feels like a few paragraphs of feminist signaling softening the audience up for a not-terribly-novel inversion of Friedan: “the unsatisfied careerist is the new unsatisfied housewife!” One wonders what Faludi or 2000s Jezebel would say.

At no point does the article SAY you should have a baby but it does say your professional life will be bleakly unsatisfying and single-girl-in-the-city recreation (drinks! vacations! performative satisfaction on Instagram!) won’t fill the hole, nominates kids (and dogs! and sex! and activism!), “jokes” that Rory Gilmore maybe was into something in removing nose from grindstone and getting pregnant, and ends on a note urging you to invest your feminist hopes in the next generation.

So maybe there’s still too much anti-natalist headwind to come out and say it just now, but they’re tacking pretty close. Baby steps. ::rimshot::

The one striking thing, there’s no “biological clock” ticking in the background of this piece specifically about unsatisfied careerist women in their 30s as there absolutely would have been in previous iterations. Technology has bought women of that class another decade of fertility, maybe that’s finally been priced in to people’s expectations.

Oh another thing, you notice how it never makes an aside to showily acknowledge the distinct challenges of brown, or queer, or tbh not executive class women? Pre-2010, what did I say?

This decides it, New York Magazine is absolutely betting the identity fever’s gonna break and they’ll own the “hungover but not absurd liberal” beat

I said that Gawker and its bastard children would never apologize for Gamergate, this is a closer than I expected

(I mean it’s not even a forgettable Jezebelite, it’s someone who started at NYMag’s The Cut in 2012, after a run at Jared “Jared Kushner” Kushner’s NY Observer. But it’s something)

association-of-free-people:

kontextmaschine:

association-of-free-people:

sadoeconomist:

association-of-free-people:

trained-chimpanzee:

kontextmaschine:

In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.

whoever drank that particular flavour of neoliberal koolaid deserved it 

Oddly I haven’t missed them.  Hell, I didn’t even notice their absence.  

I noticed they were gone because Mic actually had me blocked here

Every so often I’d try to comment on some long discussion and I couldn’t because the OP was a shitty Mic article

I was blocked also, but their pandering shit kind of blended into the rest of tumblr I guess.

In a sense Tumblr stole their thing because any self-loathing hubris filled tween could write for them.

Wait a second don’t bury the lede, Mic blocked people on tumblr (as a way of making sure the reblog chains of their official ports-to-tumblr never went through ancaps and were more hugboxy) ??

One more thing I didn’t realize could happen until someone broke a norm and it looked obvious in retrospect. 2017!

Yes, they actively blocked. If you took them to task and had any sort of following where the criticism gained traction you got the hook.

They were basically a Gawker subsidiary knock-off sharing that over-processed corporate-plastic political facade formulated on race and gender baiting.

They took the lowest of the low hanging clickbait fruit and were easy to trash for it. The garbage heap is the best place for that incarnation of Mic.

According to that article they’re going to get into video production though. Vice has become hugely successful following that track, I wonder if they’re attempting to emulate.

“pivot to video” is journalist-speak for “the money is shutting our click farm down, though they may reuse the brand for a Hail Mary attempt at video, which will also close down”

I’m not sure Vice is successful in “match viewers to advertisers” sense, they just have the deepest-pocketed and most patient corporate backers, they really took the magazine brand (Do’s & Dont’s, cocaine gentrification) and sold out hard to like Disney around 2007 when we were going to ride the real estate boom to heaven drinking Sparks and wearing American Apparrel. That’s how they invested so heavy in video so early, also why they sloughed off McInnes towards Taki’s and Street Carnage (Pepsi VICE) and later the Proud Boys. VICE Media was gonna be the new Time-Life

association-of-free-people:

sadoeconomist:

association-of-free-people:

trained-chimpanzee:

kontextmaschine:

In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.

whoever drank that particular flavour of neoliberal koolaid deserved it 

Oddly I haven’t missed them.  Hell, I didn’t even notice their absence.  

I noticed they were gone because Mic actually had me blocked here

Every so often I’d try to comment on some long discussion and I couldn’t because the OP was a shitty Mic article

I was blocked also, but their pandering shit kind of blended into the rest of tumblr I guess.

In a sense Tumblr stole their thing because any self-loathing hubris filled tween could write for them.

Wait a second don’t bury the lede, Mic blocked people on tumblr (as a way of making sure the reblog chains of their official ports-to-tumblr never went through ancaps and were more hugboxy) ??

One more thing I didn’t realize could happen until someone broke a norm and it looked obvious in retrospect. 2017!

In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.

Someone should bring up Matt Yglesias’ old “in a scandal, just make it clear you won’t resign and the party you’re lashed to will have to back you up” strategy

when I was young I wrote off a response to a Phyllis Schlafly essay syndicated in my local newspaper and never got a reply

it was a shock and then a lesson that she could do that, one it’s good I got before the internet

I wrote into the newspaper and got printed a few times but in retrospect I was angling my words towards it, I guess that was the point but it feels unvirtuous

this was when the modern text form was the “FAQ” but the form was already developed enough that the Qs weren’t A’d let alone F but a Socratic (“dudebro”) dialogue

Catching side glances at this Nick Robinson thing and it’s like “he’d insistently solicit sex from everyone, but no one in the industry scene wanted to cross him because he’s so influential, his friends could make or break you.”

And I’m thinking “Wait a second, the performative-vulnerability indie dev scene works by trading sex for favor with Gawker-type video game journalists? That’s downright unethical.”

peopleofearth-tbs:

caricature

micdotcom:

— Mikki Kendall, Neo-Nazis have threatened CNN employees’ families. Many writers already know what that’s like. (Opinion)

During the American Revolution, printer James Rivington’s Gazette was something of a proto-NY Times: Manhattan-based, but with a broad circulation and the most international coverage in the colonies. It was also the biggest newspaper not to tilt to the rebels, first offering a platform to all factions and then increasingly Loyalist.

This was not universally well-received. Isaac Sears, the privateer-trader who organized the merchants of New York into the Sons of Liberty, pushing back against British regulation which cut into their profits and backed by the threat of mob violence, described Rivington thus:

He would appear as a leading man amongst us, without perceiving that he is enlisted under a party as a tool of the lowest order; a political cracker, sent abroad to alarm and terrify, sure to do mischief to the cause he means to support, and generally finishing his career in an explosion that often bespatters his friends.

I have known a Statute of Lunacy taken out, upon a degree of conduct less exceptionable than this I have described: If the relations of our politician, should find his estate wasted by means of his patriotism, and they choose to improve upon this hint, I assure them, it is heartily at their service.

They did not. (A “Statute of Lunacy” was the period version of involuntary psychiatric commitment)

The Sons of Liberty arranged a series of hanging-in-effigies of Rivington, complete with a poem by revolutionary poet Philip Freneau framed as a satisfying confession before the gallows, and he was arrested by the New York Provincial Congress.

This not availing, an angry mob besieged Rivington and his family, driving them to the safety of a British warship, sacked his office and press, and seized his lead type to be melted down and cast into bullets.

They then faced and wheeled to the left, and marched out of town to the tune of Yankee Doodle. A vast concourse of people assembled at the Coffee House, on their leaving the ground, and gave them three very hearty cheers.

- Connecticut Journal, Nov. 20, 1775

Hey does NYC still have that magazine baseball league where High Times is the Bonghitters?

argumate:

my renowned advice column, Ask Someone Hastily Skimming The Relevant Wikipedia Page, is syndicated in 34 newspapers nationwide.