I.
It was a simple logic, formed out of a small bitterness growing inside—to reach more people, to get out of the microcosm, to stop spending my nights at Kinko’s making copies, to work for real magazines, make what I thought would be real money—conveniently compartmentalizing the fact that many things written in zines and small underground literary journals over the years had affected me and sunk far deeper into my soul and changed me more than an article in The New Yorker ever could.
My favorite writers were small press writers, half-unpublishable writers, writers for small select audiences of their peers; Suicides or failures, mostly, strange creatures who were best appreciated when they were conveniently obscure or sick or dead enough to get their difficult personalities out of the way of their own work.
I made fanzines because I was an avid reader and admirer of the literary zines, and I wanted to write for and participate in my community, make art and share it with those who shared values, with no gatekeeping intermediaries or real ambitions.
One of the perils of a long and amazing youth in Anarchyland is that one’s formative years are so exciting and wonderful, so full of adventure and community that the come-down into civilian life is experienced as a panicky hangover—fragmentation, new solitude, abortively pursuing things in different directions.
One feels the urgent need to catch up with all the people who spent their youth and time properly, in the tortoise-like construction of the foundations of future life.
So I left my sweet little punk house in Greensboro where we had sweet little shows in the sweet little attic—but if I’m honest, it was already my third or fourth-generation group house and I already felt tired and like all things were becoming degraded versions of previous things—and moved to New York, first taking a job in the nonprofit sector and then getting a leg into professional mainstream journalism through the Harper’s Magazine internship.
I decided it was high time to make my way from being an outsider punk-zine-writer-person to being a Real Writer or Journalist or Editor™.
At first, it all went great. By night, it was punk world of house shows and old queer squatter tugboats and garage DJs at Ridgewood bars and black leather jackets hanging around, but by day it was the tweedy NYC lit world of books and culture and intellectual salons and This-Week's-Big-Article-and-the-Intellectuals-Situation.
I found Harper's to be an insanely romantic place, just like I had imagined, the big windows overlooking the steaming rooftops and water towers of gray downtown, cozy little offices crammed with books and piles of literary journals and papers where editors chain-smoked and chit-chatted for hours. It was the true paragon of what I had thought I would find in old literary New York, and I was very sad when the internship came to an end (Although if I am entirely honest, there is a kind of darkness in any New York Publishing office, a kind of under-vibration of 1980s-New-York-Evil that you feel when you watch movies like Scrooged or The Devil's Advocate)
As I said my goodbyes to that magical fall, the friendly, chaotic receptionist Adrian—who I had grown so fond of because he was the only one in the office who didn't have to be guarded, careful, watch his back—took me aside and said, "You're the type of guy that should have a career, a real career!"
"Yeah, that would be nice." I said.
He wished me the best of luck and imparted to me some kind of wisdom and advice that was probably very good but I can't remember for the life of me now, and with that I walked out of the appropriately psycho-geographically-located 666 Broadway, and out into what I imagined would be my wonderful bright future.
Having no clear idea of how to develop a "beat" or subject expertise, I leaned back on the one thing I knew—the subculture. The avant-garde. The edge, the forward knife-blade of culture.
What do I mean by this? I mean weird radical leftist shit, protest shit, obscure literary movements, squatters, train-hopping (it’s kind of telling that ten years later none of this stuff remains beyond the pale in magazine publishing—and some of it has become high-value commodity for museum people and archivists and art world types).
It was the path of least resistance, pure laziness, this idea of repackaging well-worn subculture for the normies. The hidden world beneath the paving stones? Oh, I knew the normies would find it new and interesting. I also knew it would make the underground angry. And you know what, I kind of liked that it would.
It felt—not morally wrong, exactly—but kind of cheap. I figured I'd do it just long enough to get my foot in the door, then pivot.
But you end up turning the kind of tricks you know how to turn.
In the way of things, the first compromise leads to more compromise, to justify the distance already traveled. No one likes to walk a quarter of a mile down the road and turn around and go back the way they came. Even if you meet a dead-end, the urge is to press on.
After the first compromise, comes a second compromise, then a third, then a kind of curiosity of what will come takes over; and also a stubbornness, a determined and probably accurate intuition that you can’t go back.
The following compromises flow easy, with a logic justified by the compromised one.
The old life begins to look unsavory, like a lack of fortitude or pragmatism toward the vulgar and mundane aspects of life.
