11.19.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:49 pm by George Smith
I don’t see Stephen Colbert much anymore except in clips like these. I’m long past the idea that the best journalism, via satire, is done at Comedy Central because the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do things the enfeebled mainstream media can’t.
Big whoop. It’s journalism or comedy for what’s left of the middle and upper middle classes, the servants of the top who haven’t yet had their heads put on the chopping block.
In other words, entertainment for the people who did nothing a couple weeks ago. Yeah, laugh, laugh, Colbert is sooo funny. But he and Jon Stewart haven’t changed a damn thing after a decade of broadcast. Instead, we got the lowest voter turnout in my lifetime and the installation of even more old Purity Party fascists from WhiteManistan.
In the linked segment Colbert goes on in his usual way about “salvage markets” where you can buy expired food at cut-rate prices. (I had it as an embed and it autoplays, another reason Colbert & Co. deserve to be hit in the face with bricks. See the line on bull-whipping below.)
I suppose it would be almost funny if I haven’t used one of Pasadena’s city food banks bread programs. Much of what is laid out on the couple of tables is expired product from the local chains. Differing from the “salvage stores??? shown above, it’s FREE.
No one makes a profit from it. In fact, all the local food banks in Pasadena are free, as you are tipped to when you arrive at the point.
What does expired bread taste like? It’s as you think, often hard almost to a rock-like state, or stale. Of course, you can always put it in the microwave with a little water to humidify the stuff.
Yes, you can use your limited SNAP dollars to buy “expired food??? as opposed to the fresh food it’s supposed to buy in the supermarket. Stretch the account.
But how about a law that prevents the local businesses from profiteering on it by disallowing diversion of expired food to markets set up for the purpose of selling it? Or requiring business that do such a thing to send 150 percent of an equivalent of unexpired food to a free food bank or conduct sale of it to SNAP card holders within their own business at 50 percent off?
Nah, of course not.
The awkward awfulness of Stephen Colbert is that he gets his million dollar salary off mock yucks of this nature.
Yes, isn’t it great that horrid predatory behavior in the corporate dictatorship provides great journalism and laughter for Comedy Central! They deserve a bull-whipping.
I don’t see any people laughing at the 99 cent store when I’m there.
H/t to Frank at Pine View Farm, where first I saw it. (In other words, this is a comment rescue/reprint operation.)
You can also get some laughs on life in the corporate dictatorship from Loud Folk Live. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Stephen Colbert, orders of magnitude so and it’s not patronizing. It’s also not for Colbert or Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central audience of white-bread nothings and evening pearl-clutchers, which just about all alone makes it entirely worthy of attention.
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11.14.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, The Corporate Bund at 12:59 pm by George Smith
Ol’ Uncle Contemptible, Ted Nugent, paid by Don Blankenship, at “Coalstock” in 2009.
This week Don Blankenship of Massey energy was indicted by the US government for his role in a calamitous explosion at one of his company’s coal mines in 2010.
From the New York Times:
The former chief executive of the company involved in the nation’s worst coal mine disaster in 40 years, in which 29 men died in West Virginia in 2010, was charged on Thursday with widespread violations of safety rules and deceiving federal inspectors.
Donald L. Blankenship, who formerly ran the Massey Energy Company, was indicted on four criminal counts by a federal grand jury in the Upper Big Branch disaster near Montcoal, W.Va.
Mr. Blankenship was accused of looking away from hundreds of safety violations “in order to produce more coal, avoid the costs of following safety laws, and make more money.???
IN 2009 Massey held the laughable “Coalstock,” a Labor Day celebration in West Virginia. The celebrity entertainment was Nugent and two other country artists, Hank Williams, Jr. and John Rich of Big & Rich.
From this blog, 2009 quote from Blankenship at “Coalstock:”
“Today was a good day for American workers past, present and future. This historic event brought tens of thousands of people together to show their support for the men and women whose hard work built this country and we were proud to welcome them …
“It is also about what our government is allowing others to do to American labor. Our government, environmental extremists, American corporations, and politicians on the right and the left are all endangering American labor.”
