As someone currently trying to carve out a career for themselves in the content mines, this really resonated with me. The late 2000s blogging-palooza that you describe was what I grew up reading (born in 1994), and I figured when I finished school I'd get a job and blog on the side and eventually parlay that into a full time gig, but needless to say that hasn't happened yet, and I'm starting to wonder if working full time as a writer (of anything) is even a viable career path anymore.
In regards to the "no distinctive film critics anymore" thing, I also went to a fancy New York school for a writing degree (I, too, was thirsty for validation, and am now thirsty for a job) and took a "Reporting the Arts" class. The first section was about writing reviews, and our professor asked the class who their favorite critics were -- I was the only one who had an answer (it was you, btw), and at the time I thought that was a reflection on how incurious readers with even a vested interest in media's success are, but now it feels a bit more like a supply problem than a demand one. Which sucks, because thoughtful arts criticism is still probably my favorite thing to read, let alone write.
That last bit about AI writing a dull thing no one wants to read reminds me of these ads I've seen for Grammarly, where they promise AI will write your dumb office jargon so you seem professional.
I work in an office and write in dumb jargon with the best of them, but Jesus, I don't confuse it with meaningful work.
But instead of addressing the dumb fucking busy work, we've just invented robots to do it for us. And the fact that such basic AI can do it largely demonstrates what we already knew: the work lacks value.
So we've invented automated ways of doing unnecessary tasks no one wants to do. Truly this is the stupidest future.
Dude, yes, 100%. AI isn't really the problem, the problem is that we're so idiotically incurious about everything that we ask the AI to complete our most useless tasks in order to satisfy other useless AI. That is the opposite of streamlining!
Also, thank you for mentioning Gorillamask. I had forgotten how I came across your writing to begin with, and it was there.
The reason I found Gorillamask was it came up when I was googling "hot babes" when I was 17, and that site used to link to a "babe of the day". Here we are 15 years later.
Reading this made me realize how much I've siloed myself off from the new internet and am yearning for the old days. I basically read this and a few other Substacks, Defector, a few of the GMG sites that remain decent, and individual writers who write for sites that are largely terrible otherwise. I still navigate to these off of my Bookmarks tab instead of going to Twitter or some other aggregator feed.
I'm pretty much an old man stuck in my ways at this point, but as Vince pointed out, the new content model erases any of the individual personalities I used to use to identify writers I enjoyed. The sameness is stultifying.
Hopefully whatever is next sees people divorcing themselves from the concept of their fandoms defining their personalities. Creating your identity around the entertainment you consume has always struck me as terribly sad. Maybe people will realize the capital and cultural forces that are atomizing them into these fandom camps don't have their best interest at heart, that it's all just extractive.
Or maybe I'll just continue to live in my curated internet bubble forever. It's nice enough in here.
There is maybe some irony to the forces that killed the blog world consolidating and stagnating into basically the exact same paradigm that blogs rose up out of in the first place. The difference now is that advertising can't underwrite it anymore. We'll see how it plays out long term, but the idea of getting money directly from the readers I'm trying to entertain seems so much more straightforward to me.
I'd be happy with a more decentralized internet where I pay for the sites I like, but it makes me worried about access.
I'm 41 years old with a job that provides the disposable income to pay for the things I enjoy. Early-to-mid 20s me probably wouldn't have found the writers I enjoyed at Filmdrunk, KSK, Deadspin, Achewood, the AV Club, etc. if I had to pay for those sites before knowing what was on them.
Hopefully some long-term model will emerge where writers can get their content out to the people that want to read them and then get compensated directly without all the rent-seeking middle men.
If you felt like writing a full book that AO Scott might now actually review, I think your personal perspective here on the death of the internet vis-à-vis the lens of art criticism is pretty fascinating.
I hate to use summer franchise movies as my example here but I think it applies. I had a really emotional reaction to the new Indiana Jones movie and I became semi-invested in the trap of following its RT score. Likewise, I saw the new Mission Impossible Monday night and was blown away by its set pieces but left pretty cold by the way it told its story. So I started to get irrationally annoyed by its near-perfect RT score. After a few moments of frothing, eventually I realized the trap I was falling into and the one you outline here. My reasons for being cold on Dead Reckoning and taken with Dial of Destiny are personal to me and if I was to write about why, maybe someone could have a discussion with me about it.
