Vice surrenders - Cory Doctorow

[justaprogressive]

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 other the 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.

[link:https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck|

[hatrack]

1. I, for one, welcome our new Enshittification Overlords!

.

[Voltaire2]

2. Between the Great Enshittification and the Polycrisis

it is getting difficult to sort out who our overlords are.

[hatrack]

3. Don't forget the Immortal Singularity Fortress Denizens!!

[orthoclad]

7. Was this the book where

a set of un-named plutocrats hired the author to advise them on how to control their bunker security forces?

[hatrack]

8. Bingo . . . It was supposed to be a freewheeling look at global trends and changes . . .

And quickly devolved into a discussion of how to keep one's security forces in line. And it was all at an undisclosed location, a long limousine ride from an anonymous airstrip.

[orthoclad]

9. That seminar was a clear declaration

of intent - the oligarchy planning ahead on how to survive the mess they've made. They realize what's coming of their actions.

[redqueen]

4. The really rich ones nt

[orthoclad]

6. The "polycrisis" has a "monocause"

from the Congressional Budget Office.

The pursuit of this concentrated wealth is at the root of all of our problems. Here's our overlords. Operating in plain sight.

[Basic LA]

5. Thanks for this explanation.

I wondered who the hell Vice is/was since the story broke.