This is something I am genuinely confused about - I really don't understand these online media dynamics, nor do I know who any of the Gawker people are - what exactly could be principled about embracing Alex Jones (or Tucker Carlson for that matter)?
They are clearly utterly cynical and have gotten wealthy by attacking and inciting violence against vulnerable, defenseless people, and Glenn Greenwald appears to have capitulated to that same cynicism. How is it defensible in any respect? Am I missing something?
2. What does that person have to do with the prohibition against publishing lies in professional publications?
3. How is WHAT defensible in any respect? Are you under the impression that anyone who listens to or watches something that's indefensible are they themselves indefensible? Is defending the right of a controversial figure to speak an endorsement of their speech?
1. I'm referring mostly to Glenn Greenwald's embrace of Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson (in response to the comment above - again maybe I'm misunderstanding the comment)
2. I agree with the point of your piece about publishing lies, but I'm speaking to the question of why it would be considered damaging to be affiliated with Alex Jones or promoting him.
3. Again, I'm responding to the comment here, and your response wrt Alex Jones. I'm trying to understand how promoting/elevating someone like him is defensible or "principled"
Alex Jones has plenty of fans. They don't think that it's problematic to be associated with him. Is there a consensus about Jones? Or is this more of that in group/out group nonsense.
FWIW I read the Daily Stormer all the time and I have no problems admitting that. Why? Because once, years ago, they actually published a story that the mainstream media covered up.
> I had completely forgotten about Ashley Feinberg
> Tom Ley who?
> (god help me) David French
I suspect you are less baffled by popular-crowd politics than you claim to be.
"Alex Jones and anything associated with him are beyond the pale" was the subtext of the original Gawker piece. The text of the "defense" of TCW is that associating him with AJ (to capitalize on the notoriety of the latter) and doubling down when it turns out to be bullshit (because the intended effect is unmoored from reality anyway) is not a serious position. The subtext is that it would be nice to not spend all day, every day, being buried in an epistemic shitpile.
It was unspoken because it's not there. There is no contradiction between finding behavior unobjectionable, and objecting to false allegations of said behavior.
Would you be baffled by someone who isn't homophobic objecting to Gawker falsely outing TCW as gay? (We could say--hypothetically--that he was on a business trip to Saudi Arabia at the time.)
Remind me again why I care what these humans think?
Anyway, my beef with Bari Weiss is that she was all in favor of cancel culture when she was dishing it out. When it came her turn to be on the receiving end, she decided that she didn't like it so much, Free Speech Is Important and so on and so forth.
You should recognize that your criticism of her, that she only cares about her own personal beefs, is made massively hypocritical when combined with this attitude.
Except that's not my criticism of her, either. My criticism of her is that she complains about cancel culture when she's the subject, but she was more than happy to have others canceled.
I have never seriously considered being a journo, But If I Had-
I would have liked to be one of those weirdos who just travels to a hotspot on spec, strolls around the disaster area/war zone/Calm Before the Storm, talks to local bureaucrats and refugees and politicians and militiamen, and just generally get a sense of what the fuck is going on right there and then. Then take that raw material, do a little deep dive down the Wikipedia hole to learn some local history to put this shitshow in context, wrap it all up in a piece, and strain it through a couple rewrites, and sell it to an editor somewhere.
(I expect I would suck at this the first half dozen times, but possibly improve with practice. Also in this scenario I’d have the funds to travel for weeks at a time on spec.)
At no point did it ever occur to me that I could be a journo by passing out hot takes on Twitter and churning out random BS for the content mill for some shitty website.
The problem is, foreign correspondents are very, very expensive. They need a talent for languages, an ability to develop instant bonds with old babas who just watched gangsters execute their nephew, and are themselves liable to blow up or get their heads chopped off. For safety reasons, they're usually stuck in the same area all the other international journalists are in, so they're competing directly with the BBC's best crew. You have to fact-check everything they submit to Hell and back.
Tweeting shit about Twitter shit, though? You can pay by the penny, and it gets just as much traffic.
The New York Times will just plop a Google Stick down in the middle of a warzone and boom! Instant metaverse coverage from the front lines. It's like the war crimes are happening right in your living room!
For places that are A) themselves very online and B) of interest to English-speaking Twitter (and especially to military OSINT weebs who will fight over fact-checking), you get more timely and just as accurate (i.e. not that accurate) coverage from Twitter. So for instance, Ukraine. You'll read a lot of total bullshit, but you'll read a lot of total bullshit in the NYT coverage of Ukraine too, just delayed by a week or two from what's actually happening.
