Welcome back!
And thank you for the many outpourings of hate over E02.
I have to say, though, that’s not how you spell ‘rayped to deth by a sifilitic wolferine’. And to the person who wrote in to suggest I ‘get a life’, well, the joke’s on you - life is what happens while you’re making other plans, buddy. Look it up some time.
Special congratulations must go to Leon who got all of the Wicked Whispers bang-on. That’s right: all three of the ITV presenters were Ruth Langsford.
BACK TO THE OTHER LAND
A man in America who used to be a feature writer for VICE has decided to set up ‘something that’s like old school VICE’.
His name is Zachary Schwartz - and if you hear a more American name than that this week, please write in and I will give you Five Pounds.
Zachary’s site is called countere. And yes - it’s pretty much a straight steal, even down to the lurid pinks and greens of Sam Taylor-era illustration.
It’s a cool idea, and one I’ve often mulled over myself, because it speaks to something that should be obvious to any aspiring new media mogul - here is a Missing Market.
Surely there is a natural Yin to every Andrew Yang? Surely the goal is wide open for a media product that reflects this?
You’d think so, but I’ve yet to notice much real world evidence. As much as I like his idea, from my ageing perch I can only notice that The Youth seem to actively want to be infantilised. In fact it often seems as though they actively want to crawl not just back up into the womb, but they feel that coming out of the fallopian tubes was probably a mistake in the first place.
Schwartz’s question is still a good one, though, even if the obvious response is still the same tautology: “Well if it were doable, it would already have been done.”
Why isn’t VICE doing VICE? is another version of the same question. The way Schwartz tells it, VICE ‘basically just hit a critical mass of Millennials, and had to change its outlook accordingly’.
I was never directly privy to the big boy business, so I only got the Chinese whispers version. But from what I understood, it was a bit more strategic than that - roundabout 2013, Rupert Murdoch came a’calling with his chequebook, and eventually snuffled down two hundred million Dollars worth of the company (a shareholding he’s since had to radically write-down. As has Disney.)
By my recollection, it was a bit different - VICE had been through a second fit of explosive growth, and had now hit a roadblock, a natural ceiling, on its market share. But its market share was still overwhelmingly male. So that meant there was still one route to growth - or at least, the level of explosive growth that Rupe and others had wagered on. That was to fold the other half of the population into the mix.
There was a deliberate attempt to hire more women - and then, to reach out to what might be considered ‘women politics’. This instantly nixed the boners and street carnage angle. What could replace it? Ah, but solving that question brings life’s intersectional hall monitors, In their long coats. Running over the fields.
Not sure whether this is, strictly, ‘what women want’ - but I will happily leave it to my woman reader to email me with her thoughts (hi Freya).
In practice, what it meant, as Mr Schwartz points out, that it was now impossible to write anything about a men’s stuff, let alone men’s movements, without air quotes, guarded by a sentry of scare quotes.
When he pitched them something on NoFap, he says, it was clear the only way he’d be allowed to write it was if he angled it in such a way that NoFap was linked down all the way to the InCel layer of hell, and then, below it, to the PUA layer of hell, and then the Gamergates, and the Classical Liberals, and the Alt Right beneath that, toasting their marshmallows with Beelzebub as they bolted their barbed pizzles inside their razor-tipped chastity cages.
Sounds about right. No?
MOLD AGAINST THE SOUL
Curtis Yarvin, also ‘known as’ Mencius Moldbug, is back writing, after a long absence.
I have neither the space nor the grey cells to unpack his entire political philosophy here. But I will say this - he knows a suspiciously large amount about Ernst Junger.
One bit of his new Substack-published, serialised book ( The Gray Mirror Of The Nihilist Prince) jumped out at me. It was his starting axiom: that we’re all hopelessly over-politicised now - that every aspect of our everyday is now magnetised to the twin poles of The Politics Machine.
Turns out great minds think alike with mediocre ones, because I had recently tried to pitch something like this to a national broadcaster: The Problem Of Politics.
The gist goes like this:
Once, the key problem of youth politics was apathy. It was the fact that Tony Blair and his happy hackysack of gumbos was about as relevant to anyone’s lives as Dukes Of Hazzard.
In fact, the ‘apathy crisis’ got so bad that in the wake of the 2002 local elections - which had the lowest turnout in 70 years - that the BBC invented a raft of new, more informal, political shows trying to turn Da Yoot on to the sensual joys of Gordon Brownonomics - aka ‘putting a penny on income tax then taking it off again’.
Flash forward a decade: Facebook. Suddenly every salad-brained normie is constantly intersecting with the politics of Oh Dearism - Joseph Kony Bad. Something must be done. Soon enough, that then turns into Something Must Be Done… About Everything.
Effectively, democracy has now got it backwards. We’ve abolished the usual direction of the principle-agent relationship, and rather than delegate the legwork to our elected, we are now apparently expected to have opinions on things that we could never truly understand - be it wars of acquisition in Central Africa or House of Lords reform.
The tyranny of having to have an opinion has become its own kind of digital makework. Why are we still so time poor? Because in 2020 seriously evaluating the defenestration of David Starkey is something we are required by The Hive to inform ourselves of, to analyse, to care about. No human beyond the most tedious can afford to do that (hello!). It’s not a sensible or a sane demand.
But, tough shit. Where once your thoughts were yours, private, the culture now reaches out and licks you with its tongues of the Holy Spirit. It’s inescapable, without the kind of willpower, the kind of self-awareness, the independence of mind, that few have thought to cultivate - not least because our species’ basic Girardian Mimetic Rivalry means that we’re transfixed by things that involve us bashing our way into the dominance hierarchy.
I have no idea what to do about any of this, and I’m not sure I care.
TV COME HOME?
TV
TREVOR NELSON’S BIGOT BASH GONDOLA GLIDE
4:15PM, Tuesday, ITV3. Trevor Nelson takes unsuspecting members of the public out on a gondola, without telling them that they have been convicted of white supremacy by a secret jury of their peers. Each week, he has to manage to glide the gondola under a particularly low bridge, thereby bashing the boorish bigot’s bonce. This week: Ms Tina Devereux, 38, of New Addington.
PODCASTS
THE SUPER STAN
Cressida Knight-Williams and bessie Iona Fellowes went to the same modest independent school in South London. Now, they’re taking on the podcast world as they struggle to rise up the ladder in the publishing/fashion/fitness/influencer/PR industry in the big city.
This week Cressie talks about how stressful she has found it locked down in dad’s pied á terre with boyfriend Charlie. They discuss how Charlie can only climax with BBC Parliament playing in the background, and run through coping strategies for couples who find themselves locked down together except the bloke is an absolute bell.
Eventually, they bring on friend of the pod, personal hygiene vlogger and culture prefect Tamsin Wakada, who talks about her latest book, WHY I’M NO LONGER TALKING TO MEN ABOUT NIPPLES and her newly-launched self-care brand of oven gloves, FAYA!
In the TV Nook, the trio discuss the latest episode of Trevor Nelson’s Bigot Bash Gondola Glide, and BBC Sounds’ New Podcast: The Eternal Karen.