De-consolidating Culture
What to look forward to, and who was wrong on the internet last week
Welcome to Mess & Noise. Last time, we delved into the Gen X film Slacker to see how relevant it is today. If you’re new here, I also write about being a working parent, weirdness in business and culture, and sandwiches. Paid subscriptions are paused until February. Old posts are unlocked for all.
Your Verdict: More Sangwiches
Thanks to everyone who took the survey last week! I didn’t expect more than 5 respondents, so the volume of answers was a wonderful surprise. The results were not surprising. Turns out we all love sandwiches around here!
I can’t always do video like we did for Brancaccio’s and Brennan & Carr, so I’ll reboot sandwich reporting with pics and text soon. Keeping it simple, like a good sandwich.
If there are sandwiches in NYC that you love, let me know either in the comments or by replying to this email. I’ve already received a few great leads, so keep ‘em coming.
In the meantime, I present you:
Last week in internet wrongness
Freddie de Boer is a writer I enjoy but don’t pay for, so I’m unable to comment directly on his silly post about New York’s recent coverage of Problematic Men. That’s a hackneyed term, but the closest umbrella I could grab to cover semi-fraudulent health influencers with shady personal lives, and sadistic authors accused of sexual assault.
New York’s cover story on Andrew Huberman last spring featured several of his former romantic partners speaking out about his lying, infidelity, and controlling behavior, but de Boer says it wasn’t substantive enough to warrant publication.
The New York piece also poked minor holes in Huberman’s “lab” at Stanford, its actual area of inquiry (something about optic nerves in mice), and errors in his summarizing of medical reports that are ostensibly outside his field.
de Boer says the cover image was engineered to make Huberman look unnecessarily “sinister.” It’s actually 98% identical to every photo of Huberman that exists everywhere.
Without making his point too clearly, de Boer suggests the Huberman story diminishes the impact of last week’s Neil Gaiman exposé, which has more serious allegations.
If you were to put these two stories on a Bad Guy spectrum, Huberman might be a cool blue and Gaiman white hot. If you were to give the Bad Guy spectrum another name, you could call it a category of “women’s interests,” or a pillar of popular media for centuries.
It’s also the editorial strategy driving New York Magazine. Look at New York’s top 20 stories of last year. All of them are either:
A) written by a woman
B) feature a woman subject in a position of power, victimization, or scandal
C) a topic of women’s interest, such as marriage, divorce, sexual harassment, scams, mysteries, or true crime
or D) some combination of any of the above (most of them, actually)
Sidenote: I can’t believe I missed the story about the two paleontologists who had a falling out over the dinosaur meteor and I can’t wait to read it
To complain about a women’s magazine overdoing it with a deep dive on a charismatic podcast doctor who’s horrible to women in his private life, and maybe full of shit in his professional life, is like shaking your fist at a Lifetime movie or the Oxygen network.
The Huberman story had little-to-no impact on Huberman professionally, and that’s because there is little overlap in Huberman’s core audience and the women who read New York magazine.
New York readers may have been aware of Huberman, but they’re more interested in hearing a true story about a terrible boyfriend, whether he’s an elder statesman of the GOOP-adjacent men’s healthsphere, or some random con artist profiled in a 50-part TikTok series.
After the Huberman story “broke,” (that sounds way more impactful than it was) he may have had a panicked phone call or two with his PR team, but he lost nothing. Women did not band together in outrage and demand his removal from the internet. They simply continued to ignore him. Huberman is still a top 20 podcaster according to Apple and Spotify charts, and he has 6.5 million YouTube subscribers. His show has at least 18 active sponsors.
Gaiman on the other hand has been dropped from his current projects, and de Boer is furious that New York would report this as an addendum to their original Gaiman story.
The less serious Huberman piece from 10 months ago did not desensitize or distract New York’s readership from a real story of sexual assault with real consequences.
de Boer says the addendum is New York shamelessly “monetizing public morality,” rather than responsibly and concisely following up a big story for readers who genuinely want to know, “I wonder what’s gonna happen to this famous person now that’s he’s been accused of rape from seemingly credible sources?”
Perhaps I’m a little touchy after seeing someone who’s been Found Liable for Sexual Assault win the popular vote in our last presidential election, but there is some relief — or a women’s interest — in closing the loop on abuse stories and seeing how abusers are held accountable, even if it’s simply losing a development deal or two.
Other Wrongness
I don’t always use this newsletter to helplessly clap into the void, but here’s one last gripe before we move onto a silver lining I’m manifesting after the inauguration:
The New York Times spectacularly fumbled what could have been an interesting and nuanced interview with Curtis Yarvin. It was instead stilted and frustrating.
I wrote about Yarvin over the summer. Now that his “dark enlightenment” philosophy has officially infiltrated the executive branch of the U.S. government, the Times put him on for some clunky “gotcha” tactics to cultivate social media soundbites.
It’s the same thing Lulu Garcia-Navarro did with J.D. Vance, when she desperately angled for him to repeat his “childless women are sociopathic” schtick. Vance admits there are “social reasons” people choose not to have kids, but instead of double-clicking on that and getting him to admit that it’s conservative social policies (or the conservative opposition to any social policy) that deter people from starting families, she tries to pin him trashing cat ladies again.
And so it went with David Marchese and Curtis Yarvin. Every time Yarvin gives a bunch of historical context for a question he’s about to answer, Marchese accuses him of obfuscation and demands “just answer the question!” like it’s a live debate on prime time. Bro, let him cook! Let him use all the paint he needs until he’s in the corner, then show him how dumb his ideas are.
I know quick-hit outrage is the only fume that legacy media like The Times and CNN still run on, but if they pandered less, and extended their audience and tricky subjects a little more respect, their coverage of said subjects would be more illuminating.
Yarvin says the U.S. isn’t a true democracy and FDR ruled like a dictator/monarch/startup CEO (those are interchangeable terms in Yarvinism). He’s not wrong. Vance says the U.S. has become “almost pathologically antichild.” He’s not wrong either. But instead of pushing them to illustrate their batshit vision for fixing problems most people might agree on, these reporters clumsily try to dunk on them instead. It’s insulting to everyone.
A Silver Lining
No promises, but here’s what I’m hoping: With the consolidation of wealth, power, and media into the hands of a few Fucktard Nerdballs, their status as incumbents is sealed.
In business and culture lifecycles, incumbents are big and powerful before they become slow and out of touch. Then they’re vulnerable to disruption.
Here’s ye olde music industry as an analogy:
In 1990, all the major record labels consolidated into six corporations that were responsible for 93% of all music. Within that time, there was a flourishing of cooler independent record labels that produced the best music of those decades. By 1992 Nirvana had surpassed Michael Jackson on the Billboard charts. By the early 2000’s the majors had consolidated further into The Big 3, then MP3s came along and gobbled up their lunch and dinner.
This is a meandering way to say the fellatio ring-kissing that led up to the inauguration and was on full display that day was the natural evolution of former “disruptors” becoming the status quo, and reaching their zenith of power.
There’s only one direction from here, and it’s down. I’m looking forward to the in-fighting among the Tech Broligarchs, the public’s shift away from their deeply uncool cars and platforms, and some new and independent peer-to-peer network that comes along to replace them.
That’s where this one ends. Power to the people in the comments!
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻⚫️⚫️⚫️
Never stop clapping into the void.