<
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck>
'
Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as
it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own
supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye.
For those of you who don't know,
Vice was a Canadian media success story. It
was founded by a motley clique of hipsters, one of whom – founder of the Proud
Boys – has since grown to be one of the world's great fascism influencers.
Another perfected the art of getting young people to work "for exposure" even
as he built a massive, highly lucrative media empire on their free labor:
https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/vice-oral-history/
Eventually,
Vice transitioned to a string of progressively worsening
corporate owners, each more dishonest, predatory – and gullible – than the
last. The company was one of the most enthusiastic marks for Facebook's
infamous "pivot to video" – in which Mark Zuckerberg destroyed half the media
industry by tricking them into thinking that the public was clamoring for video
content, based on fraudulent viewing numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video
Vice went all-in on video, spending hundreds of millions to finance
Zuckerberg's doomed attempt to conquer Youtube. But unlike [the other] rubes
who got zucked,
Vice found greater fools to scam, convincing giant,
slow-moving media companies that the best way to get in on the Next Big Thing
was to shower them with vast sums of string-free money:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viceland_(Canadian_TV_channel)
And yet, at every turn, through a succession of increasingly incompetent owners
who bought the stumbling, declining
Vice at fire-sale prices and then
proceeded to hack away at the wages and tools its journalists depended on while
paying executives salaries so high that they beggared the imagination,
Vice's
reporters continued to turn out stellar material.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
