#sooner or later...

“I’ve missed you, my dear self”...featuring (Buff) Daesung during “A Ze Cho”

replied to your

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had a taste of how it’s gna be when tour ends in...

At least in 2016 we knew Dunkirk was coming.. idk how I’m gonna deal with this Not Knowing and Waiting thing

“Beasts all over the shop. You’ll be one of them, sooner or later…”

Last August I ran into an important-ish media person by chance. Their website had just broken some kind of record.

“Ferguson. ISIS. Robin Williams committing suicide. August has been GREAT for us,” they said without irony or remorse. They didn’t detect anything wrong with being eerily gleeful at brutal news.

I’ve said this many times, but when I started getting into Internet writing/“journalism” I thought Internet writers were amiable and morally superior. I thought the business was Dead Poets Society. Instead it’s as nasty as Wall Street but with a lot less money to make.  

I’m feeling this way A. Because I get soul-search-y and weird this time of year (I’ll explain some other time, maybe) and B. Because of what’s going on in Baltimore.

I feel so sick about all the political issues in this country. Like just think about how fucked up it is that police are pretty much killing black people for any excuse and without repercussions. And the traditional media outlets just sort of scoff at this and try to downplay it and instead play up the violence and call black people thugs.

But is the Internet media much better?

When I’m upset over a big issue like this I think back to that August conversation. There are people who don’t actually care about this stuff. To them it’s just easy traffic — easy money. Maybe they cared in the beginning but over time constantly writing about this stuff desensitized them. Either that or they were shady from day one (which would prove my theory that crooked people go into finance but the really crooked ones go into media).

At a job last year an editor made me erase the pope’s transphobia from a story (a story where discussing transphobia was relevant because it was about the pope and the LGBTQIA community) because they said it’d be less shareable.

“But it’s the truth,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s the least shareable version of the truth.”

Nothing taught me how fake journalism is and how fake media is more than this moment. It’s faker than pro wrestling. I still feel SICK that I had to do this.

All I’ve ever wanted to do was work for a publication I believed in. And I’m so, so, so grateful to do that. I love Salon and have since I discovered them back in 2011. We write about what’s important, not merely what’s shareable. And we never cave into the whims of the super-brands like other so-called news sites (not news when you’re getting a paycheck from the guys you’re writing about and delete articles critical of them). But what if you don’t believe in the industry at large?

I’ll cite Ryan Holiday for the millionth time on here:

It’s easy in the aftermath of the financial crisis to think that banking is the only industry that has this kind of corrosive effect. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to make a similar argument for some of the best and most thoughtful thinkers and writers of my generation, who head into online journalism and online content, where they face an equally appalling though rarely discussed set of hazards.

“A man is worked on by what he works on,” Frederick Douglass once put it. What is it that the average online writer is expected to work on in 2015? Expendable content. Outrage porn. Speculation and rumors. Pseudo-news. Fluff and artifice.

And this says nothing of the culture that accepts and even encourages the publication of genuinely exploitative, de-humanizing, vicious, and occasionally criminal stories. For what? For clicks and likes. For traffic. For precious pageviews and ad dollars.

These forces are influencing everyone writing online, even if you don’t blog full time or for a major entity. Wherever you publish, on your own site or elsewhere, it can become so easy to see a piece as good because of how many social shares it got (compared to say, whether it was your best effort or something that advanced the public’s understanding of a major issue). Also because anything can be published and everything that is published is published immediately, one quickly overestimates their abilities as a writer and their importance in the universe. It becomes so tempting to produce for attention and validation in the very short term instead of putting in the hours and paying the dues one needs to pay in order to grow. The system is designed to make you worse at what you do.