In Thomas Frank’s Pit the Billionaire, a book bought for the blog by a loyal reader, Blankenship and “Coalstock” are described:
There is no better instance of [cognitive] erasure than the enormous rally held in West Virginia on Labor Day 2009 for the express purpose of announcing the solidarity between coal miners and the coal mine operators … The get together feature the protest favorites Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent and was presided over by Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, a pollution-spewing strike-breaking mogul of the old school. Dressed in American flag clothing and boasting that the gathering had cost him “a million dollars or so??? Blankenship took the stage and declared he was there to “defend American labor because no one else will??? … Eight months after that rally, 29 workers in Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine were dead from a huge underground explosion … Now when we find a mine operator claiming that his own struggles against regulation are actually the struggles of mine workers — workers who are then killed because mine regulations are not properly observed .. we have stumbled upon a near perfect example of what the sociologists call “complete horseshit.??? The man’s ideas are so contrary to reality …
“The charges hold [Blankenship] personally responsible for … hundreds of safety violations in 28 months leading up to the explosion,” reads the Times.
If convicted Blankenship faces a prison sentence of up to thirty years.
Web error 500 — “internal server error” messages when accessing this blog are the consequence of a corporate hosting fault felt across its entire network. In other words, I can’t do anything about them but complain and have done so.
I am told, as have been many others, that engineers are working on the problem, which has now affected matters for about two weeks.
It is one of the reasons I haven’t posted much to the domain.
Be patient. I will keep you abreast of plans.
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11.03.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 12:21 pm by George Smith
Lack of blog action, two reasons: Depression over general state of affairs and hassles with WordPress/web hosting.
For the past couple weeks web hosting has been beset by problems, across all platforms, technical faults of unexplained nature described only by “500 — Internal server error” messages.
It was so bad over the weekend the blog database couldn’t even be administrated.
After a decade of this I’m so sick of talking to information technology workers at help desks I just walked away. As a class they’re worse than the flu virus, which is something you at least can be immunized against. They’re corporate job apparently requires them to give up being thinking human beings, to be something on the end of the line that will make you think you’re talking to an automated phone menu with only two options, hang up/give up or consult on-line documentation, which is not supported and/or not relevant to the current problem.
These people are so dysfunctional that accepted business practice is to either actively hide contact pages or purposely disarm or push them into default when trouble is breaking out, as it was all along the hosting network. And it was not a problem that came upon the network in one day; it had been building for weeks.
But we’ve all seen this coming. It’s the model of the American corporation. Extract automatic monthly fees for substandard or virtually non-existent service. Refuse to communicate to anyone with which you have a business relationship except through “announcements” edict or notifications that payment is overdue.
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10.24.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:03 pm by George Smith
I wish I had the picture from the hard copy of Thursday’s Los Angeles Times. In the business section, a b&w photo of Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, two self-satisfied middle-aged white billionaires in their look-a-like casual clothes, standing by their cookie-cutter campus bicycles.
It for a story on their first management book, one in a genre that’s an ocean of deadening conformity. Naturally, there’s is different because they are Google, dammit!
And therefore it is called “How Google Works, ” “a guide to managing what they call ‘smart creatives’, according to the newspaper.
Everyone is now well-acquainted with how much smarter everyone of Google is than the lice-infested masses. And that is why they are all wealthier than Croesus because in America you are compensated in direct proportion to your gargantuan talents. Or lack thereof.
But I have yet to see any hint of recognition that the constant numbing stories of how smart they are, how intellectually superior one must be to just pass an interview in Mountain View, of how everything in the place is encrusted with the wonderfulnesses of soaring IQs and unfettered innovations, just ooze condescension.
If pomposity were a person and it met Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg it would throw itself away.
