I think old people deserve a fair hearing, one they aren’t afforded all too often in the multimedia era. I believe that the elders aren’t always wrong and the young aren’t always right. Growing up, we were lied to about all this, ironically by the people who are now old. The “never trust anyone over 30” boomer generation inculcated a sense that youth is just a form of incipient correctness. The future is theirs, so therefore they will be right about the future. Inevitably though, the young, while dictating the future, will ruin it in some glaring way. They’re human, it happens. And keeps happening.
Worse than Twitter’s baseline tone is just the omnipresent, reflexive demonization and collective will to hurt outgroup individuals. Connected to that is a panicky willingness to buy into emotionally charged stories that you don’t dare question your in-group on. Did we all become Deadspin? No, Deadspin wasn’t like this in 2008. But, if I’m honest, it was probably one more step to wherever we are. And this current place, perhaps a hell and perhaps a purgatory, is an ever-changing but seldom evolving shit show. It’s been one big refutation of the once-ballyhooed idea that we should all be speaking to each other, constantly.
What the boomers missed, however, was how they created this generation. They promoted an aesthetic of rebellious gatecrashing, then pulled up the ladder once safely ensconced. Moreover, they demeaned their privileged perch out of a moralized pique, all while ceding no purchase. This food is terrible, and such small portions, but none for you. No tradition was upheld because no tradition was offered.
So the younger generation responded in kind, not with tradition, but with an all-out assault on it. They beat the establishment, then beat themselves, and in the end, almost nothing endured.
Interesting, might give off enough heat to make popcorn, who knows.
The pullquote:
So it’s hard to be mad at anyone specific, because these men who are nurtured within a system of wildly pervasive but wholly tacit male favoritism get the best of both worlds. They get to make a show of being progressive and they also get to reap the benefits of a system they’re supposedly fighting against.”
Here’s a thought: a year ago, circa Gamergate, I predicted that while Gawker wouldn’t apologize they would quietly back off the culture war stuff now that they were taking lumps for it, and said Pareene would be a better custodian of the brand voice.
So reading this I discover they installed Pareene last month, and then this:
In January, a black senior editor at Gawker.com, Jason Parham, wrote a post on his personal blog called Gawker Media’s Responsibility to Diversity,
one that later inspired Cook’s release of Gawker’s diversity
statistics. He was concerned in part by the creation of a new executive
editorial team — cheekily called the Politburo, and featuring five male
editors and two women editors — reflected a waning interest in editorial
diversity. Nick Denton responded in a comment on Parham’s post with this:
“Let’s
welcome, if not out-and-out racists, then at least the wide array of
people with whom a conversation is possible: national greatness
conservatives, Burkean Tories and business pragmatists, for instance;
Christians and other spiritual people; economic liberals, libertarians
and techno-utopians; and black and other social conservatives.”
Instead
of focusing on a simple request, one familiar to any self-aware media
company in 2015 — a commitment to “publishing and hiring more Latina
voices, queer voices, black voices, and marginalized voices across its
core sites” — Denton waved his hand and advocated for more or less the
opposite.
One high-growth post-type in 2015: “You’re Right, But For Even Better Reasons Than You Think.”
Like I’ve said, The Awl is kind of the mid-late 2000s Gawker aged in place. Before it was a whole media conglomerate, or the predecessor of BuzzFeed, or whatever it is now, Gawker was a New York-focused gossip tabloid for people capable of comprehending nested clauses that split its focus between actual celebrities and the local media industry. Star magazine meets the New York Observer, I guess.
But since it was the 2000s internet it was really about itself all along, and thus was always gossiping and analyzing about itself (and so on, recursively - see the Julia Allison “microcelebrity” thing, an experiment in closed-media-cycle ecology whereby you create a viable subject of gossip and media analysis by virtue of producing enough gossip and media analysis about the gossip and media analysis you’re producing about the fact that you’re creating her as a viable subject).
Well anyway what my point is taking that and letting it run for a decade or so while the parent organism continues to mutate under its own pressures (thus creating new source material to feed the maw), they’re pretty worth listening to on the subject of internet media.
The thing with Polygon and Kotaku renouncing review embargos, and going in on Ubisoft over AC:Unity, and retroactively downgrading Destiny… that’s brilliant, and I bet most people don’t even make the connection to hashtag Gamergate.