But alas, what would happen is I would be immediately flames for cutting against the hive mind. Thank you for writing the piece here and I agree that the reason I’ve always appreciated your writing is your ability to imbue it with your personal feelings. It helps me better understand your perspective.
Hahaha first off, I can't believe it was the Inside Out review that finally did you in. Not the van-lifers, not the actual film director Kevin Smith who you constantly ripped on until he jumped into the comments for an entire afternoon. Just a stupid animated movie that no one remembers anymore.
The sort of outrage that your Inside Out review generated seems to have become mainstream. In the last few years it's become common for people to absolutely lose their minds over things that just do not warrant such outrage. You've covered this going back a long ways, the book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed", etc...
The downfall at Uproxx started for me when I noticed writers embedding tweets to support an argument. This blew me away because it was such an obviously bad way of citing sources. When I started college, professors didn't allow you to use Wikipedia. When I finished, the Washington Post was embedding tweets in articles. Somewhere during that time, we lost a lot.
I remember the day a staffer at Uproxx contacted me privately to offer me a gig writing posts at $50 a pop. I was thrilled. Luckily I had other options because after the first few, I did the math and realized I was making less than minimum wage based on how long it took me to write. I'm definitely not cut out to be a full-time writer, but unfortunately, modern media companies don't take care of the people who are.
I really miss the good writers, and the media environment which allowed a larger number of smaller websites to spend a few hundred dollars prospecting for new talent. Uproxx back in the 2008-2015 time period was incredible. Cracked, the AV Club, Gawker, and especially Vice were something else.
A disjointed rant but the bottom line is Vince, you're one of the only writers from that time period who hasn't either sold out, quit, or become a liberal scold or a conservative grifter.
Please keep writing, you're one of the only people left who's worth reading.
The Kevin Smith fray was soooo enjoyable. I think I got him to react to a faux business concept around airbrushed jorts after he commented on what I had done creatively. Good times.
Man, this brings back Matt! Sorry, brings back MEMORIES of a great time on the internet. I read basically every site you mentioned on a daily basis, it was the first time that I'd found writers who wrote how my friends and I talked. I remember when Drew dropped the big daddy and started using his real name, Ufford/caveman too. It's sad to see what they've all become, I used to love the comment sections on the uproxx sites and Gawker/Deadspin, it was like belong to a community. Vince, any chance you could write for Defector? They're really not wrong when they say that they're the last good website.
It was the first email I wrote. They said they had just finished a hiring round. Feel free to hassle them on my behalf though. I had been thinking of trying to jump ship for like two years before that, shoulda emailed sooner.
This place needs an edit button, I realize now that it sounds like I'm saying that it's sad what those WRITERS have become, when I meant it's sad to see what those websites and comment sections have become. Vince, I saw a survey email from defector about an hour after I read your comment and definitely mentioned how much of a shame it is that writers like you and Alan Sepinwall are unemployed by a major site, and told them they should expand more beyond sports and hire both of you guys. Fingers crossed it works, I'd love to see either or both of you on there.
Final thought, I can't imagine your loyal commenters made your sales pitch any easier to the Uproxx brass.
"Let's see, we've got a guy who pretends to be a Klingon, five people with disgusting usernames who write filthy, hilarious puns, whatever an OhMyBalls is, and a guy who writes 2000 word fan fiction about a Chinese dick sucking robot"
First, LOL'd at "Screenebriated" and why it wasn't used as the title of this Substack, at least now I can know what could have been. Also, awesome article never really thought deeply about how to categorize just WTF is going on in terms of content online and film reviews in general. I'll always have you to thank for watching "Drive" and "The Green Knight" not sure I would have ever seen them otherwise but it was because I trusted you, the person, not you the content for pull quotes.
Quinten Tarantino is wrong, there is a distinctive critic. You. That's why I'm here, and trust me, more will come.
The decline in film criticism is due to the same phenomenon that has brought about the decline in film: too many MBAs. Everything is distilled through an MBA capstone project. We are living in a libertarian nightmare of ill-conceived, bland content that is expertly marketed. All of this is encased in a nightmare weave of finance that is so expertly manipulated it keeps everyone with money protected. Not even Elon Musk can blow his fortune (he, like Donald Trump, has already blown it so much so that he should be in the Tenderloin fighting for toilet paper), but, thanks to the financial machinations of contemporary business, both he and Donald Trump are still living in mansions. It is the marketing/finance-driven juggernaut that has brought us to this place where, "...humanity (is) regarded as an inefficiency to be stamped out."