I wanted to be a real writer-editor, a real person of letters!—Murray Kempton, Joan Didion, Malcolm Cowley, Marshall Frady, Jenny Diski, Edmund Wilson—not a cheap subculture-exposer turning over little anthills and dumping them out.
I pitched, I pursued assignments, and I found all this agonizing, and stymying in a way—the process of actually getting a real assignment to get paid to write something was completely different than the freedom and natural pleasure that came from free-range writing. Whereas before I knew who I was writing for and felt an intimacy and shared understanding, now I had no idea who I was writing for—and felt that I had to pull back the camera and explain things, but didn’t know what to explain and what was self-evident. The researching and writing of pitches soon overtook, consumed, and destroyed the actual root urge to write something—soon, one actually writes nothing but pitches, one proposes ideas and doesn’t get them assigned, all that work is wasted. One loses faith in one’s own voice and one’s own ability to make things and be creative.
This was the desecrated and sunken place I was getting to, even from the beginning.
II.
In 2009, I got my first real magazine assignment from the Malcolm McLaren-like impresario of Vice Magazine’s literary turn. A little polemical book was making the rounds of the New School intellectuals called The Coming Insurrection, written by an anonymous communist faction who had left Paris and moved to a rural village called Tarnac, where they were fomenting all sorts of revolutionary theory and getting accused of sabotaging high-speed train tracks.
It paid $1100 bucks for a 6,000 word text and photos, no expenses, and given that the pitch had been rejected everywhere else, I was very grateful for the opportunity.
This particular Editor-in-Chief was in the midst of transforming the former slurs-rag into a literary and journalistic powerhouse. It was becoming an interesting and yeasty “serious literary magazine.” Lots of money was sloshing around and he used it to recruit big-name novelists and journalists and aging punks to write interesting things that they probably couldn’t get published elsewhere—a true middle-brow landing pad for those trying to make a “life in the arts.”
It had become one of the few places you could do interesting fiction or long-form journalism without immense amounts of bureaucracy and gatekeeping and still get paid reasonably well.
It wasn’t just this editor-in-chief of course, there were many others lending their intellectual heft to this endeavor, but let’s just say the whispered consensus at the time was that this particular Editor was responsible for building the literary and journalistic reputation. (and when he departed Vice, he immediately founded a small literary journal called Apology—apparently an apology for having provided cultural legitimation for Mammon.)
Like many DIY punky people in the early 2000s, I had grown up with a kind of dismissive attitude toward the earlier version of Vice. It was “that hipster magazine.” Or “that cocaine-addled, jaded crack-smoking shithead New York hipster magazine,” depending who you asked.
At the same time, it was fun to flip through, to see some gutter punks and random people you knew in the “Dos and Don’ts.”
I picked up issues here and there in the 9/11-era, when and where I could, they were hard to get a hold of, and I didn’t really feel too much of anything for them. They seemed kind of empty—a spiritual void.
I remember feeling second-hand embarrassment for the people who genuinely believed that early Vice was authentic and cool.
How could they not know that there was another world, a better world out there, that was being hidden from them?
The newer incarnation of Vice was much better, sitting on the borderlands between intellectual aging punks and journalism and big fiction writers, a kind of weirdo New Yorker.
I was too inexperienced and unreliable for The New Yorker and the old-guard media places, and wasn’t a natural fit at the Red-diaper-baby places like The Nation and Dissent (where, as everyone knows, your Ivy degree and cultural pedigree matters), so I landed at Vice by dint of good luck and chance because, at the time, it was the island of misfit toys.
The article I published ended up getting some positive attention from the kind of people who cared about these things, but it also royally pissed off the French communists, who were really trying hard to be secretive and mysterious.
It was a first object lesson in writing about lefty subcultures I was close to for mainstream magazines.
Write what you know, they say.
But the people and things I knew and cared about didn’t really want to be written about.
Or wanted to completely control the way they were written about so that in the end it boiled down to propaganda.
Joan Didion famously said that writing is always selling someone out. This is really true. Absolutely true of the journalists. (Journalism is sadly less about writing and synthesizing big ideas, and mostly about access, getting in touch with people and saying, in a convincing way: “You have a story to tell, and *I’m* the one to tell it.”) But also of the memoirists and thinly-veiled fictionists.