So let’s hear it again for the “smart creatives:”
Jonathan Rosenberg: Traditional management books don’t address the fact that the balance of power has shifted from companies to consumers. That’s made building superior products the paramount issue for companies today. So the key thing that they need to figure out is how to attract what we in the book call the new breed of employee, the “smart creative.” Those are the people who have mastered the tools of the current age to build superior products. We don’t think anyone has told that story before.
Eric Schmidt: We’re always on the winning side when we’re on the user side…. It works in most countries. There are some countries which you can essentially think of as non-democracies, where they’re just not organized around citizens, they’re organized around other things, and there the issues are much harder.
[I have to step in here because Schmidt, in the interview, really doesn’t seem to know how fucked this sounds.]
The interview includes Schmidt and Rosenberg pimping Uber and, then, at the end just slipping in a little bit that Google is heavily invested in the company.
And as stated at the beginning, no Google piece is complete without an assertion about how great it is there because it’s where all the brilliant people are: “[Schmidt]: What attracts people is the ability to work with other brilliant people and to work on really, really big problems.”
Fuck these guys, their driver-less cars and data-delivery dirigibles. As solutions to big problems they’re not exactly the polio vaccine or the elimination of smallpox in our lifetime.
Instead, their alleged “smart creatives” crowning achievement is the tech fossilization of the winner-take-all economy, one in which nothing exists except that which is embedded in the top half page of Google search returns.
Others have caught on:
When I ask people why they don’t pay for a music subscription service or (heaven forbid!) purchase physical albums, the most common response is: Why should I? I can get almost any song I want for free on YouTube. I’ve even had people laugh at me for my naïveté in considering any other way of consuming music. And who can blame these freeloaders from taking advantage of a “free??? (if sometimes legally dubious) source for almost any song ever recorded? But the highly paid Google execs who run YouTube need to be at the top of any list of the culprits who destroyed the economic conditions for musical artists.
What a strange turnabout! Remember when people did volunteer work to help the poor? Now the poor do it to help the wealthy.
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10.18.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 11:36 am by George Smith
Unemployed, underemployed, or unemployable, when you’re down and almost out, Silicon Valley’s libertarians are there for you with apps to allow you to help others by turning your abode into a hostel.
For a small fee, of course.
The buzzphrase for this has been “the sharing economy.” Except now the word’s getting out and the bloom is off the poison oak.
From the New York Times, on a piece earlier this week on how New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has lowered the boom on AirBnB, the residence sharing enabler, issuing a report stating that three quarters of the firm’s rentals in NYC were illegal:
Critics say that the start-ups are unsavory efforts to avoid regulation and taxes, and that the very term “sharing economy??? is ridiculous.
“We need to move forward … We need to work together on some sensible rules that stop bad actors and protect regular people who simply want to share the home in which they live,??? AirBnB spokesman Nick Papas told the newspaper.
“Anyone operating an illegal hotel should be on notice that the state and city will take aggressive enforcement actions in this area … A slick advertising campaign doesn’t change the fact that this is illegal activity,” retorted the attorney general.
Schneiderman’s report, according to the Times, found that 37 percent of the revenue generated through AirBnb came from just six percent of the rentals, specifically from landlords of entire buildings who had used the service to simply convert their apartment high-rise properties into transient hotels.
This was very bad news for AirBnB. So it did what the sharing economy start-ups always do. First, ignore the law. Then send out the call for a libertarian flack to ride to the rescue in the opinion pages of the big newspaper.
In this case, it’s Arthur Brooks of the Unregulated Business Uber Alles lobby American Enterprise Institute.
The phrase sharing economy now begins to leave a bad taste. This is because it’s not sharing at all. You pay for a cheap service, provided by someone Silicon Valley technology can take advantage of and leverage in the desperation economy.
Or as I put it a year ago:
The sharing economy: American tech industry euphemism for the creation of an economy in which the top 1 percent gets all the share.
So libertarian pundit Arthur Brooks uses a different phrase to describe it: the helping industry.
As in, “Everyone wants to help. Wouldn’t you want to be part of such an industry, helping people with more money than you by cheaply renting your home to them at their convenience?”