For countries not of interest to the English-speaking world, well, no1curr, so there's neither coverage in mainstream media nor Twitter until something blows up (e.g. Sri Lanka) - then everyone just fits it directly to their priors for a few days (organic farming, capitalism, whatever) until the next shiny thing distracts them.
I could be that journo ... gather all my data from the hookers, bar-flies, and drunks ... write my story having neither sobered up, nor left the hotel bar.
That's the sense I get from reading Hunter S. Thompson.
As long as your hot takes don't stray from The Current Consensus, you can make a career out of this. Best of all, you don't need to learn a single word of a foreign language or even have to leave the house.
I jokingly wrote this ... however the more I think about it. I do two weeks FIFO (fly in - fly out) work. Two weeks off ... maybe I could make a go of it.
The whole dynamic reminds me a little bit of how Gamergaters came to be. These were nerds who were bullied by jocks back in high school for their lifestyles and tastes, but then time passes, superheroes and other nerd stuff becomes popular, they end up on top and turn into the same style of bullies who once bullied them.
Same thing with these media types. Unpopular and bullied in school, but time passes, social justice politics become popular, they ride the wave, and sure enough, they become the same Mean Girls who once bullied them.
We've had this discussion in the past but that's not really how Gamergate came to be. Like almost all of these little cultural disasters, it came about because a bunch of poseurs with daddy's money subsidizing their apartment and no-pay journalism job waded in to try to make hot takes about whatever issue du jour was on at the time, then had some pretty nasty internal drama within their little SF clique, and then tried to turn the whole thing into a comment on the nature of their subculture (toxic, cringy, racist) while at the same time very obviously colluding with one another to get maximum cool points from one another. Gamers in general, being extremely poorly socialized, responded in weird, idiosyncratic ways (wow, I'm a nazi? That's not true. Maybe all these other guys in white hoods accused of being nazis aren't nazis either! I should hang out with them!) and shit spiraled and got ugly. The whole nascent alt-right thing got a lot of them because the breitbart dudes were the only ones willing to even pretend to take them seriously.
Freddie linked to the Trace Woodgrains story about Antiwork [1] just a few days ago and it made key citations to how marginal groups end up socially gentrified [2], which is better for society overall but really really sucks for the people being gentrified, who generally have nothing else.
See, this reminds me of GG in a different way- I've seen a whole bunch of different outlets claim that the Zoe Post accused Zoe of sleeping with games journalists for reviews when it doesn't actually claim that. But God forbid anyone actually read the damn thing to check. I'm not aware of a single outlet correcting this claim.
For the record, I think that Eron Gjoni was, at best, the most naive fucker on earth for thinking that he'd come out of the whole thing looking good, although I do find it amusing that he shares initials with Emmanuel Goldstein, the Trotsky analogue from 1984 who wrote another blasphemous screed that almost no one has actually read.
He was a little schween but within his own social circle there was a lot of talk about consent and the nature of relationships and he was I think trying to act within their norms by warning other people about a predator. The results were predictable to anyone outside of that subculture. His motives were also almost incomprehensible to people outside that subculture since they amounted to saying 'hey this girl screwed around on me and I'm blowing up her life for it.' I think it was other people who noticed that about half the guys she'd slept with were games journalists, although none had reviewed her game.
Basically what I'm saying is everyone involved was either misguided, a grifter, or a humongous loser, often more than one at once.
Yeah, it's depressing how no one noted that the whole thing was the product of Tumblr callout culture. And there was almost no one worth rooting for in the entire thing.
About a month after the Zoe Post, Brianna Wu's husband made a somewhat similar public Facebook post about an ex and he got nothing but praise for it (until a few months later when the ex caught wind of it and posted a rebuttal). It really shows how there really are no rules except how much social capital the people involved have.
GamerGate continues to astound me in its ability to get writers to make shit up.
A few years ago Charlie Warzel, who is widely respected for reporting on tech/the internet wrote in the NYTimes that the Zoe Post was a "9,425 word screed" and a "manic, all-caps rant made to go viral". Yes, when I want something to go viral, I definitely think "10,000 words seems about right". I mean, I know the circles I hang out in are full of autists that will accidentally drop everything and read for an hour straight, but if I wanted something to go viral I'd aim for a 2 minute hyper-cut video version, not walls of text so sprawling that they should probably have a table of contents and index. Putting that aside, NOBODY writes in all-caps all the time. That's just not how it works, why even lie about that? Especially about something so easily checkable if you just included the link to it?
I thought the Medium piece was very interesting, but of course now that it's three years old I can't remember enough about GG to make sense of all of it. A question: How is it Jon Ronson's fault? I've only read two of his books, but I'm curious about the connection (which I realize was tossed off in a half-joking way).