Most “subjects” in any journalistic depiction generally hope to utilize media exposure for their own purposes, to lengthen their shadows in some way—whether that is building personal fame or an audience or building their movement, to sell more product, exoneration, etc—but also generally accept the fact that they’re never going to get a 100% perfect hagiographic depiction.
The only real way to avoid selling anyone out is to never portray another and just write about yourself and your own experiences—but even then—you’re just selling yourself out.
This was a problem. It remained a problem.
III.
After producing a single long-form reportage for Vice, I freelanced and worked a variety of fact-checking and copy-editing jobs in midtown, including inside the Death-Star-like Conde Nast building, where the kaleidoscopic neon from the gigantic billboards coming in through the plate-glass windows made it so you could never tell if it was day or night. The transformative editor-in-chief left Vice at some point.
I was basically on the brink of giving up on publishing and had half-moved back to my mom’s in North Carolina, when, out of the blue, I got a call from the new Vice Editor-In-Chief—a hilarious, wonderful guy who started as an intern and rose up the ranks by force of will—a true creature of the company.
Would I like to be an Editor at the magazine? It felt like I was being thrown a life-preserver. I chain-smoked and paced the drainage pond around the Barnes and Noble behind my mother’s house, gabbing to him on the phone, getting really excited about the opportunity. I looked up at the big swaying pine trees and at the family of ducks I loved that lived in the drainage pond, they were so peaceful, everything was suburban contentment.
I was OK, I was fine, why would I want to go back there and bring more chaos into my life?
It was the kind of offer I couldn't refuse. I was extremely grateful and flattered for a paying relatively free job of this kind, a proper editor job in journalism. I thought that the job at Vice—which was basically my dream job, or as close to a dream job as you can come in the media landscape—might be enough to staunch some of whatever was gnawing at my soul.
If I’m remembering correctly, in Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley described his initial decision to become an editor for The New Republic as being based on simple petit-bourgeois values of wanting to have a nice comfortable life, while uplifting those writers and the lower-frequencies culture that he believed in.
I also thought I could participate in continuing the mission of transforming this lowbrow place into something a bit more highbrow, like Playboy or Ramparts in their golden age, an unexpected place to find intellectual and subcultural depth and while helping outsider, non-conformist writers and artists get paid.
I felt that I was “entering the institutions,” in the old Marxist terminology.
I would not be doing clickbait trash, no sir, not me, not I, it would only be highbrow fiction and long-form and subculture.
IV.
In 2010 or 2011, Vice was on the rise. It’s time had come. Shane Smith was gallivanting around the heights of New York Media World, schmoozing with The New York Times, HBO, the Murdochs—regarded as a business genius and an affable dirtbag upstart—and being courted by the elite organs that had long ignored Vice as a red-headed stepchild.
They ignored it until they couldn't ignore it anymore. According to the numbers, he was eating their lunch with the 18-35 demographic, and the Vice model for news and content and advertising was allegedly the future.
First, and probably most importantly, it was the golden age of the 20-minute weirdo Vice news documentary. You know, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, Black Metal in Botswana, doing cocaine with the FARC, this kind of thing, genuinely pioneering outsider stuff that was freewheeling, informative, and exciting.
Secondly, the transformative Editor-in-Chief from 2002 to 2010 had turned the print mag into a real literary and journalistic magazine, earning it respect from the gatekeeper New York literati as a "real place to write"—whereas in the past it seemed like most of the Vice writers had been a kind of clique of friends.
Third, it was the live-blogger-livestreamer era and Vice was starting to lead the charge on this with forays into political coverage and live-streaming/live-blogging of the Arab Spring stuff. Vice covered riots and political stuff that other publications ignored.
What you heard a lot of at the time was a kind of shrugging, "Vice actually isn't that bad. It may not be perfect but at least it’s not like corporate media. Its open to other viewpoints."
You started to hear this from Leftists. You started to hear this from Right-wing people. They were capturing what today might be called the "populist coalition." There were some true devotees and true believers in Vice, but it felt like the average slightly-disaffected viewer was kinda like "hey, this is cool, I may not love everything but I enjoy what I like, this isn't that bad."
The Big Dogs were probably slightly spooked by the lean, chaotic wildness of Vice and started to adapt some of their own coverage to keep the youth demographic.
I knew the basic origin story: Shane Smith and Suroosh and Gavin McIness had started Vice as a fanzine in Montreal, distributing it at local skate shops and record stores, throwing parties, and promoting and later on signing artists at the borderlands of hip-hop, punk and electronica.
