It also doesn’t require investment in reporting or expertise. A 23 year old intern being paid a pittance is the best qualified person to write this type of content, and they don’t have to do any reporting.

What is of interest is how what began as a cynical metrics and cost-driven expedient became a a set of genuine ideological commitments through an online radicalization process driven by cycles of trolling and performative victimhood

Group psychological phenomena recognizable from the drama and beef-driven dynamics of newsgroups, Livejournal, and Tumblr were manifest in online media and then in the mainstream media as they transitioned to being fully online properties.

The first rule of any competitive business is differentiation. Why did not even one VC funded publication decide against becoming a woke clickbait mill?

The election of Donald Trump meant the transposition of online drama and beef culture onto the actual world of American politics.

To understand these dynamics for what they are and to see Serious Journalsts and presidential contenders in the US Senate enacting them in deadly earnest is...extraordinarily macabre and funny at once

US domestic and even global politics is best chronicled in the style and format of Something Awful

Most people reading Jezebel in 2014 did not think its politics were going to take over America. I predicted it would and endured a great deal of mockery in my friend cohort as a result.



I had the good grace, during the Kavanaugh nomination, to rub it in everyone's face.

This amazing piece about how the founders of Mic were cynical tech/finance bros whose online profit-making scheme turned into a deadly earnest socjus cult captures the absurdity of the online pseudo-reality https://theoutline.com/post/2156/mic-com-and-the-cynicism-of-modern-media …

The lesson is that of Howard W. Campbell in Mother Night, the spy who broadcast coded messages embedded in pro-Nazi propaganda, tallying the greater harm the manifest content of his broadcasts did than the aid his coded messages provided the Allies: We are who we pretend to be

A film exploring the inner lives of the hundreds of patsies sacrificed to this totally fraudulent project, who believed they were changing the world while sustaining an enormous bubble of eventual write-downs in the billions: that would be good entertainment

The climactic scene being, of course, the Mic union meeting/struggle session where the company agonized over what institutional resolution was required for Jack Smith IV being a bad boyfriend. They induced his resignation. Three weeks later everybody was fired.

Twitter became addictive during the Trump years to those participating in this online radicalization process that fed into pre-existing personality disorders germinating within the void of meaning, but also to the spectators like myself who understood what was happening

But knew that there was no space amid the cascade --the semi-weekly micro-Dreyfus Affairs -- to explain why your days were punctuated by explosions of harsh cackling at the depraved spectacle

Perhaps now as the write-downs begin, the story can be told

The publication that really blazed the trail for the industry wide pivot to outrage clickbait was http://Salon.Com , one of the first online web magazines that saw that socjus screeds pulled huge traffic around 2012 https://trib.al/XhFJwWL

You can follow @wesyang.

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