Quotes:
WHAT is a “helping industry????
To hear him tell it, [AirBnB co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk] started the business because it was fascinating and fun. And most of all, he says, because it could help ordinary people who needed an affordable place to stay or had some excess capacity in their homes. That’s right — Nate sees Airbnb as a “helping industry.???
Some will howl at this …
Ordinary people, especially vulnerable people without power and privilege, find Airbnb empowering and useful. It lifts Americans up …
Any of us can work in a helping industry. That includes teachers, nurses, stay-at-home parents … The blessing of our free enterprise system is that any of us can sanctify our work. We just need to ask if what we are doing truly lifts others up.
For his sterling example, Brooks finds a woman who has been disemboweled, as many have been, by the American economy. By subletting her apartment out for a few days monthly and “[bunking with a friend or family member]” she can keep paying the bills on the place.
But what if the “friend” or “family member” decided they wanted to be part of the helping industry and charge for the few nights the guest is staying over? Ah, that ruins everything.
And it exposes Brooks’ argument as risible. AirBnB, the helping application is just leveraging desperate people, in this case making some money off the “friend” or “family member” that puts up its user for free.
And none of it addresses Schneiderman’s report that states most of AirBnb’s revenue generated by it in NYC is illegal, coming from landlords/owners who’ve just used to flip entire apartment buildings to unregulated hostels.
From when I first looked at AirBnB:
At Google images, “sharing economy??? returns the Silicon Valley pissed-in [bathwater] of the future. The sharing economy, as defined here, is just a euphemism for installing network technology that atomizes labor costs, unleashes the economy into free-lance downward bidding wars, taking larger pieces of a stagnant economic pie for the owners of the technology. In other words, they always get the share, no matter how much smaller the total economic swag becomes. And, as is always the case with snake-oil sellers, they’re backed up with other fine-sounding euphemisms, in case “sharing economy??? just isn’t enough. In this instance, Google offers “collaborative consumption“…
But if you look more closely at AirBnB property, you will see that some of the rooms are also offered as monthly rentals, revealing the desire of the owner to be an apartment manager. Of these, we already have loads in Pasadena — and in your city — and they use Craigslist, too.
Others, when examined, are renting all the rooms in a given house, which may look nice on the outside, turning it into a stealth motel. One must assume that some are illegal. Pasadena and all cities do have various ordnances for apartment complexes, hotels, motels, probably increasing in importance if the rented structures are not built in the business district.
This is the case with granny cottages here.
Most of them are illegal, in one way or another, under strict municipal code enforcement. But they are a staple in southern California where people have converted garages into them in trying to build revenue. And AirBnB makes it easier to rent them out, perhaps not that much easier than Craigslist.
In any case, this puts AirBnB in the role of virtual slumlord, although that may not be the large part of its business.
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10.02.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 2:52 pm by George Smith
Full size. Listen to The National Anthem.
The first copies of Loud Folk Live will be going out tomorrow and Saturday. So expect them sometime around the middle of next week.
I’m proud of it. It’s a better record than my first, Arrogance, way back in 1985 and that, surprisingly, even made mention in a lot of places including Chuck Eddy’s book on the 500 best hard rock and heavy metal records. Which I didn’t take too seriously, but which was nice to have happen, anyway.
Loud Folk Live is much different. It’s an ideology, a point of view, a mix of electric Americana as well as hard-hitting guitar rock n roll, totally live and straight to two-track. What went down over our recent summer of contempt is exactly what you get.
The performances are tight and explosive. Hooray for the Salvation Army Band’s mix of Purple Haze, lyrics to alcoholism and interjections of singing Bringing in the Sheaves gospel challenges you not to laugh. Alone, it makes the entire thing worth having.
And then it tumbles right in to the sermon to our god of green, morals and how to not get into Heaven, Jesus of America.
If you don’t like rock ‘n’ roll, or my voice, you certainly won’t enjoy it.
Which doesn’t bother me that much. If you contributed after the last post, you’ll get one, anyway.