Shane had been the one who wanted to take things to the next level, repeating like a prayer, "we're gonna be big, we're gonna be rich,” until it came true.
McIness had been jettisoned or left at some point (I don’t know the actual story)—I imagine because his political views were becoming a liability to a company trying to scale the heights.
By the time I arrived, Shane was the man with the golden touch—he would show up in the newsroom to give motivational talks, or send emails asking for us to hit him up with ideas.
Both he and Suroosh seemed tired to me, which was understandable—it had already probably been a long journey. I mean, they had been guerilla-marketing with the band LEN’s 1999 hit "Steal My Sunshine" in 1999 for Christssakes! Then there was the move to New York and The Strokes-era and the downtown artist Dash Snow, etc., etc., and I imagine it probably only felt like the race was really on for real in 2010 or 2011.
The office in Williamsburg was about how you would imagine—open concept, all white, neon stuff on the walls, 20-and-30-somethings rushing around, a beehive of activity—as unromantic and unliterary as Harper's was fiendishly romantic. A big white warehouse near the gentrifying Williamsburg waterfront and around the corner from the gentrifying McCarren Pool—where, it seemed like eons ago, we had climbed the chain-link fence and spent the night in the gloamy abandoned summer squatterness with the empty 40-ounce bottles.
I felt that there were all sorts of different kinds of people working at Vice—some were genuine real people, curious about the world, looking to make a difference and make their mark; I made some lifelong friends and met all sorts of people I just really liked, I looked into people’s souls and found kindred. Some others were at their root good but had been slightly corrupted by long exposure to this world; there were a lot of dead-souled “music guys” with beards passionate about multi-colored vinyl and gossip with an uncanny talent for writing 800 words over and over, on deadline, while saying absolutely nothing; some were trickster journalists and editors, Loki-like fun-lovers; Others were true exemplars of what one would expect of a Vice work environment, social climbers or aspirational partiers who lived for hipster fashion and open bars and good parties and upscale food experiences, and a few seemed to me to be actual demons disguised as human beings, walking around in human-skin suits
Then, just beyond our bubble, there was the normie Media World—by “Media World” people I mean the Ivy League-educated world who fundamentally believed in the centrality of The New York Times and Washington Post and perhaps The Paris Review, the hierarchy of respectability.
Many of them were starting to think that Vice was "cool" within the wider ecosystem of media, because it was slightly more offbeat and rebellious than what they were accustomed to.
I also found these people to be strange and dissonant. I distinctly felt like: I ended up here by accident. I’m not meant to be here. But I’m meant to be here. I’m a misfit toy. It was not the place I had sought out or longed for. But there were many others who had SOUGHT this out, for whom this was their greatest dream and their happiest reality.
I felt: here is a place with money. With a transforming identity. Here is a place that is trying to straddle two different worlds, the world of respectable media and the world of disreputable media. So they are open for experimentation. They are open to doing respectable media subjects from a slightly more experimental and exciting lens and in this we can create something cool, in this borderlands, if people of talent step in, there is a chance and an opening to build something new.
Vice’s hierarchical relationship with its satellites was purely colonial: the nerve center in Brooklyn was at the top, obviously, followed by the UK and LA as the second-tier operators, then Mexico, then there was a vast array of other satellites in places like Romania or Bulgaria or Serbia and the South American countries, but it seemed like many of these were skeleton-crew two to four person operations and fed story ideas up the food-chain, but were in a position of colonial dependency: I visited a few of these offices and some really gave the impression of “local hipsters and DJs clubhouse” rather than proper news-gathering organizations, which was cool, but strange.
V.
Being a somewhat lowly print guy and this being the era of Shane Smith rising, I never met him, but I do remember I had a very vivid dream about him. I found myself in some kind of Canadian punk house, it was the late 90s. It was a typical punk house or subcultural place of that time and Shane Smith was there, the kind of loud, burly, bearded guy you might meet in those times and places, surrounded by make-out sessions, bicycle messengers, punks and art-school dropouts.
We talked for a long time in the neon kitchen and he was telling me about his grand schemes to turn his little black-and-white Canadian fanzine into something bigger, something real, and it was interesting and he was charismatic, and I was nodding and listening and interjecting here and there and drinking my drink quickly as you do in these kinds of situations.
VI.