"So You've Been Publicly Shamed" was a popular book by him that mostly focused on the internet-enabled parts of public shaming at previously unheard of levels. It's most notable for being the definitive telling of the #HasJustineLandedYet story, where Gawker writers (or was it editors) started a global harassment campaign against a random woman who made an off-color joke that was meant to highlight white westerner's privilege (a woke joke, in other words). It's a signpost for “oh, this behavior is new and unique to the internet” and a dive into "cancel culture" as we might call it now. iirc, he ultimately settles on a more nuanced view that is anything but "oh, this behavior is new and unique to the internet", but in my mind the nuance is washed away most of the time and only the title remains: The book is a bludgeon to assert that online public shaming exists.
Ah, that makes sense. I hadn't thought that was the link, because that was one of the two books of his I'd read and I'd remember it being more nuanced than that. But, yeah, nuance doesn't survive the reputation a book gets.
(The other book was Them, which I liked quite a bit, but which in retrospect must be really weird to reread because Alex Jones is all over that book, and he kind of comes across as a lovable eccentric.)
I have always thought that the appeal of communism, nihilism, whatever to intellectuals was the belief that come The Revolution, they'll finally get the whip hand.
Yeah it's always funny seeing the whole 'what will you be doing after the revolution? I'll be in charge of reeducating the ruling class about ISSUE X and redistributing their wealth to the worthy' and in fact they'd be wormfood
I recently had a conversation with my 30ish son where he was defending some online ugliness and bullying of someone whose politics he disagreed with. Noting that his disagreement wasn't even so great as Republican vs. Democrat, but more inside baseball of a movement he was into, it finally hit me that he just wanted his chance to be the bully.
Lately when I read your articles about writing I think about a meme I saw once. It's a drawing Gregor Samsa, on his back in bed, saying 'well THAT happened' and it sort of sums up the whole media establishment as you describe them.
I mean, I have recently published on education research, Democratic politics, the serotonin theory of depression, the importance of sincerely embracing your chosen profession, the left's status as a worker's movement, the need for a reinvigorated skeptic movement, YIMBYism, behavioral genetics, Stranger Things, and the death of one of my dearest friends. But yeah, I just write about this stuff.
I said pretty clearly articles ABOUT WRITING, dude. I think you're responding to maybe some other stuff people have said to you which I am not responsible for, rather than to my own response to your article.
The “eternal grad student” thing reminds me of Mike Birbiglia’s story about being T-boned by a drunk driver but — thanks to a bad police report — having to pay to fix the drunk’s car. Sometimes you do indeed have to take the L, even when you’re right. It’s kind of a silly world that way.
In much the same way, I actually think the underemployed blogger is right that Williams would have a hard time proving reputational harm from a story about him attending a movie, EVEN THOUGH it’s quite obvious to everyone that the whole point of the Gawker piece was to damage his reputation. I think Williams just had to live with it, even though he’s in the right.
(Obviously, also don’t take legal advice from an anonymous fence repairman in Substack comments. But that’s my guess.)
I've always been kind of fascinated by just how huge of losers much of the old Deadspin/Gawker crew turned out to be. I started noticing when some of the old barstool hit pieces were objectively written in bad faith (regardless of your opinion on barstool). Freddie does a really good job of analyzing what's at the core of these smug personalities: part jealousy, part fear of not fitting in, part cynicism working in a dying industry. Just a tremendously unlikable crew.
Stuff like this makes the "is twitter real life" dialogue more impossible to solve, in my view. On the one hand, Twitter isn't real life because nothing new Gawker or its toadies do can materially harm Williams or win any serious debate. On the other hand, Twitter seems to be a substitute for real life, in the sense that it's impossible to imagine a website allowing such a fundamental error to still exist on their page for so long unless they were convinced their Twitter hive was going to stick up for them. Twitter seems powerless but also weirdly transformative in the way writers think about their roles.
I would love to be a media critic who never talks about Twitter, but I literally can't because media professional culture IS media social culture and media social culture IS Twitter now. It's unavoidable.
I genuinely feel like cutting out Twitter from my media diet made a dramatic difference for me in my work. It’s a lot like not watching trailers, but the only difference is that your expectations aren’t being packaged by ad execs, they’re being shaped by your friends, other writers, and shitposters, and it’s hard not to find yourself unwittingly and unintentionally gravitating towards groupthink and consensus.
I’m not saying everyone can (or should), and you’re very right that as a media critic it’s basically *just* Twitter all over and impossible to ignore, but at least for me, in my little field, it has helped.
A take I saw a few weeks ago that seems to have held up as I've though it over:
The reason there was such an over-reaction to the prospect of Musk buying Twitter was that, to many people, Twitter = the world, and so it's a billionaire literally buying the world out from underneath them. It's right out of some dystopian novel.