You can still have one for whatever you name. They’ll be CD-Rs with the above insert, later as a limited run burn in a clam shell case.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is just a diversion next to the blog. It’s not. Loud Folk Live is part of my American experience, as important to me as the last twenty years of writing on the subject with which you’ve become familiar.
No one was going to publish a book. Not possible in this country. (Work through Amazon and the empire of Bezos? C’mon, already did that and got hosed.) So I made music.
If you want a copy, go here, page down, then you know what to do.
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09.01.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:18 pm by George Smith
“Politicians like to speechify about ‘hard-working Americans,’ but in your experience, what percentage of your colleagues actually work (or worked) hard?”
Here’s what they said:
Who is working hard is a difficult concept to quantify in today’s workforce. It is easier to determine who is slacking and not producing. That should be the question.
— Lew Hundley, Salem
The problem is that our present liberal system is rewarding people for not working. Many are getting lazy and want to just live off the labor of others. That will come to an end soon.
— William K. Dettwyler, Salem
I have worked both for government and private companies. Most people work hard, although a few do not. The big difference is that in the private sector the hard workers usually advance while in government the politically correct ones advance whether they work hard or not.
— Loren Wright, Salem
Ninety-eight percent work as hard as they need to. Politicians speak of American exceptionalism, but we reward results rather than effort. We perceive the successful as hard-working rather than talented or fortunate, and the failures as shiftless or lacking ambition.
— Erin Cramer, Stayton
While there are a lot of “hard-working” people in our country, it appears the percentage is decreasing. Unions represent the work force, but spend 90 percent of their time taking care of 10 percent of the workers. And the apathetic mentality of our people seems to be growing.
— Tony Weaver, Woodburn
— The Oregon Statesman
To be fair, not everyone was characterized by this certain lack of charity. But over half the hoi polloi were.
Labor Day should be renamed Labor-Management Day. –letter to the editor in Arizona
Most Americans realize that Labor Day is about celebrating workers and their contribution to our free society, but that won’t stop union bosses from stealing the spotlight to push their own agenda. — a corporate flack pushing Right-to-Work law, in the Pensacola Union Tribune
Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor in 1886, said, “We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful and childhood more happy and bright. These in brief are the primary demands made by the Trade Unions in the name of labor. These are the demands made by labor upon modern society and in their consideration is involved the fate of civilization.” — from the Des Moines Register
That ended well.
“We used up all of our tear gas and pepper spray.??? — the Chief Operating Officer of Ferguson, Missouri
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as allegory for US labor. You get turned into a giant beetle, are villified and injured. Then you die and get put in the trash.
Regardless of stories about Market Basket and Trader Joe’s.
From the No-Job Job Fair.
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08.30.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund at 11:52 am by George Smith
Old PARIAH magazine, the glossy we wish was on the newsstand, way ahead of its time.
This Labor Day marks the first in recent memory where many opinion writers could no longer overlook the dreadful state of American employment. As a result, today you can easily find recommendations to raise the minimum wage or a few anecdotes about a couple companies, usually Market Basket, where labor combined with a former owner to overcome the greed of corporate masters.
However, it’s really still not very hard to find the material I characterized yesterday.
Let’s see a few pieces. Roll it.
From Newsday:
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the Labor Day concept. It strikes me as a touch un-American. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to take the day off. But I don’t accept the notion of two fixed Americas, one comprised of laborers and one comprised of business owners. It’s antithetical to the America of job mobility I know and believe in — and the one we always should be striving to grow. Yet lots of Americans genuinely see the country divided today into permanent working and ruling classes. It’s no wonder, considering how many political leaders exploit that proposition to gain votes …
But with the underemployment rate stubbornly hovering at about 15 percent this Labor Day, maybe it’s time to give businesses a little credit and recognition for all they do for this country. I, for one, would be hosed without employers. Most of us would be.