When you work at a place that pays decently for long-form journalism (and isn’t shield-walled like The New Yorker) you get a lot of pitches and proposals.
At the same time as you are getting pitches from writers “lower” than Vice in the unspoken media hierarchy, you are also trying to secure content from writers that are “too big” and out of your league to write for your publication.
Most of the people that pitched me were early career journalists and photographers—aside from a few grizzled war correspondents, most of them are normal, professional people. They kept at it, they hoped to catch a break in a notoriously difficult and unprofitable industry, what they lacked in talent they made up for in hard work and stick-to-it-iveness.
Many of them badly wanted to write for Vice since a) they could get paid to go somewhere and report and b) they genuinely thought it was cool and a “rebel” “non-conformist” place.
They pitched me over and over, even when I didn’t respond—and you know what? sometimes the ideas and writing were mediocre and shallow, but sometimes it would be interesting and good, and working with them was always a pleasure because they didn’t mind being edited and they were professional.
So this was the first group that you found yourself working with—I would call them normal journalists and writers and photographers.
But by and large, I wasn’t so interested in this group. I wanted special little rare flowers.
I was interested in getting some of the many talented people I knew in the DIY political and artistic underground to produce work for me.
I would not censor them—they could basically produce whatever they want, and they’d get paid fairly well to just be themselves and do what they already did.
Getting paid for your weird art that you’ve been practically giving away for years, I thought might instill a sense of confidence and self-belief in some—it would not be some kind of either/or thing.
For many, it did just this.
When I was younger, I worked at an all-night doughnut shop. Late at night, I would invite touring punk bands to come by and take old doughnuts and coffee. This felt the same. Open the side door and pass out doughnuts and coffee.
But what really surprised me was the two-facedness—how sometimes, the committed anarchists and underground people reached out (some secretly, some with dignity) requesting to write for Vice.
Some did not understand that they did not just shit golden words straight from God’s mouth, that they would have to be edited (Understandable when you’ve been doing-it-yourself for so long, but completely different from the casual throwaway-ness with words that many career journalists have). Some experienced a serious existential dilemma about “working with” (“platforming” in the modern parlance) big Bad Vice, and made their choice one way or another.
I can think of a few old punk people who were constantly pitching, and had me even pro-bono editing their pitches and stories, begging for an in, but then went out and were like "woe is me, I've written for Vice, fuck Vice! How embarrassing!"
But also, some of the absolute best people I edited and worked with came from the underground world. Some were extremely fastidious and professional with what they produced and wrote, it was all perfectly copy-edited and better than that of your average, normal journalist (which meant less work for me).
It seemed overall like win-win.
VII.
What was really annoying about working at Vice at the time was that literally everyone had an opinion. And oh, they wanted to talk to you about it.
The opinions were wildly polarized—in a single day, you would hear, “That’s so cool, that’s my dream job, I think Vice is so cool,” and then somebody else critiquing some video or record review you had absolutely nothing to do with, giving you an in-person hot-take. I remember sighing for the dozenth time as I had to sit through hearing someone whose opinion I didn’t respect go on about the intricacies of their views—on the place where I worked, that paid my rent and bills. Fascinating.
These people genuinely seemed to think that A Media Company was the kind of place where people sat around in a circle going through the finer points of ideology and quality on every piece of content, until together they reached a consensus and everyone walked away saying, “I feel really good—this represents us, this represents me.”
I also remember all the condescending looks and chuckles and “Vice, really? Vice sucks, dude” and the existential dilemmas it plunged those who were deepest underground into—they were setting their entire identity against a corporation, they were basically re-doing the “sell out” debates of the 1990s with Vice standing in as the new “signing a major label.”
Of course, for many, the whole point of being underground was signaling their deep and total rejection of the empty, ironic commodification that Vice was founded on—which was a reasonable critique.
The basalt structure of edgy hipster irony and nastiness from the Gavin McInnes-era was an indisputable fact.
Something I have noticed over the years is that the closer something or someone is to their cultural-political pole position, the more exorcised and enraged they get about it. This is probably because people feel a thing or person that is close to their position, should be closer. Or that impinges on ancestral territory they feel marked as theirs. Early Vice clearly understood punk and made fun of punk without believing, which infuriated the punks.
No one really criticizes or lashes out at what is strange and distant and repugnant. You criticize what is close and familiar, but imperfect in some way that is insulting. The closeness makes the criticism meaningful, possible: the other might actually be influenced, destroyed, or overtaken. The distant polar-opposite thing will either not care, or will move to crush you like a bug.