Twitter is real life to the extent that your life is on Twitter.
Unfortunately for folks involved in media, academia and politics, a whole lot of their life is on Twitter. There are lessons here for those who wish to learn them.
"Most writers are insecure people who grew up without being especially popular, and most people in the industry get into it at least in some part because it presents them with a new popularity hierarchy in which (they imagine) they will be one of the cool ones. And the easiest way to become an insider is through being especially vicious towards outsiders; media relationships are defined by shared hatred."
There's a writer I hate-follow (I'm not too proud to admit it), and watching him struggle with this as a cis white man has been fascinating. There is a constant vacillation between viciousness and simpering, like a dog that growls at strangers but immediately shows its belly to the rest of its pack. He's so socially graceless I keep imagining things will blow up in his face, but so far he's stayed fairly ingratiated with enough of the right people to go unbothered.
Ironically enough, his subtweet of FdB as "that grad school student now doing political commentary" was what got me to seek out Freddie in the first place, after piecing together who my hate-follow was referring to
On the internet, when people like you, you can do no wrong. When people don't like you, you can do no right.
I am sometimes tempted to get in my feelings about the ethics of the internet, but then I remember that the internet has no ethics. It is one big gesticulating, self-fellating, hyper-anxious hive mind where sad people go to make themselves sadder. And Gawker DNA is a big part of the reason why this is the case.
There may have been a point in time when the media industry was so bloated and self-serious that it deserved Gawker, but today the media industry is Gawker. So what now? I guess we will find out. The only thing I know is that whatever is coming, we absolutely deserve it.
I recommend Byung-Chul Han's short book "In the Swarm." It's basically a philosophy of internet culture, and it lays out what you describe in the second paragraph.
Justin Smith's "The Internet Is Not What You Think" from earlier this year also has an excellent, long chapter about how social media warps discourse. The conclusion: the bigger a social media post's audience, the closer it gets to pure shitposting. The Pope himself can tweet encyclicals, but when it's immediately surrounded by pseudo-communists with furry avatars cracking wise about child abuse, it becomes a shitpost.
“It is one big gesticulating, self-fellating, hyper-anxious hive mind where sad people go to make themselves sadder.“
Hot damn. As a sad person who is currently using the internet, I think I have standing to say that a truer description of the internet has never been written.
Not defending Gawker, but I don’t think the author of the article confused TCW with another Black man. I just think she saw Anna K’s Instagram story, which had some pictures from the premiere, and then a random picture thrown in of TCW wearing a Red Scare shirt at a different occasion. Definitely lazy reporting, to be clear..
I am pleased to be able to say honestly that I never read the old Gawker and didn't even know (unless I read it somewhere and immediately forgot) that there was a new one.
The thing about all these media in-crowd clowns is that for all their constant blather they don't seem to accomplish much and have no real power beyond (maybe) some influence over who can get hired in their segment of the media. They can mock you, Bari Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald all day, but it doesn't seem to do any of you any harm.
I find TCW quite annoying, personally. And Alex Jones sucks.
This is something I am genuinely confused about - I really don't understand these online media dynamics, nor do I know who any of the Gawker people are - what exactly could be principled about embracing Alex Jones (or Tucker Carlson for that matter)?
They are clearly utterly cynical and have gotten wealthy by attacking and inciting violence against vulnerable, defenseless people, and Glenn Greenwald appears to have capitulated to that same cynicism. How is it defensible in any respect? Am I missing something?
1. Who is embracing Alex Jones?
2. What does that person have to do with the prohibition against publishing lies in professional publications?
3. How is WHAT defensible in any respect? Are you under the impression that anyone who listens to or watches something that's indefensible are they themselves indefensible? Is defending the right of a controversial figure to speak an endorsement of their speech?
Sorry. I should be more clear:
1. I'm referring mostly to Glenn Greenwald's embrace of Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson (in response to the comment above - again maybe I'm misunderstanding the comment)
2. I agree with the point of your piece about publishing lies, but I'm speaking to the question of why it would be considered damaging to be affiliated with Alex Jones or promoting him.
3. Again, I'm responding to the comment here, and your response wrt Alex Jones. I'm trying to understand how promoting/elevating someone like him is defensible or "principled"
Alex Jones has plenty of fans. They don't think that it's problematic to be associated with him. Is there a consensus about Jones? Or is this more of that in group/out group nonsense.
FWIW I read the Daily Stormer all the time and I have no problems admitting that. Why? Because once, years ago, they actually published a story that the mainstream media covered up.
I can't even figure out if the movie is positive, negative, or neutral about Alex Jones. Is he just a basilisk we aren't supposed to look at?
I think Jones is actively promoting it.
