Astral Codex Ten

Gawker

7 min read

Gawker

Article

Gawker is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 10, 2021 and September 13, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Gawker honcho Sam Biddle tweeted”; “were those people morally obligated to continue giving Gawker money anyway?”; “I think this vastly undervalues the demise of Gawker”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, 4chan, atheism.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: May 10, 2021
  • Last seen: September 13, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
This intensified because a lot of feminists seemed to focus on nerdy guys or nerdy activities in particular. The venue where these unwanted sexual approaches happened was always a comic convention or something; the webcomics drawn about this (of course there were webcomics) always featured the stereotypical nerd with a neckbeard and fedora. A lot of times the subtext just kind of became the text, like when Gawker honcho Sam Biddle tweeted that "nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission #BringBackBullying" (he obviously claimed this was a joke, but it was the kind of joke everyone was making constantly without the victims finding it very funny.) This got really awful, with a lot of male nerds saying the feminists were being unnecessarily cruel to an already-pretty-traumatized population, and a lot of feminist thinkpieces talking about how nerds were not really oppressed and that by claiming to be oppressed they were appropriating oppression from women, a genuinely marginalized group.
Theses On The Current Moment
May 12, 2021 · Original source
Still, it might be worth having coherent principles, at least in order to assuage our own consciences. Are we actually committing to never exerting social pressure on anybody in any way? Like, what about boycott campaigns? It seems intuitively obvious that if Coca-Cola is using child slaves to pick cocoa beans or something, boycotting them until they stop is a perfectly acceptable and even commendable thing to do. And if it's okay to boycott them yourself, surely it's also okay to use social media as a platform to ask other people to join your boycott. But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"? Is it just because child slavery is actually bad but the occasional offensive tweet isn't? A lot of people I know got really angry at Gawker when their CEO said that that bullying nerds was good and people should keep doing it until the nerds shut up and removed themselves from the discourse - were those people morally obligated to continue giving Gawker money anyway? Was that offensive tweet actually bad, but the one where somebody uses the n-word or something not so bad? Good thing everyone agrees on objective standards for badness!
Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
May 18, 2021 · Original source
I think this vastly undervalues the demise of Gawker after being taken out by Peter Thiel in 2016. Gawker was not just one site, but many sites cross referencing each other in a hipster cacophony of pseudo-anti-capitalist ilk that only Ivy league educations can provide. The main beneficiary for all of the years leading up to 2016 was Jezebel, the feminist(ish) newsblog, that is one of the few remaining veterans of the Nic Denton side of the war. They were amplified by all the other Gawker sites fighting the man (I guess) and mentioning each other's stories, all in the heart of the NYC in a news world that was still reeling from the fact that online blogs were actually competing and putting out new content (gasp) hourly, not just daily. They clearly didn't care about fact checking that much, and had no qualms about being two-faced; so scruples were right out the window. And for all of the preceding years this article mentions, not coincidentally around the same time as Gawker's supremacy, gender as a topic, indeed, did rule the roost.
But Gawker was soundly defeated in March of 2016, and the writing was on the wall months and months before that. So the entire organization was already crumbling with the reporting jumping ship long before the final verdict of 100 kagillion in damages (might as well have been) actually came down. Jezebel was in disarray; defanged, declawed, and completely neutered. There was much less cross-referencing, much less money to go after even basic stories, a new implementation of selling face creams or some other product after every 2 articles for some reason, and less competent reporters to do write ups.
But more than all of that, the defeat of Gawker was the end of a kind of boldness. Denton had a massive fund to pay the legal bills and the first amendment to help him out. His basic strategy was to run up your legal bills while running out the clock. It's no wonder it took another billionaire to defeat him. The giant, slain, nobody is willing to go out on a limb like that anymore, not that that's a bad thing. It's much like being amazed at the crazy stuff your alcoholic friend gets up to and what a life of the party he is until he inevitably dies in the car crash.
Book Review: Elon Musk
September 13, 2023 · Original source
This book taught me that everyone always predicts Elon will fail at whatever he does. When he started the original X (later PayPal), everyone who knew anything about finance told him he would fail. Just because he was a hotshot coder who could write software didn’t mean he could navigate the totally-different and heavily-regulated world of finance. Elon, who started out indeed knowing nothing about finance, learned on the job and got a $200 million exit. Gawker voted Tesla #1 in their Biggest Tech Flops of 2007 (also on their list were Facebook ads and the Android . . . maybe journalists don’t actually understand tech?)
This book taught me that everyone always predicts Elon will fail at whatever he does. When he started the original X (later PayPal), everyone who knew anything about finance told him he would fail. Just because he was a hotshot coder who could write software didn’t mean he could navigate the totally-different and heavily-regulated world of finance. Elon, who started out indeed knowing nothing about finance, learned on the job and got a $200 million exit. Gawker voted Tesla #1 in their Biggest Tech Flops of 2007 (also on their list were Facebook ads and the Android . . . maybe journalists don’t actually understand tech?) Even after the Roadster, people said it was impossible Tesla could produce the Model S. Even after Falcon 1, people said it was impossible they could get reusable rockets. This is one of those cases where people comically refuse to update, again and again.