There was a weird convergence in the people making the harsh Vice critiques—while many were lumpen subculturals, some were literary elites, truly thinking the New York Review of Books was the golden god and prestige media was the only thing of value, feeling that Vice was too trashy and transitory.
I remember riding home after a party in a cab with one of the luminary founders of n + 1 magazine. They were going to have someone write some big takedown of Vice.
Addled as I was, I tried to explain to this guy what “we” were trying to do, some kind of Long March through the institutions, bringing vanguard ideas and culture to the people who would never in their lives have a London Review of Books tote bag.
I also remember feeling kind of angry—you Harvard and Yalie people really want to take down a weirdo place that is one of a few not entirely subsidized by some Manhattan daddy or great-grandaddy’s filthy Robber Baron money?
It was takedown season for Vice. Critical articles pegged to the company's rise appearing in all the left-wing and mid-tier think-piece publications. These takedowns were irritating to read because they were so simplified and dull and view-from-the-outside they could have been written by AI—the old points about the McIness-era slurs and the unique evilness of this soul-less commodification engine.
Some of us were struggling against the "Look at these 100 Juggalo Asses” and "I’m Gay But I Still Loved Fucking This Pussy Robot" trashy clickbait stuff, it was empty, but it got hits. This stuff ALMOST felt like the old rebel-cynic-edgy Vice, but it was just a second or third-generation knock-off—made by young people who were emulating and aping the past. And they well knew they could not be punished for aping the past—it was what they had learned and been reared on—but none of it was interesting or valuable or memorable.
There was a divide between the true old guard who felt a sense of ownership of the whole enterprise and had been there forever and came out of ye olde Brooklyn times, and their offspring—the second and third generation children they had hired to make content for them.
It also felt like everyone was dealing with contradictory mandates from management.
One unspoken mandate was “pump the numbers."
The other mandate was “do more serious work and improve our journalistic reputation so we can be a Real Journalistic Organization and get the approval of Real Media Institutions like New York Times.”
I felt that we were making something new and exciting. I felt deeply grateful and in total awe to have a decently paying job with almost total ideological and content-wise freedom, where I could actually pay writers and artists quite well (a rare thing in journalism!).
We were putting out amazing, interesting long-form, award-winning fiction from unknowns, I edited an entire issue on the Syria conflict in 2012, we were assigning real reported narrative long-form content. Everything was by the seat of the pants and very open and very chaotic and messy.
I’m not sure why, but n + 1 never did their big takedown of Vice. (I have my suspicions, that have nothing to do with a conversation in a taxi cab, but who really knows?)
For all the shit people liked (and like) to talk, it was by far the most diverse media newsroom I ever worked in, I mean diverse in the true sense of diverse races, diverse class backgrounds, diverse sexualities, diverse ideological positions (there were kind of right-wingers and libertarians), and then of course diverse mandates and interests (people that wanted to go to DJ parties, people who wanted to build a political and “literary magazine”). Most of the employees and writers were weirdos, losers, misfits, without proper pedigree or proper class background—and yes, tons of lesbians, queers, POC people, dropout academics, former drug addicts, etc., etc., etc.
It was also filling up with a new guard, pretty much everyone hired after the re-brand, who were the kind of people who should have been at a fancy place like The New Yorker or Conde Nast or at Pitchfork, but for whatever reason hadn’t gotten a gig there.
VIII.
In the show Succession, there’s a great episode about a startup new media company Vaulter. Some people have written that Vaulter is Gawker, but I think Vaulter is clearly a stand-in for Vice. Vaulter makes badass content, killer CMS, analytics, TV shows about smoking weed and doing edibles in a warzone, clickables for the youthful demographic, everyone that works there has a beanie and flannel and septum ring.
Kendall Roy wants badly to acquire Vaulter for the RoyCo portfolio in order to have an arm in the changing media landscape, but he repeatedly offends and turns off the start-up's founder.
But Kendall wants it and needs it and will pay anything for it. And he gets it. Only later does the family realize they’ve been duped by hype and the pitch deck, they paid out the nose for a steaming pile of shit—with Vaulter, there’s actually no there there.
The numbers have been juiced.