Schnitzel bob nailed it. "So we've invented automated ways of doing unnecessary tasks no one wants to do. Truly this is the stupidest future."
But you are one smart man. That's why I pay for this content. Keep writing. And, uh, I loved the long form. More please. You know how to write.
Vince, you've been my go to recommendation for reviews for years. And the reason for that is I can read a review and know why *you* liked it (or didn't).
That's incredibly valuable because I don't like the same things you do because, like you say in the piece, we're unique people. But when I know what you liked (and, more generally, what you like), I'm able to know from reading your reviews whether *I* will like it.
Also, someone needs to send Tarantino your review of Plane
I still get bummed from time to time that, for various reasons, couldn't make entertainment writing in the academic or journalism spheres work as a career. Then I see critics making GoFundMes to go to Sundance, and working two day jobs to make the critic job work, and I'm content with my Letterboxd capsules half a dozen people read.
Speaking of those, I often think about the point you brought up here and in your Razzies piece about the smaller cultural footprint movies have/the way there are only five movies a year everyone sees. Any time there's a complaint about "why aren't we getting this kind of movie?" the answer is inevitably "we are, it's just that all the traditional promotional models are dead, we're all in our silos, and the studio spent five bucks marketing it before it got buried on VOD." I'd say half the stuff I watch in a given year, my husband and I are the only people I know who watched it.
Anyway, great stuff, happy you're still with us and still writing. I totally forgot about WWTTD, once a staple of my daily browsing. Ah, memories.
Great essay that really captures what's changed in writing and on the internet. I think post KSK/WL heyday more unique voices went to places like Reddit, but that doesn't pay the bills and is dying itself.
As someone currently trying to carve out a career for themselves in the content mines, this really resonated with me. The late 2000s blogging-palooza that you describe was what I grew up reading (born in 1994), and I figured when I finished school I'd get a job and blog on the side and eventually parlay that into a full time gig, but needless to say that hasn't happened yet, and I'm starting to wonder if working full time as a writer (of anything) is even a viable career path anymore.
In regards to the "no distinctive film critics anymore" thing, I also went to a fancy New York school for a writing degree (I, too, was thirsty for validation, and am now thirsty for a job) and took a "Reporting the Arts" class. The first section was about writing reviews, and our professor asked the class who their favorite critics were -- I was the only one who had an answer (it was you, btw), and at the time I thought that was a reflection on how incurious readers with even a vested interest in media's success are, but now it feels a bit more like a supply problem than a demand one. Which sucks, because thoughtful arts criticism is still probably my favorite thing to read, let alone write.
Brilliant piece.
That last bit about AI writing a dull thing no one wants to read reminds me of these ads I've seen for Grammarly, where they promise AI will write your dumb office jargon so you seem professional.
I work in an office and write in dumb jargon with the best of them, but Jesus, I don't confuse it with meaningful work.
But instead of addressing the dumb fucking busy work, we've just invented robots to do it for us. And the fact that such basic AI can do it largely demonstrates what we already knew: the work lacks value.
So we've invented automated ways of doing unnecessary tasks no one wants to do. Truly this is the stupidest future.
Come on, Billy, let's go get robo-fucked.
Dude, yes, 100%. AI isn't really the problem, the problem is that we're so idiotically incurious about everything that we ask the AI to complete our most useless tasks in order to satisfy other useless AI. That is the opposite of streamlining!
Also, thank you for mentioning Gorillamask. I had forgotten how I came across your writing to begin with, and it was there.
The reason I found Gorillamask was it came up when I was googling "hot babes" when I was 17, and that site used to link to a "babe of the day". Here we are 15 years later.
*shameful(ish) fist bump*
Gorillamask OGs rise up!
Reading this made me realize how much I've siloed myself off from the new internet and am yearning for the old days. I basically read this and a few other Substacks, Defector, a few of the GMG sites that remain decent, and individual writers who write for sites that are largely terrible otherwise. I still navigate to these off of my Bookmarks tab instead of going to Twitter or some other aggregator feed.