The man’s recommendation? Have an Employer’s Day. Paradoxically, I agree. Labor Day is un-American in the sense of it reflecting how things are. We live in a corporate Culture of Lickspittle. So why not have a national Lick the Boots Day?
This from the current Secretary of Labor, runs the Americans-don-t-have-the-skills-employers-want meme (no link):
As the Secretary of Labor, I have a unique opportunity to meet with employers around the country of all sizes and from an array of industries. So many of them tell me the same thing: they’re ready to grow their businesses and to hire more people.
But here’s the rub: too often, they can’t find workers who have the skills they need.
Recently, the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, has stated he wants to raise the city’s minimum wage to a little over 13 dollars an hour.
For this weekend, a local corporate flack, Stewart Waldman, opines for the LA Daily News:
It is crucial that our government begins gearing policy toward attracting and retaining business. Once businesses are comfortable, well-paying jobs will follow. No one should have to live on a minimum wage, but the mayor’s proposal isn’t even a short-term solution — it’s a disaster for Los Angeles. Happy Labor Day!
An older woman in the hinterlands is shocked, shocked, that corporate America is rude to young people and that the line about not being able find qualified workers is a con. It won’t even deign to answer their job applications:
Our business education people have coached people who apply for jobs to be careful to present themselves in the best light, to be courteous in their presentation, to become knowledgeable about the company to which they are applying, update their resume and improve their education if need be to find a job.
My friend did all of these and yet, still no job. And yet there are employers complaining that they cannot find good help …
If someone works that hard to work, seems to me they should at least be recognized for all the effort they put into their search by the courtesy of a call or a formal note or in today’s world, I guess an email would be better than nothing.
No wonder the young people today put no stock in the importance of a first impression or the need to have information in order and skills well noted and presented and to keep trying for a job.
Better late than never, I suppose.
Here’s some counter-balance, with venom. From the Reno newspaper. Amazon employs retiree slave labor:
U.S. workers get fewer holidays than those in the rest of the first world, so I’m totally in favor of heavy partying, dressed or undressed.
With prospects for American families looking increasingly dim, we might as well get drunk. Herewith, some reasons why.
AMAZONED OUT. Despite Reno City Hall’s glowing pronouncements about what a great employer Amazon is, many of the 4,000 workers the online octopus will retain during the holidays will be impoverished senior citizens living in aging motor homes who wander the country like farm workers. The only difference is that they have neither found their César Chávez nor are they likely to.
Amazon terms them “workampers??? who will suffer elongated shifts on hard concrete for low pay with no benefits. As with Wal-Mart and casinos, most will qualify for food stamps and welfare. Their health plan will consist of aspirin or emergency rooms.
I’m with him. Party heavy, get drunk. I have you covered at Escape from WhiteManistan.
And in about an hour, I’m going to start just that.
Now go, go, go for the closest you’ll get to official Loud Folk Live Dick Destiny music for Labor Day, Rich Man’s Burden performed a couple weeks ago from deep in the heart of Pasadena, just off Rte. 66, where you get your kicks.
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08.27.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 2:47 pm by George Smith
This week the fork-tongued collective at Facebook declared it would be instituting new measures to reduce the volume of clickbait shotgunned into its closed social culture of lickspittle.
As the coiner of Culture of Lickspittle, I found this hysterical. You would too.
It’s the equivalent of Facebook saying it’s going to cut off both its legs in a sham attempt to cure disease it couldn’t exist without.
Facebook has done this before, mostly in a move to punish clickbait farms that don’t tithe to it sufficiently. This means Upworthy.
While Buzzfeed, which pays protection money to the minions of Zuckerberg, remains immune.
Facebook users live on clickbait.
So saying you’re going to do something about it is like a town hooker being seen signing up for re-education through the Church Universal & Triumphant. Unbelievable, unless it’s a maneuver to extract pay to play blow jobs from the ranks of those as yet unreached by your blandishments.
Clickbait has taken over the life blood of American journalism. It is what millions respond to. Total worthlessness is worth in the CoL. And deception is its shiny gold paint.