And even worse, the employees want to unionize. Logan Roy tells his son, “go there and gut Vaulter," and Kendall goes there and guts Vaulter, and the unionizing employees spit in his face as he does exactly what daddy tells him to do.
IX.
There are only two or three paths for start-up new media endeavors that arose and fell in the last ten years—get gobbled up by a new majority stakeholder like Waystar RoyCo, which will proceed to gut the organization, slash expenses, slash the print publication, keep the profitable verticals up and running.
The other, the path taken by Vox, n + 1 and to an extent Vice in the last five years is to have the Gen-X founder-men step down and then let the Pupils take over the school and woke-ify it with their 25-35 year old graduate-school imprimatur. (The ones that feel they’re too deep for your basic run-of-the-mill liberal wokeness conceal the wokeness within a more sophisticated framework of “intersectional-socialism” but it’s just a grad-school version of the same thing.)
The third is to find a rich guy or a rich liberal/cultural family to inject money to keep it going in the old-world model, such as has been done with The New Republic and The Baffler, this usually lasts until the rich guy or rich liberal/cultural family gets bored or they or someone in their family actually looks at the P&L or at all cares or interrogates what is going on financially; what is going on in the realm of financial viability is almost always ridiculous and or horrible. And then they see how unbelievably wasteful their staffers are; and then their staffers unionize against them; or some combination of all of the above.
These are the three paths and they can be blended at any particular place—Buzzfeed, it seemed, was doing a fireworks show of these three paths, getting gutted by the hedge funds, at the same time as it was severely Wokeifying, at the same time as it was attempting to do “real news/long-form” not clickbait, at the same time it was doing an IPO, at the same time as it was dying and all going down in flames.
X.
We’ve talked above about the paths of companies, organizations, IPOs, bureaucracies, verticals. Now to the individual.
There are two paths for the still-employable lifer DIY person, as they get older and longer in the tooth in this world.
The first is to go deeper underground—to sublimate the ego by pursuing the friendship and accolades of a select faction of peers who one perceives has value—the chosen few. Work the lowest jobs. Stay near the bottom. Together, they band together and reject the world, ambition, money, and those that reject the hardest and firmest get the biggest prizes of social status.
When it is conscious (as it is with these world-rejecters) this is the nature of all splinters, zealotry, all sectarianism.
The second is to poke one’s head up from the gopher holes, and see if one can enter the world as it is.
This of course, can come with feelings of shame that need to be rationalized away or tiptoed into—the same type of shame I imagine the Amish feel when they leave the beloved community and go live as sinners in New York City.
One no longer feels special, one of the elect.
Like Tommy Lee Jones’s broken man in No Country for Old Men:
“OK, I’ll be a part of this world.”
XI.
As with any job and most everything else that has been important in my life, my initial burst of effort was committed and determined, but my follow-through was poor. I threw myself into the job for the first year or so, doing the best job I could do. But when I would come home to my empty apartment at nine or ten-o’clock sober, or half-buzzed at eleven or twelve, it was as if a fog, a fog of spiritual emptiness engulfed me. No amount of hot yoga, or schemas, or hangouts with friends, or walking the two miles back and forth could sate this empty feeling.
This was not Vice’s fault, it was my constitutional depression—all around me, my peers were satisfied with their work, imbued with the cult-like excitement of being in on the ground floor with a rising media company—we could literally do anything, write about things we wanted to write about, undertake massive projects that other publications were too afraid or too clamped up with bureaucracy or status-anxiety to get into.
I began to go home more and more to North Carolina on holidays and long weekends—there, in my childhood bedroom, with my mother and brother, I would experience a kind of spiritual renewal—as if the spirit was coming up from the roots of the house itself. I would spend the days and nights wandering around in the woods, on the empty backstreets and greenways, down in the creek beds, traipsing down the same railroad tracks my friends and I had traipsed down ten years before. The weather always seemed to be better, more nourishing than the weather in New York City, as if when the weather passed through forests and over creeks rather than concrete sidewalks and tall buildings filled with striving people, it picked up a kind of heartening spirit. The friends were all gone, moved away, and so had I, but I still came back to these empty places, as if hoping to still find my old loved ones there… as if I was hoping to find us all there, our group that split up and went our separate ways.
