Write to Consume
A rambling pondering reflecting recent news
Google laid off 12,000 people yesterday, Vox cut 7% of its 1900 person workforce. Thursday, it was GameSpot and Giant Bomb, months after their acquisitions by Fandom. Earlier this week it was 10,000 people at Microsoft, which buried the story of layoffs at Riot Games. Amazon has cut over 18,000 jobs in the first three weeks of the new year. In the fall, there were layoffs at Vice media and IGN and. There are always more layoffs, in a country with few worker protections, and where health care is tied almost ubiquitously to employment - both through the obvious requirement of wages being converted to cover costs, and medical insurance conveyed through employment benefit packages.
The Federal Reserve is trying to curb inflation by slowing wage growth. Inflation is driven by corporate greed, corporate profits in turn driving up the cost of living. So layoffs feel like an effort to discipline labor by the private sector. The U.S. Congress may shut down the government by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. This posturing as opposition to the president (who designs the budget) is in fact the Congress refusing to spend the money they voted on apportioning. (For whatever it’s worth, I think we’d all be in considerably better shape if we cut back the enormous military budget.) One solution proposed for this issue has been the minting of a one trillion-dollar platinum chip. If you don’t understand how this would help, don’t worry, neither do I.
I mention the looming financial crisis because of its direct effects on the media ecosystem because, especially as regards news and criticism in popular culture, it’s important to me. I read an article from the Max Read tech news newsletter about how gaining a following is about consistent and coherent production. It inspired me to write more. That’s why I started this thing; that’s what all the other writers are doing, writing more; some of them have built up a base where it will help them financially. For me, I mostly intend to publish things I can’t get placed elsewhere, and to ramble like I’m doing here.
That article, somewhat tongue-in-cheek in tone, was reflecting largely on a recent Washington Post profile of Matt Yglesias. The Post piece was one of those stories which tries to paint itself as giving a balanced description of its subject but wherein all the links to highlight criticisms of the subject went to refutations of the critiques, creating the effect of a breathlessly fawning profile wrapped in the even-handed language of progressive centrism. And I read a story in the New Yorker, a book review of a recent history/typology of the professionalization of criticism through academia. The critic is a self-professed colleague of the author and did more to summarize the book’s arguments than assess or dispute them.
There are countless examples of the naval-gazing nature of prestige media, sometimes explicitly in service of capital’s interests and the wants and urges of the ruling class. And there are masses of talented writers whose avenues of opportunity are shrinking and evaporating, including at those major publications. WaPo has cut sections. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writers are still striking.
Media around games, tech, and sometimes sports tend to be what I see first because online publications focused on audiovisual entertainment are much of my media focus – their writers and editors are many of who I follow on Twitter. And the merciless culling happens more there than elsewhere it seems, more frequently and urgently, because people with no interest in games, much less criticism about it, rather simply interested in an asset to acquire and liquidate, is who owns much of games media. And, in fact, that’s who owns much of the games industry and wider media, as well; venture capitalists looking to turn a buck.
The process of anything in this stage of capitalism (if it was ever any different it was a matter of scale and time rather than principle) is to be built up, purchased, gutted, disassembled. People who make money based entirely off the shifting winds of financial speculation are not genetically precluded from having good or interesting ideas about art or media. But, as is evident from Zaslav’s recent stewardship of HBO, an interest in it, or a mastery over creating profit from parts of it (reality TV in his case) does not make one a scion or a prophet across all disciplines. And, in fact, the system which produces businesses with the hope of becoming a smaller part of a competitor or swallowing them up, making it its most efficient uninteresting self is going to promote to its levers of power people with little to no interest in art or criticism for their own sake, or how they influence and improve one another. These objects area all just content to them – magnets for eyeballs, captive audience used as leverage to sell advertising space. And thanks to Google’s AdSense and contemporary search engine optimization, what floats to the top of the search engine will seldom be the most interesting or thoughtful art or criticism, or most incisive news reporting, until those things have been augmented or hobbled by word choice to invite eyeballs for ad sales. Capitalists own the networks, the channels, the magazines and newspapers. If we’re lucky enough for them not to lean on editorial, the function and form of the modern internet still constrains possibility.
Monique Judge wrote in The Verge on New Year’s Eve that perhaps it’s time to return to personal blogs. Like the New Yorker piece’s broad allusions to Marx near its conclusion – though not quite as airily or callously – this piece in the Verge avoids the nature of this return, this elimination of writer as a discrete job category and the creation of everyone as a writer or a critic. Sure, like Yglesias, you can sign a big contract with Substack. You can generate revenue through Blogger and Medium and Wordpress. But mostly, as your writing requires a full-time job and the dwindling resources of independent operations see freelance opportunities go up in smoke, we’ll be creating content for Twitter and Facebook and Letterboxd and etc., generating value we’ll never hold, never able to realize.
Our entire society feels like a house of cards made out of houses of cards, but perhaps that’s redundant. Is a shell game of shell games a more explanatory analogy? We’re on the precipice of multiple bubbles – financial and social – exploding and we’re steering into stagflation. The people trained through their school and/or their experience in life to help you make sense of it – journalists, critics, and academics among them – are being pushed further to the margins, numbers large in theory but small in the practice of who you are likely to see. This is not by coincidence, but if it is as happenstance it is as a consequence of long ongoing processes of neoliberalism, of lite-regulation markets.
Our hopes must be in the building power of the labor movement, as it makes gains across industries and sectors, in food service and industrial farm work obviously, but in tech and media also. With an enlivened, vital, and militant labor movement, some of capital’s power can be curbed. A country for its workers rather than just by them is possible. With an awake at the wheel Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, perhaps changes to the existing model can be made.
In the meantime, I write because I’m trying to make sense of the world, and conveying an experience in life and with art. And consuming art to have something to write about, and someone else’s experience to explore. But that’s just an observation of what’s going on and a declaration of what I’m doing. It’s not a solution.
This was all over the place, but here’s what you’ll get from the P.C. Vulpes substack going forward – more movie revies, maybe show and game reviews, and likely more ponderings or ramblings about the state of the world as relates to all the people I respect whose sole income is writing, and all of those of us who are just trying to make a go at it. This is going to be my year of anime, JRPGs, and telenovelas. Hopefully it is also our year of entrenching labor power.