We know Upworthy is the highest form of crap sincerity trolling, done by smiling automatons who all look and scan the same in biographical slogans having to do with how they believe they’re changing the world by sifting stuff to make you allegedly joyous or tearful on-line.
But what about everybody else? Rhetorical. It’s clickbait or die. And you know it when you see it.
Linguistically, something like an early anti-virus scanner could get rid of most clickbait in an afternoon. Flag the words “see,” “this,” and “these.” The only utility they have in web titling is as a command/enticement to bring up something of no value. Fundamentally, they’re only used in clickbait.
Having worked for a newspaper and still regularly seeing paper copies of the Los Angeles Times and NYT, one can safely say headline writers for physical copy virtually never employ stock clickbait usages. You’ll never see the words “awesome,” “cry,” “lol,” “must” or “[the numbers 5 to 20 or so]” in old school headlines. Their presence in web publishing is not evidence of innovation or a new model of journalism. It is the pushing of patent medicines.
There were and are good reasons for headline rigor in old school journalism, just as there is good reason to not buy the idea that loud and louder farting in public is a mark of quality and achievement in an individual.
Space limitations on type set still constrain physical news. Combined with a certain amount of intellectual pride and effort going into making a descriptive headline that addresses the substantive nut of the news to follow.
But virtually everyone has surrendered to clickbait in cyberspace.
Let’s take a few examples.
Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. Here’s why he won’t go to jail.
This is from Vox. It’s part of the subset of clickbait known as the explainer. Explainers are 250-500 words of alleged explanation simultaneously explained by a dozen or more similarly done pieces at rivals, sometimes stuffed with a few graphs and charts. They’re usually done by people with no particular skill at explaining any matter, expecially science or anything else complicated.
Here’s another piece of Vox clickbait by someone named Alex Abad-Santos.
When Vox was started by Ezra Klein, the stock line was how it was going to provide better journalism, something more in line with what people actually want. Easy talk.
If this is what Klein thought, then the observation is correct. People respond to clickbait. But if that’s what you’re going to serve, and it’s what Vox does serve in many categories, it has much competition.
Ezra Klein’s talent was in politics and policy at the Washington Post. Klein’s excellence was obvious. He showed no facility in anything else.
Because you are really good at one thing doesn’t mean you should have the vanity to put your fingers into every pie, from science to comic books.
To explain, we can compare Klein to Brian Bosworth. At Oklahoma, Bosworth was a two time Butkus Award winner, the only one in college football history.
Bosworth was a dominating personality. He talked a great game and created a shell environment that led many to believe he would be a superstar in the NFL.
That never happened. Brian Bosworth was a great linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks but he was not durable. He was not an NFL bust but still lasted barely three seasons before his career was over, worn out by injury.
This is the Vox trajectory, I bet. Already, few care. Ezra Klein was a force at the Post. But outside the Post, he’s neither particularly durable or quite as special.
Here’s another piece of bald-faced clickbait, at the Washington Post, in a blog called Everything Post.
The outrage driving the Ferguson debate ignores these three key facts.
Stock troll title, commissioned from someone specifically for the purpose of creating a law and order troll piece saying, wow, that Ferguson isn’t that bad. Armored cars, menacing snipers and your small community being soaked in tear gas are only that which your require in America.
And from the Huffington Post, where the most popular pieces are those that are the best clickbait:
This Genius Project Would Create Tiny Homes For People Making Less Than $15,000 A Year
Clickbait usage, genius, which it is not the work of if you’re sucked in. Did you think Macarthur Grant genius? Or maybe the work of a Nobel laureate?
Nothing like that.
And the “tiny homes” are not even made, they exist only as a business’s drawings. The drawings make them look like nice studio apartments. Which tells you, even if they are made (in Portland), which one doubts, they will not be reserved for formerly homeless people who can now still only pay 200-300 dollars a month in rent. (What it is is most probably a scheme to get public money to underwrite a private developer’s building project, then jiggered to be handed-off to high value but small apartments gentrifying a slum.)
