CSotD: Fraud as a viable business model
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In the current (th)Ink, Keith Knight lobs a stinkbomb at a deserving target.
I keep seeing stories tagged to HuffPo in my Facebook feed, but, honestly, it's like one of those tired old TV shows that they keep renewing and, when you see it listed on your guide, your response has long since gone from "Well, there's a possibility!" to "Good lord, is that still on?"
When Arianna Huffington sold out to AOL for a large pile of cash, there was some expectation that she would begin to pay for the original content on her site, but she continued to offer "exposure" to all but her nearest and dearest.
Meanwhile, the right rail of the site became devoted to boobs and deceptive headlines, mostly about boobs, intended to attract the clicks of, well, the booboisie. Whom else indeed?
And, as the headlines at HuffPo became more and more hysterical, as the stories became less and less substantial, as the blatant, painful sexism and exploitation became more and more obvious, you would think that readers would drift away.
But, hey, ER continued to get decent ratings even after the departure of every star from the original cast and even after the plot lines began to make the Moldavian massacre on "Dynasty" look like something out of Arthur Miller.
And, similarly, people continue to come to HuffPo, just as the proverbial dog returneth to his proverbial vomit.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and you've got yourself a viable business model.
Keef is a little behind the times, mind you, because Arianna has, indeed, been paying editors and other key personnel. But, still, yuck and double yuck. It's not just that the site has turned to crap. It's that the site has turned to exploitive, dishonest crap.
But so what?
The "so what?" is that, while commercial media has always been in the business of selling eyeballs, the scramble for clicks has completely overcome any sense of ethics or of any purpose beyond amassing those clicks.
The free press that Jefferson saw as the safety net between civilization and chaos, has come out firmly on the side of chaos. They are not "for" or "against" anything — they just want clicks, any clicks, at any cost.
And clicks are relatively anonymous, though there are measures such as "unique visitors" that — if you assume they work — distinguish between those coming to find out what is happening with the latest hearings into Guantanamo or Syria and those who are just returning to scream "Kenyan socialist" at the person who has just returned to scream "fascist teabagger" in the echo chamber of the comments section.
But you don't need sophisticated analytics when you can just scroll down to the comments themselves, and see the collection of morons that a site has amassed. Many even have assembled a permanent cast of morons who know each other. It's as if "Cheers" were set in a crack house or perhaps a cave in Idaho.
To be fair, however, a substantial portion of on-line advertising seems targeted to morons, so the market apparently exists and there ya go.
But that doesn't make me feel better, and I feel even worse when I read an article on an apparently legitimate mainstream website only to find, at the bottom, "suggested links" to four-month old stories about Miley Cyrus's boobs or to obvious scams about the Five Foods You Should Never Eat.
It has not only come to the point where even legimate news outlets are willing to wallow in the muck, but suddenly we have enough Onion knock-offs that people are passing around graceless satires that, while incompetent as social commentary, function quite well to increase the public's delusional level.
Nobody cares. And, when I say "nobody cares," what I mean is that, when someone points out that a particular story is fake, the response is, "So?"
Facts have become a matter of opinion. Truth was once a trophy, but now everyone gets trophies just for participating.
Back in 1994, I wrote a column in which I talked about how technology was enabling the exploitation of what had up until then been an underplayed, if not insignificant, paranoid element in society.
Among other things, I said:
Here's the rest of it, if you're curious, or even if you're not. Click on it for a readable-size version, or try
the full-size PDF.
I need to go back to Tralfamador and hang out with Montana Wildhack for awhile. This time that I am stuck in simply depresses me.
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