I'm pretty much an old man stuck in my ways at this point, but as Vince pointed out, the new content model erases any of the individual personalities I used to use to identify writers I enjoyed. The sameness is stultifying.
Hopefully whatever is next sees people divorcing themselves from the concept of their fandoms defining their personalities. Creating your identity around the entertainment you consume has always struck me as terribly sad. Maybe people will realize the capital and cultural forces that are atomizing them into these fandom camps don't have their best interest at heart, that it's all just extractive.
Or maybe I'll just continue to live in my curated internet bubble forever. It's nice enough in here.
There is maybe some irony to the forces that killed the blog world consolidating and stagnating into basically the exact same paradigm that blogs rose up out of in the first place. The difference now is that advertising can't underwrite it anymore. We'll see how it plays out long term, but the idea of getting money directly from the readers I'm trying to entertain seems so much more straightforward to me.
I'd be happy with a more decentralized internet where I pay for the sites I like, but it makes me worried about access.
I'm 41 years old with a job that provides the disposable income to pay for the things I enjoy. Early-to-mid 20s me probably wouldn't have found the writers I enjoyed at Filmdrunk, KSK, Deadspin, Achewood, the AV Club, etc. if I had to pay for those sites before knowing what was on them.
Hopefully some long-term model will emerge where writers can get their content out to the people that want to read them and then get compensated directly without all the rent-seeking middle men.
If you felt like writing a full book that AO Scott might now actually review, I think your personal perspective here on the death of the internet vis-à-vis the lens of art criticism is pretty fascinating.
I hate to use summer franchise movies as my example here but I think it applies. I had a really emotional reaction to the new Indiana Jones movie and I became semi-invested in the trap of following its RT score. Likewise, I saw the new Mission Impossible Monday night and was blown away by its set pieces but left pretty cold by the way it told its story. So I started to get irrationally annoyed by its near-perfect RT score. After a few moments of frothing, eventually I realized the trap I was falling into and the one you outline here. My reasons for being cold on Dead Reckoning and taken with Dial of Destiny are personal to me and if I was to write about why, maybe someone could have a discussion with me about it.
But alas, what would happen is I would be immediately flames for cutting against the hive mind. Thank you for writing the piece here and I agree that the reason I’ve always appreciated your writing is your ability to imbue it with your personal feelings. It helps me better understand your perspective.
Hahaha first off, I can't believe it was the Inside Out review that finally did you in. Not the van-lifers, not the actual film director Kevin Smith who you constantly ripped on until he jumped into the comments for an entire afternoon. Just a stupid animated movie that no one remembers anymore.
The sort of outrage that your Inside Out review generated seems to have become mainstream. In the last few years it's become common for people to absolutely lose their minds over things that just do not warrant such outrage. You've covered this going back a long ways, the book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed", etc...
The downfall at Uproxx started for me when I noticed writers embedding tweets to support an argument. This blew me away because it was such an obviously bad way of citing sources. When I started college, professors didn't allow you to use Wikipedia. When I finished, the Washington Post was embedding tweets in articles. Somewhere during that time, we lost a lot.
I remember the day a staffer at Uproxx contacted me privately to offer me a gig writing posts at $50 a pop. I was thrilled. Luckily I had other options because after the first few, I did the math and realized I was making less than minimum wage based on how long it took me to write. I'm definitely not cut out to be a full-time writer, but unfortunately, modern media companies don't take care of the people who are.
I really miss the good writers, and the media environment which allowed a larger number of smaller websites to spend a few hundred dollars prospecting for new talent. Uproxx back in the 2008-2015 time period was incredible. Cracked, the AV Club, Gawker, and especially Vice were something else.
A disjointed rant but the bottom line is Vince, you're one of the only writers from that time period who hasn't either sold out, quit, or become a liberal scold or a conservative grifter.
Please keep writing, you're one of the only people left who's worth reading.
The Kevin Smith fray was soooo enjoyable. I think I got him to react to a faux business concept around airbrushed jorts after he commented on what I had done creatively. Good times.
Man, this brings back Matt! Sorry, brings back MEMORIES of a great time on the internet. I read basically every site you mentioned on a daily basis, it was the first time that I'd found writers who wrote how my friends and I talked. I remember when Drew dropped the big daddy and started using his real name, Ufford/caveman too. It's sad to see what they've all become, I used to love the comment sections on the uproxx sites and Gawker/Deadspin, it was like belong to a community. Vince, any chance you could write for Defector? They're really not wrong when they say that they're the last good website.