In clickbait, you never really have to follow up anyway. One of its strengths is in the creation of trivial but grandiose-sounding fictions.
From last week, on BuzzFeed acquiring a big infusion of venture cash money:
And if that isn’t enough, they’ll be hard at work using the cash … to better optimize content specifically for the Culture of Lickspittle:
“We spend a ton of time thinking about why people share things and what kinds of things will they share. The same stories are very widely shared on Facebook and Twitter and email.??? .
When we share shit why do we share it on the places made out of sharing? It’s a boon to journalism.
Top stuff on Buzzfeed, a passing glance…
11 Things You Learn When You Watch All 5 “Step Up??? Movies In A Row
1. You never knew a day could be so great.
The 17 Funniest “Jeopardy!??? Fails Of All Time
What Kind of Shark Are You?
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08.25.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 1:02 pm by George Smith
The Seeker, by the Dick Destiny Band, performed live in scenic downtown Pasadena, a block from Rte. 66, where you got get your kicks. Two old men and a big jangle in an old song by the Who.
In case you haven’t been following the narrative, or just dropped in, this is what I do with my life. Once you’ve been cut off from the US economy, you have nothing left to do and no one to do it with if they haven’t had the same pleasure.
So might as well do what you can, in this case twice a week, in the corporate Bund. It’s then your prerogative to regularly show how you’ve been judged/rendered/whatever not useful to even very small numbers of people.
And since this is about the Culture of Lickspittle, from the Sunday New York Times, on how it’s now allegedly uncool to promote yourself on-line. (Or shit that obsesses upper middle class white explainers who had no presence in cyberspace before the Facebook and Twitter scripting platforms were invented for them.)
It annoys people:
[Much] self-promotion on social media seems less about utility and effective advertising and more about ego sustenance. One of the earliest psychological studies of narcissism and Facebook, a 2008 paper by Laura E. Buffardi and W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, found that “narcissistic personality scores were related to … the quantity of information listed about self, self-promoting pictures, and provocative pictures.???
In other words, those who are narcissistic offline also narcissistically overshare online, a conclusion few would dispute …
But, Professor Campbell conceded, online narcissism is a logical outgrowth of DIY capitalism …
Rampant self-flackery, however, comes at a cost. While narcissism is generally “really good at the initial stage of relationship — for being hired or getting promoted, for getting a boyfriend or girlfriend — it damages you over time,??? Professor Campbell said. In addition, the more one self-promotes, the more “you’ll become a polarizing figure??? …
Self-flackery. Quaintly insulting coinage by someone named Teddy Wayne, just manufactured for publication in the Times.
Many might also think flacking is the oxygen bound to the hemoglobin in the Culture of Lickspittle’s very blood.
And how can it be DIY capitalism when there’s been no money for anything in the last year or more? How can it be DIY capitalism when the agencies that have enabled the trivial posting of your stuff are the only bodies making money from the sale of masses of “yous” and our digital trailings?
I am so dense when it comes to these matters and beg forgiveness.
Being polarizing, it is reasoned, is bad in the Culture of Lickspittle. You need a license for it.
I’ll explain. For free.
Polarizing works for Ted Nugent. It works for agencies and corporations too. The Ferguson police presence could be said to have been polarizing.
Cable companies are polarizing. Everyone hates them. Corporate America is polarizing.
This is how Lickspittle works.
If you don’t use Twitter and have maybe only 30 or so “friends,” of which two are actual flesh and blood people you’ve met, and you post — say — your unemployment tunes, you’re polarizing.
In fact, if you post anything on the net, this includes blogging, if it doesn’t make money or have a large audience, you mutate into polarization. Because you’re engaged in self-flackery.
If you send your song in an e-mail link to a handful of others, if it annoys even one, it is spam.
But if people receive advertisements from the popular, political agencies and big companies, it is getting newsletters and information about stuff you ought to buy. In the Culture of Lickspittle.
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