They finally did what they should’ve, took a step back from the fray to calm down and plot how to turn the whole thing to their advantage. And if they pull it off they could actually come out stronger from the whole thing. They’ve already earned the indie devs’ loyalty from acting as their champion, and their media compatriots for championing their prerogatives against the unwashed masses (I expected Salon to jump onside because obviously, but seeing the fucking London Review of Books do it first and harder was an eyeopener). Now by actually jiujitsuing “ethics in game journalism” to reposition themselves as champions of their alienated audience, and using it as a club to extract concessions from the AAA studios - well, if they pull it off that’s pretty much running the table right there.
They’ll cool down on the SJW “muh intersectionality in vidya” beat, you mark my words. Maybe poke the hornets’ nest for attention every now and then, but the free ride is over and now they know that costs them more than it pays off. They’ll just quietly commission less and less of that stuff. They’ll never make a public show of contrition, that was never in the cards, that’s not how Gawker and its bastard children roll, that’s never been how they roll.
Nick Denton’s brilliant stroke, going all the way back to Gawker’s origins as Gawker Stalker, was to not even make pretense to the American tradition of Sulzbergerian evenhanded postwar monopoly journalism, but to go the British competitive no holds barred venomous one, all taking shots at each other, stirring up witch hunts to boost circulation. It’s been like that for a long time, where multiple outlets are in competition for the same national readership - that’s where 1984’s “prolefeed” and “Two Minutes Hate” come from. That’s why Milo Yiannopoulos, from the British system himself, was the one landing all the hardest blows on the other side of this fight.
I mean, it’s interesting. It’s interesting, and I like living in interesting times, but there’s a reason that phrase comes from a backhanded blessing - as a way to run a culture it’s fucking dangerous, it leads to pillarisation. The Dutch model - Protestant/Catholic/secular social democrat - is safe enough with the European confessional wars well behind us, but the 19th and early 20th century models, where the pillars could be “monarchist” or “communist” or “fascist”, (or even the pre-20th century American party-affiliated yellow press), that was fucking dangerous. Journalists talked their countries into war, into revolution, to boost their numbers and make their names. There’s a reason British libel law is so strict, and that’s to create some leverage to tamp things down when they start stepping on toes that matter.
I mean hell, we’re on course for a full-blown constitutional crisis in a decade or two in no small part because Murdoch imported the British model.
Nissan pulls ads from Gawker http://theralphretort.com/nissan-cuts-ties-gawker/
And Gawker making an article in response to it http://gawker.com/how-we-got-rolled-by-the-dishonest-fascists-of-gamergat-1649496579 (archive.today link https://archive.today/UXA4r)
It is like they want to deliberately sink their business into the ground by showing themselves as being about the worst place to advertise in, seeing how they treat advertisers.
P.S: bonus points for saying that Renée J. James, president of Intel, is a “craven idiot”.
——————————————-
Gawker, confirmed for mad. Like. Mad mad.
AND THEY CAN’T DO A THING TO STOP IT.
Looks like they’re opting for the “run ourselves into the ground” option. And here I thought they’d be smarter than that. Lol. I was wrong.
Max Read-era Gawker is a glass cannon.
The Choire/Balk/Doree Gawker could handle this shit, but then it would never have gotten itself in this position in the first place. That’s not speculation, just go over to The Awl, which is basically the Choire/Balk/Doree Gawker aged in place, and check out their Gamergate stuff. It’s still anti-, and given to celebrate their triumphs before they hatch, but that “we’ll get them in the end” stuff is the line of someone rationalizing a strategic retreat and regrouping.
Hell, even Pareene could’ve handled this. He’d be an insufferable little shit about it (I have no idea how he missed bothof the Daily Caller’s “most punchable faces in media” lists), but he at least knew that the Gawker brand voice was contempt, not hatred. I mean, look at this. Correct.
Eh. I could tell Gawker was headed nowhere good in 200…7? 9? Back when commenting was open by audition only and there was an article about some kid falling out a window and one of the commenters invoked Anal Cunt’s classic Conor Clapton ballad, “Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck”, and then someone huffed that we should show more sensitivity, because a child has died and all that, and then the huffer was not included in that Friday’s round of commenter executions.
It’s funny looking at the comments, people reading ‘gaters as a new cultural development that’s ruining your arcadian internet. Nah man, that’s the traditional culture of the old internet you built yours on top of. Used to wander the plains freely, and as recently as a decade ago you intermingled, but by now you’ve pushed it back into reservations on the ‘chans, and you’re still pushing. Cet animal est très méchant; Quand on l'attaque, il se défend.
I guess my investment in all this is that I was born and raised into citizenship in the older internet, and I’ve got a bit of patriotism about it.