It was the first email I wrote. They said they had just finished a hiring round. Feel free to hassle them on my behalf though. I had been thinking of trying to jump ship for like two years before that, shoulda emailed sooner.
This place needs an edit button, I realize now that it sounds like I'm saying that it's sad what those WRITERS have become, when I meant it's sad to see what those websites and comment sections have become. Vince, I saw a survey email from defector about an hour after I read your comment and definitely mentioned how much of a shame it is that writers like you and Alan Sepinwall are unemployed by a major site, and told them they should expand more beyond sports and hire both of you guys. Fingers crossed it works, I'd love to see either or both of you on there.
At least we'll always have that Furious 7 review.
Final thought, I can't imagine your loyal commenters made your sales pitch any easier to the Uproxx brass.
"Let's see, we've got a guy who pretends to be a Klingon, five people with disgusting usernames who write filthy, hilarious puns, whatever an OhMyBalls is, and a guy who writes 2000 word fan fiction about a Chinese dick sucking robot"
First, LOL'd at "Screenebriated" and why it wasn't used as the title of this Substack, at least now I can know what could have been. Also, awesome article never really thought deeply about how to categorize just WTF is going on in terms of content online and film reviews in general. I'll always have you to thank for watching "Drive" and "The Green Knight" not sure I would have ever seen them otherwise but it was because I trusted you, the person, not you the content for pull quotes.
Just a detail, but the French newspaper that World of Reel quoted is Libération, not La Liberation.
Quinten Tarantino is wrong, there is a distinctive critic. You. That's why I'm here, and trust me, more will come.
The decline in film criticism is due to the same phenomenon that has brought about the decline in film: too many MBAs. Everything is distilled through an MBA capstone project. We are living in a libertarian nightmare of ill-conceived, bland content that is expertly marketed. All of this is encased in a nightmare weave of finance that is so expertly manipulated it keeps everyone with money protected. Not even Elon Musk can blow his fortune (he, like Donald Trump, has already blown it so much so that he should be in the Tenderloin fighting for toilet paper), but, thanks to the financial machinations of contemporary business, both he and Donald Trump are still living in mansions. It is the marketing/finance-driven juggernaut that has brought us to this place where, "...humanity (is) regarded as an inefficiency to be stamped out."
Schnitzel bob nailed it. "So we've invented automated ways of doing unnecessary tasks no one wants to do. Truly this is the stupidest future."
But you are one smart man. That's why I pay for this content. Keep writing. And, uh, I loved the long form. More please. You know how to write.
Vince, you've been my go to recommendation for reviews for years. And the reason for that is I can read a review and know why *you* liked it (or didn't).
That's incredibly valuable because I don't like the same things you do because, like you say in the piece, we're unique people. But when I know what you liked (and, more generally, what you like), I'm able to know from reading your reviews whether *I* will like it.
Also, someone needs to send Tarantino your review of Plane
I still get bummed from time to time that, for various reasons, couldn't make entertainment writing in the academic or journalism spheres work as a career. Then I see critics making GoFundMes to go to Sundance, and working two day jobs to make the critic job work, and I'm content with my Letterboxd capsules half a dozen people read.
Speaking of those, I often think about the point you brought up here and in your Razzies piece about the smaller cultural footprint movies have/the way there are only five movies a year everyone sees. Any time there's a complaint about "why aren't we getting this kind of movie?" the answer is inevitably "we are, it's just that all the traditional promotional models are dead, we're all in our silos, and the studio spent five bucks marketing it before it got buried on VOD." I'd say half the stuff I watch in a given year, my husband and I are the only people I know who watched it.
Anyway, great stuff, happy you're still with us and still writing. I totally forgot about WWTTD, once a staple of my daily browsing. Ah, memories.
I barely know how to watch movies w/o immediately reading your review of it right after. Tough habit to break.
I had to verbalize my own reasons as to why that new Spiderverse sucked! I'm too lazy for this.
In a word? Not enough DGI.
Great essay that really captures what's changed in writing and on the internet. I think post KSK/WL heyday more unique voices went to places like Reddit, but that doesn't pay the bills and is dying itself.