> I had completely forgotten about Ashley Feinberg
> Tom Ley who?
> (god help me) David French
I suspect you are less baffled by popular-crowd politics than you claim to be.
"Alex Jones and anything associated with him are beyond the pale" was the subtext of the original Gawker piece. The text of the "defense" of TCW is that associating him with AJ (to capitalize on the notoriety of the latter) and doubling down when it turns out to be bullshit (because the intended effect is unmoored from reality anyway) is not a serious position. The subtext is that it would be nice to not spend all day, every day, being buried in an epistemic shitpile.
It was unspoken because it's not there. There is no contradiction between finding behavior unobjectionable, and objecting to false allegations of said behavior.
Would you be baffled by someone who isn't homophobic objecting to Gawker falsely outing TCW as gay? (We could say--hypothetically--that he was on a business trip to Saudi Arabia at the time.)
It’s the larger context that makes the false allegation damaging.
(Yes, that's from the David French tweet you keep referencing.)
So your question boils down to "why is damage bad?"
Remind me again why I care what these humans think?
Anyway, my beef with Bari Weiss is that she was all in favor of cancel culture when she was dishing it out. When it came her turn to be on the receiving end, she decided that she didn't like it so much, Free Speech Is Important and so on and so forth.
That's a fair criticism of Bari. But she's also the constant recipient of mean girl shit that has no content at all.
That might be. Don't know, don't care. I stated only what my personal beef with her is. The rest of the crowd can do whatever it is that they do.
You should recognize that your criticism of her, that she only cares about her own personal beefs, is made massively hypocritical when combined with this attitude.
No, my criticism is that she's a hypocrite. I have no idea whether her beefs are "personal" or not.
Right but when you say "i don't care about what other people do" then it undermines your criticism of her, that she doesn't care what other people do.
Except that's not my criticism of her, either. My criticism of her is that she complains about cancel culture when she's the subject, but she was more than happy to have others canceled.
I have never seriously considered being a journo, But If I Had-
I would have liked to be one of those weirdos who just travels to a hotspot on spec, strolls around the disaster area/war zone/Calm Before the Storm, talks to local bureaucrats and refugees and politicians and militiamen, and just generally get a sense of what the fuck is going on right there and then. Then take that raw material, do a little deep dive down the Wikipedia hole to learn some local history to put this shitshow in context, wrap it all up in a piece, and strain it through a couple rewrites, and sell it to an editor somewhere.
(I expect I would suck at this the first half dozen times, but possibly improve with practice. Also in this scenario I’d have the funds to travel for weeks at a time on spec.)
At no point did it ever occur to me that I could be a journo by passing out hot takes on Twitter and churning out random BS for the content mill for some shitty website.
The problem is, foreign correspondents are very, very expensive. They need a talent for languages, an ability to develop instant bonds with old babas who just watched gangsters execute their nephew, and are themselves liable to blow up or get their heads chopped off. For safety reasons, they're usually stuck in the same area all the other international journalists are in, so they're competing directly with the BBC's best crew. You have to fact-check everything they submit to Hell and back.
Tweeting shit about Twitter shit, though? You can pay by the penny, and it gets just as much traffic.
I guess Nellie Bly (one of my childhood heroes) would never make it today.
> The problem is, foreign correspondents are very, very expensive.
And, as much as I love Substack, there's no way it's going to fund such a thing.
I wonder if our grandkids will look at "foreign correspondents" as this cool thing we used to have.
The New York Times will just plop a Google Stick down in the middle of a warzone and boom! Instant metaverse coverage from the front lines. It's like the war crimes are happening right in your living room!
For places that are A) themselves very online and B) of interest to English-speaking Twitter (and especially to military OSINT weebs who will fight over fact-checking), you get more timely and just as accurate (i.e. not that accurate) coverage from Twitter. So for instance, Ukraine. You'll read a lot of total bullshit, but you'll read a lot of total bullshit in the NYT coverage of Ukraine too, just delayed by a week or two from what's actually happening.
For countries not of interest to the English-speaking world, well, no1curr, so there's neither coverage in mainstream media nor Twitter until something blows up (e.g. Sri Lanka) - then everyone just fits it directly to their priors for a few days (organic farming, capitalism, whatever) until the next shiny thing distracts them.
F
I could be that journo ... gather all my data from the hookers, bar-flies, and drunks ... write my story having neither sobered up, nor left the hotel bar.
That's the sense I get from reading Hunter S. Thompson.
As long as your hot takes don't stray from The Current Consensus, you can make a career out of this. Best of all, you don't need to learn a single word of a foreign language or even have to leave the house.
I jokingly wrote this ... however the more I think about it. I do two weeks FIFO (fly in - fly out) work. Two weeks off ... maybe I could make a go of it.
