RIP Gawker.com, a website I liked

I first discovered Gawker in 2005. I was a lonely, isolated teenager who spent too much time online, back when such behavior was not quite an accepted norm. I don’t remember exactly how I found the site. Most likely I followed a link to Wonkette from dailykos or some other old-guard liberal politics blog and from there found my way to its then sister site — this was pre-web 2.0, remember, before social media feeds became content clearing houses and the internet was more loosely agglomerated. Gawker itself in those days, under Jessica Coen’s stewardship, was still largely dedicated to posting insidery New York City minutia and was filled with items about book launch parties and gossip about media industry types. The world it reported on could not have been farther from my own existence in the exurban sprawl of southeast Michigan. Reading chatter about Conde Nast office politics and blind items about obscure socialites surely should have held no interest for me, yet I rapturously devoured all of it. I remember being particularly absorbed by an ongoing series of posts chronicling a summer softball league populated by the editorial staffs of magazines like Harper’s and The New Yorker. It was a type of escapism, a window onto a strange and magical universe as distant from my own as Middle Earth or Hogwarts.

But it wasn’t just what Gawker talked about that drew me in, it was also how Coen wrote about these things, the glib and gleeful snarkiness that was, and remained, the site’s calling card. Deeply cynical and too smart by half, the writing spoke to me in ways no other writing had. It was the expression of sentiments at once foreign and familiar. I was still in the nascent stages of intellectual development, and still trying to figure out how best to respond to a world that seemed increasingly to be losing its mind, and Gawker Way felt just about right. The country had just re-elected a bumbling frat boy war criminal and there was a sense in the air that things had just gone profoundly wrong. This was also around the time in which writers like the late David Foster Wallace were crowing about the “end of irony” and calling for a New Sincerity. Gawker, on the other hand, said to hell with that and doubled down on cynicism. It mocked our stupid, vulgar culture by reveling in stupidity and vulgarity. It was exhilarating. It made me want to move to New York and become a writer and write like that.

I never did, of course. While I’d originally hoped to study journalism at college and pursue a career as what they now call a “longform” writer, a general aversion to the legwork of reporting, borne out of bouts of social anxiety that made the prospect of interviewing strangers utterly terrifying, drove me to pursue a more traditional English degree. Then it was on to grad school, where I adapted to the rules and regulations of academic writing. Such writing, even at its very best, obeys the laws of decorous abstraction, and even the most unrestrained thinkers studiously avoid crudity in their prose. Don’t get me wrong, I do love to read the sort of rigorous, complex, detailed arguments typically found in academic writing, and producing such work carries with it a thrill of its own. But there are still times where I crave the stylistic purity of common expression, the moral clarity of a simple “fuck you,” and the joy of sheer frivolity.

But even after I’d abandoned my bright-eyed hopes of becoming a hip New York media type, I still read and admired Gawker, even looked to it, lamely, as a sort of north star. It was a place that seemed to let its writers do whatever they wanted, or at least come close. It even let them unionize! What a dream. And now its dead, having fallen victim to a culture that allows the rich and powerful to colonize the language of the oppressed in order to silence critics.

Since I found Gawker (or it found me) in 2005, the world has mostly just gotten uglier, as capitalism continues to painfully transition into its late, apocalyptic phase. Sea levels are rising, billionaires are robbing us blind, Walmarts are becoming lawless warzones, a bought-and-paid-for corporate warmonger is running for President, and she’s the GOOD candidate. We are living in the opening paragraph of a William Gibson novel. If there was ever a time that we needed a publication fearless enough to publish 500 Days of Kristin, it’s now. Instead, there is only darkness.