The old psychological distortion and dichotomy began to re-emerge: “Vice, evil, zines and money-losing punky ventures, righteous” right alongside a newer distortion which was: “New York is Babylon, North Carolina is free and pure.” These were Catholic distortions. Instead of seeing the shades of gray, I did not stop and check my magical thinking, I let it take over and began to believe it to be true—all the fast conversations and fast living disgusted me, all the people walking around Williamsburg wheeling and dealing bullshit on their cell phones, then the long walk home out from the Weimar decadence through the stark, quiet Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.
On the one hand, I could see that the people at Vice and the people on Bedford Avenue and the Media World people were just people trying to follow their dreams and be happy and get by and live uprightly and survive. But on the other... I don’t know, felt bad man. I had no faith in the life I was leading.
Then I started dating a girl who I had had a crush on when I was 18, and started going to visit her in Minneapolis on weekends, and she became my life. Being a punk from the early 2000s, she had a very low and dismissive opinion of Vice as a not-cool place, and I took her opinions seriously because she had come out of the same world I had come out of, and it was a grounding reminder that what I was doing was nothing special, so it was also kind of hard to feel that I was doing something worthwhile. She thought Vice was stupid (and that I was stupid), and I told her Vice was stupid, so we believed Vice was stupid.
Even though everyone told me it was a bad idea with their furrowed brows and polite, subtle forced positivity, even though I knew it was insane, the concept of just leaving took root and wormed its way into my brain. Leaving New York, leaving media world, leaving my friends, leaving it all behind. Quitting it all. It felt so good, just to think about.
Instead of doing the reasonable thing—which would have been to double down on the career I had built and my friends and the life I was living in Brooklyn—I doubled-down on my girlfriend and ran off with her to China, and we broke up a short time after.
XII.
Now Vice is at its end and is a dying husk and the vultures are circling above its carcass as it huffs and puffs its last breath, and the cohort that it came up with—Gawker, Fusion, Buzzfeed, Al Jazeera—lie in shallow graves, sued into oblivion or shuttered or cut up and sold for parts.
Now it’s being bought by Soros, who I’m sure knows it can be retrofitted as a tool and an instrument in the lefty Popular Front (Just like I thought for years! But on a bigger scale. Hi George! I’ve been going to anti-globalization protests since I was 16 and my aunt asked me why I did it, if I’ve been being paid by you for the last 20 years.)
On the face of it, the full character arc of Vice is pretty crazy—Gavin McIness, a Canadian, not even a native-born-American, went from Mr. Williamsburg-hipster-magazine to leaving before its meteoric rise, to starting this paramilitary Y.M.C.A. that constantly had (has? I don’t know, I don’t follow the news really anymore) roving street battles with antifa. And now, at this very moment, the Proud Boys are staring down lengthy prison sentences, under Civil War-era sedition laws. (Should I hate them and despise them because they're just the wrong kind of guys using bullshit cosplay homemade shields? After we used bullshit cosplay homemade shields for two decades?—just from the other side of things?—even though we were never cracked down on or prosecuted by the federal government in this way, ever?)
I don’t think this story is over. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and action and reaction to that and reaction to that action and reaction and down and down and down….cliff after cliff after cliff.
What is so weird is that Vice—which literally began as an ironic? genuine? slurs-filled ex-punk MAD Magazine—has in the four or five years basically become a fortress of the wokeness, a never-ending font of either empty content or basically radical-chic Teen Vogue-style political-blogger propaganda disguised as news (I imagine in trying to pave over or make up for the past).
You see this sometimes in individuals (not so often really, but occasionally)—where the extremely racist person becomes the loudest and most woke person—but honestly it’s not so common.
Then in the last two or so years they realized that go-woke-is-go-broke and started course-correcting back to a kind of centrism, but it’s already too late. No one cares. No one believes anything anymore.
Oh, look—the extremely-online bloggers who call themselves "journalists" but don’t actually talk to anyone or leave the apartment and just diddle themselves all day on Twitter (or Mastodon now) have discovered some new Far-Right-Nationalist thing online to expose! Now they’ve written an article. And it’s just a half-assed, Tik-Tok-ized don’t-leave-the-house version of Mother Jones or The Intercept reporting.
The original content slowly stopped being original and started becoming a simulacra of a simulacra of itself. Then the people upstairs completely abandoned ship and stopped caring, and into this void stepped the perpetual refugees of other failing and shuttered shitty little blog sites. Completely lacking any talent or editorial sensibility, they finished out what was heading toward an inexorable end. All the others had already jumped ship or been fired or laid off or stopped caring or moved on to more stable places of employment.