I'll have to drink on it for a while.
The whole dynamic reminds me a little bit of how Gamergaters came to be. These were nerds who were bullied by jocks back in high school for their lifestyles and tastes, but then time passes, superheroes and other nerd stuff becomes popular, they end up on top and turn into the same style of bullies who once bullied them.
Same thing with these media types. Unpopular and bullied in school, but time passes, social justice politics become popular, they ride the wave, and sure enough, they become the same Mean Girls who once bullied them.
It's a depressing human cycle, isn't it?
crybullying
We've had this discussion in the past but that's not really how Gamergate came to be. Like almost all of these little cultural disasters, it came about because a bunch of poseurs with daddy's money subsidizing their apartment and no-pay journalism job waded in to try to make hot takes about whatever issue du jour was on at the time, then had some pretty nasty internal drama within their little SF clique, and then tried to turn the whole thing into a comment on the nature of their subculture (toxic, cringy, racist) while at the same time very obviously colluding with one another to get maximum cool points from one another. Gamers in general, being extremely poorly socialized, responded in weird, idiosyncratic ways (wow, I'm a nazi? That's not true. Maybe all these other guys in white hoods accused of being nazis aren't nazis either! I should hang out with them!) and shit spiraled and got ugly. The whole nascent alt-right thing got a lot of them because the breitbart dudes were the only ones willing to even pretend to take them seriously.
Freddie linked to the Trace Woodgrains story about Antiwork [1] just a few days ago and it made key citations to how marginal groups end up socially gentrified [2], which is better for society overall but really really sucks for the people being gentrified, who generally have nothing else.
[1] https://tracingwoodgrains.medium.com/r-antiwork-a-tragedy-of-sanewashing-and-social-gentrification-56298af1c1a7
[2] https://status451.com/2016/09/15/social-gentrification/
See, this reminds me of GG in a different way- I've seen a whole bunch of different outlets claim that the Zoe Post accused Zoe of sleeping with games journalists for reviews when it doesn't actually claim that. But God forbid anyone actually read the damn thing to check. I'm not aware of a single outlet correcting this claim.
For the record, I think that Eron Gjoni was, at best, the most naive fucker on earth for thinking that he'd come out of the whole thing looking good, although I do find it amusing that he shares initials with Emmanuel Goldstein, the Trotsky analogue from 1984 who wrote another blasphemous screed that almost no one has actually read.
He was a little schween but within his own social circle there was a lot of talk about consent and the nature of relationships and he was I think trying to act within their norms by warning other people about a predator. The results were predictable to anyone outside of that subculture. His motives were also almost incomprehensible to people outside that subculture since they amounted to saying 'hey this girl screwed around on me and I'm blowing up her life for it.' I think it was other people who noticed that about half the guys she'd slept with were games journalists, although none had reviewed her game.
Basically what I'm saying is everyone involved was either misguided, a grifter, or a humongous loser, often more than one at once.
Yeah, it's depressing how no one noted that the whole thing was the product of Tumblr callout culture. And there was almost no one worth rooting for in the entire thing.
About a month after the Zoe Post, Brianna Wu's husband made a somewhat similar public Facebook post about an ex and he got nothing but praise for it (until a few months later when the ex caught wind of it and posted a rebuttal). It really shows how there really are no rules except how much social capital the people involved have.
GamerGate continues to astound me in its ability to get writers to make shit up.
A few years ago Charlie Warzel, who is widely respected for reporting on tech/the internet wrote in the NYTimes that the Zoe Post was a "9,425 word screed" and a "manic, all-caps rant made to go viral". Yes, when I want something to go viral, I definitely think "10,000 words seems about right". I mean, I know the circles I hang out in are full of autists that will accidentally drop everything and read for an hour straight, but if I wanted something to go viral I'd aim for a 2 minute hyper-cut video version, not walls of text so sprawling that they should probably have a table of contents and index. Putting that aside, NOBODY writes in all-caps all the time. That's just not how it works, why even lie about that? Especially about something so easily checkable if you just included the link to it?
https://itsnotmyfault01.medium.com/everything-is-gamergate-response-50bb4d03011b is where I counted all the all-caps words. Obviously the whole thing is not all-caps.
I thought the Medium piece was very interesting, but of course now that it's three years old I can't remember enough about GG to make sense of all of it. A question: How is it Jon Ronson's fault? I've only read two of his books, but I'm curious about the connection (which I realize was tossed off in a half-joking way).
"So You've Been Publicly Shamed" was a popular book by him that mostly focused on the internet-enabled parts of public shaming at previously unheard of levels. It's most notable for being the definitive telling of the #HasJustineLandedYet story, where Gawker writers (or was it editors) started a global harassment campaign against a random woman who made an off-color joke that was meant to highlight white westerner's privilege (a woke joke, in other words). It's a signpost for “oh, this behavior is new and unique to the internet” and a dive into "cancel culture" as we might call it now. iirc, he ultimately settles on a more nuanced view that is anything but "oh, this behavior is new and unique to the internet", but in my mind the nuance is washed away most of the time and only the title remains: The book is a bludgeon to assert that online public shaming exists.
Ah, that makes sense. I hadn't thought that was the link, because that was one of the two books of his I'd read and I'd remember it being more nuanced than that. But, yeah, nuance doesn't survive the reputation a book gets.
Thanks for solving that mystery!
(The other book was Them, which I liked quite a bit, but which in retrospect must be really weird to reread because Alex Jones is all over that book, and he kind of comes across as a lovable eccentric.)
I have always thought that the appeal of communism, nihilism, whatever to intellectuals was the belief that come The Revolution, they'll finally get the whip hand.
Yeah it's always funny seeing the whole 'what will you be doing after the revolution? I'll be in charge of reeducating the ruling class about ISSUE X and redistributing their wealth to the worthy' and in fact they'd be wormfood
I would cheer this comment, but I can't make the click work. Anyway, this is a good observation/conclusion.
I recently had a conversation with my 30ish son where he was defending some online ugliness and bullying of someone whose politics he disagreed with. Noting that his disagreement wasn't even so great as Republican vs. Democrat, but more inside baseball of a movement he was into, it finally hit me that he just wanted his chance to be the bully.
It was a sobering and disappointing conversation.
There but for the grace of god go I. There despite the grace of god have I gone.
Yes. The worst bully is a former victim.
Lately when I read your articles about writing I think about a meme I saw once. It's a drawing Gregor Samsa, on his back in bed, saying 'well THAT happened' and it sort of sums up the whole media establishment as you describe them.
https://i.imgur.com/Q8fhO0O.png
found it. How long is this article? Not 1000 words
I mean, I have recently published on education research, Democratic politics, the serotonin theory of depression, the importance of sincerely embracing your chosen profession, the left's status as a worker's movement, the need for a reinvigorated skeptic movement, YIMBYism, behavioral genetics, Stranger Things, and the death of one of my dearest friends. But yeah, I just write about this stuff.
I said pretty clearly articles ABOUT WRITING, dude. I think you're responding to maybe some other stuff people have said to you which I am not responsible for, rather than to my own response to your article.
The “eternal grad student” thing reminds me of Mike Birbiglia’s story about being T-boned by a drunk driver but — thanks to a bad police report — having to pay to fix the drunk’s car. Sometimes you do indeed have to take the L, even when you’re right. It’s kind of a silly world that way.
In much the same way, I actually think the underemployed blogger is right that Williams would have a hard time proving reputational harm from a story about him attending a movie, EVEN THOUGH it’s quite obvious to everyone that the whole point of the Gawker piece was to damage his reputation. I think Williams just had to live with it, even though he’s in the right.
(Obviously, also don’t take legal advice from an anonymous fence repairman in Substack comments. But that’s my guess.)
I've always been kind of fascinated by just how huge of losers much of the old Deadspin/Gawker crew turned out to be. I started noticing when some of the old barstool hit pieces were objectively written in bad faith (regardless of your opinion on barstool). Freddie does a really good job of analyzing what's at the core of these smug personalities: part jealousy, part fear of not fitting in, part cynicism working in a dying industry. Just a tremendously unlikable crew.
Stuff like this makes the "is twitter real life" dialogue more impossible to solve, in my view. On the one hand, Twitter isn't real life because nothing new Gawker or its toadies do can materially harm Williams or win any serious debate. On the other hand, Twitter seems to be a substitute for real life, in the sense that it's impossible to imagine a website allowing such a fundamental error to still exist on their page for so long unless they were convinced their Twitter hive was going to stick up for them. Twitter seems powerless but also weirdly transformative in the way writers think about their roles.
I would love to be a media critic who never talks about Twitter, but I literally can't because media professional culture IS media social culture and media social culture IS Twitter now. It's unavoidable.
I genuinely feel like cutting out Twitter from my media diet made a dramatic difference for me in my work. It’s a lot like not watching trailers, but the only difference is that your expectations aren’t being packaged by ad execs, they’re being shaped by your friends, other writers, and shitposters, and it’s hard not to find yourself unwittingly and unintentionally gravitating towards groupthink and consensus.
I’m not saying everyone can (or should), and you’re very right that as a media critic it’s basically *just* Twitter all over and impossible to ignore, but at least for me, in my little field, it has helped.
> That is your cue to do something else
Until your comment I didn't realize that Twitter's "prevent you from reading more until you log in" feature was a good thing.
That's fair! If I were to use it, it'd probably be like that, but I don't think I will anytime soon. Just nicer that it's a bit calmer now without it.
A take I saw a few weeks ago that seems to have held up as I've though it over:
The reason there was such an over-reaction to the prospect of Musk buying Twitter was that, to many people, Twitter = the world, and so it's a billionaire literally buying the world out from underneath them. It's right out of some dystopian novel.
Twitter is real life to the extent that your life is on Twitter.
Unfortunately for folks involved in media, academia and politics, a whole lot of their life is on Twitter. There are lessons here for those who wish to learn them.
Comments are back! Awesome!
Hey, Freddie-- How’s your shoulder doing?
Fine. The physical therapist says I have an unusually good range of motion for someone who's six weeks out of surgery.
Nobody will be able to accuse you of being an eternal physical therapy patient. You're on the fast track, baby!
Shoulder post-doc
"Most writers are insecure people who grew up without being especially popular, and most people in the industry get into it at least in some part because it presents them with a new popularity hierarchy in which (they imagine) they will be one of the cool ones. And the easiest way to become an insider is through being especially vicious towards outsiders; media relationships are defined by shared hatred."
There's a writer I hate-follow (I'm not too proud to admit it), and watching him struggle with this as a cis white man has been fascinating. There is a constant vacillation between viciousness and simpering, like a dog that growls at strangers but immediately shows its belly to the rest of its pack. He's so socially graceless I keep imagining things will blow up in his face, but so far he's stayed fairly ingratiated with enough of the right people to go unbothered.
Ironically enough, his subtweet of FdB as "that grad school student now doing political commentary" was what got me to seek out Freddie in the first place, after piecing together who my hate-follow was referring to
On the internet, when people like you, you can do no wrong. When people don't like you, you can do no right.
I am sometimes tempted to get in my feelings about the ethics of the internet, but then I remember that the internet has no ethics. It is one big gesticulating, self-fellating, hyper-anxious hive mind where sad people go to make themselves sadder. And Gawker DNA is a big part of the reason why this is the case.
There may have been a point in time when the media industry was so bloated and self-serious that it deserved Gawker, but today the media industry is Gawker. So what now? I guess we will find out. The only thing I know is that whatever is coming, we absolutely deserve it.
I recommend Byung-Chul Han's short book "In the Swarm." It's basically a philosophy of internet culture, and it lays out what you describe in the second paragraph.
Thanks for sharing this! Been wondering about a book covering this sort of cultural-linguistic and philosophical phenomenon in the back of my mind.
Justin Smith's "The Internet Is Not What You Think" from earlier this year also has an excellent, long chapter about how social media warps discourse. The conclusion: the bigger a social media post's audience, the closer it gets to pure shitposting. The Pope himself can tweet encyclicals, but when it's immediately surrounded by pseudo-communists with furry avatars cracking wise about child abuse, it becomes a shitpost.
Just bought it. Thank you for the suggestion!
I just feel bad for all the innocent people who have to use the internet for wikipedia, email, and online shopping. They deserve better.
Won’t someone think of the oldsters?
“It is one big gesticulating, self-fellating, hyper-anxious hive mind where sad people go to make themselves sadder.“
Hot damn. As a sad person who is currently using the internet, I think I have standing to say that a truer description of the internet has never been written.
“A lie travels around the world before the truth gets to the door.”
Sadly, I do not recall the attribution… but accurate nonetheless!
Tillman
Not defending Gawker, but I don’t think the author of the article confused TCW with another Black man. I just think she saw Anna K’s Instagram story, which had some pictures from the premiere, and then a random picture thrown in of TCW wearing a Red Scare shirt at a different occasion. Definitely lazy reporting, to be clear..
If I don’t feel guilty and ashamed every day of my life does that mean I need to take an L, or go see a psychologist?
Oh good heavens, no. You should never take anything I say about my psyche as instructions for how you should think or feel yourself.
Don’t worry Freddie, that was just my sarcasm seeping through ❤️
I am pleased to be able to say honestly that I never read the old Gawker and didn't even know (unless I read it somewhere and immediately forgot) that there was a new one.
The thing about all these media in-crowd clowns is that for all their constant blather they don't seem to accomplish much and have no real power beyond (maybe) some influence over who can get hired in their segment of the media. They can mock you, Bari Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald all day, but it doesn't seem to do any of you any harm.
That's not true, mocking Weiss and Greenwald accomplishes plenty: it makes them rich and gives them a platform!
As long as they're still talking about you, it doesn't matter what they're saying.