They Aren't Just Killing Our Sites, They're Stealing Our Memories

"The internet is forever" adage is proving hilarious untrue, but only for the good things.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez on Unsplash

Did You Flashy Thing Me?

The other day while I was writing about Saltburn, I was reminded of an essay I’d read. It seemed to articulate perfectly an idea I was trying to briefly reference — the precise kinds of thoughts for which links were invented, those little footnotes that are there if the reader wants to read them but don’t alter the flow of the actual text. Specifically, I was trying to reference the concept of a person who “just shits you.”

I knew someone had written the definitive piece on the matter, because that was half the reason I was even saying it that way. If I could just point the reader to it, they could grasp what I was after immediately without me having to sidetrack my entire argument just to explain a tangential nugget. That you could do these things with internet writing but not in a magazine or newspaper is one of the things that once made writing for the internet so exciting.

But what the hell was that essay? I couldn’t remember all of the specifics, but I knew it was written by an Australian, and that it was framed around an Australian joke.

The joke was about Job, a faithful servant of God, upon whom God seems to heap hardship after hardship. God kills Job’s cattle, then his children, and after each tragedy Job turns to the heavens to ask “Why, God, why??”

God never bothers answering until finally, when Job is on his death bed and asks again, God finally delivers the punchline: “Oh, I dunno, Job, ya just shit me.”

Even remembering all of these fairly specific things about the essay, which I was pretty sure ran on the relaunched version of Gawker (which ran from about 2021-2023) and had some kind of headline referencing not liking things for any good reason, Google was turning up nothing. I searched what I thought were fairly specific things. “Australian job joke,” “job joke Australian just shit me,” “ya shit me Australian job joke hating things disliking…”

It probably sort of spiraled and fizzled out from there; you’ve probably experienced some version of this. In variation after variation, I turned up Quora links about hating your job, Reddit threads about hating your life, guides to Australian slang, rankings of jokes by everyone from Mitch Hedberg to Katt Williams… but nothing really even close to what I was after: one specific internet page I was all but certain had really existed.

Had it not been on Gawker? Had I misremembered it? Did it even exist at all?

I started texting friends I thought I might’ve also read it. Did they remember? Was I going crazy? Incidentally, asking if you’re crazy is a bad follow-up question to “Hey remember that Gawker piece about hating things where Australian God tells Job that he just shits him??? You know, how Australians say it??”

No one I texted was of any use either. Finally, I gave up and tweeted about it. Now my tweet about this article comes up as a search result when you try to find the same article, which I hope is at least some small comfort to anyone who also thinks they’re going insane remembering a thing that doesn’t seem to exist.

Eventually Twitter user Benny_Brox, with 85 followers, showed up to save the day, responding with a link to the essay on the Wayback Machine, an incredibly useful site that archives old internet.

My memory, which is faulty in a lot of ways, was actually pretty close to the mark on this one. The essay indeed ran on Gawker (in December 2021), was written by an Australian (Ben Jenkins), and was framed around the Job joke. Headline? The Joy of Hating Stuff for No Good Reason. I was pretty close!

And yet even armed with all of that information, I still came up empty trying to find this article written less than two years ago. It was because of this search that I came to discover that Gawker, formerly one of the most popular websites on the internet, about which multiple books have written, now consists only of a single landing page reading “Gawker. It’s a website on the internet.”

All that great writing so many people did across multiple iterations of the publication? Archived on the Wayback Machine, luckily, but otherwise gone. Certainly not available through a simple Google search.

This kind of depressing discovery is all too common these days, an issue perhaps nearer to my own heart. I’m a writer who built a career (if it’s not too high falutin’ to call it that) writing for a site alongside Gawker back in the days when “blogs” were real businesses. For more than 15 years starting in 2007 (people were still on MySpace then! YouTube was only two years old!) I devoted virtually all my creative energies to a site (first FilmDrunk, and then Uproxx, which was built from FilmDrunk and WithLeather) that I never owned, but nonetheless in some sense considered “mine.” I had been, after all, the driving creative force (and one of the driving creative forces, respectively) behind it.

A lot of people like me came to do this kind of work, at a time when “the internet is forever” came to be seen as the defining truism of the era. I’m just old enough that I can admit that we didn’t entirely recognize that in the very beginning. We were sort of just writing jokes for our friends, and when a celebrity we wrote about somehow found out about it, it felt equal parts exciting and terrifying. It certainly started to change the way we wrote.

And so “the internet is forever” quickly became a cautionary tale, a warning to respect the awesome, awful power of the thing we were all building. Not only for writers, but for anyone putting stuff on social media.

There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of blog posts written in 2007-2010-ish house blog style that I wouldn’t be especially proud to share today, and certainly wouldn’t write the same way now. Not that I’m especially ashamed of them, it just is what it is. Posting styles change, as do the business mechanics that produce them.

In any case, that fundamental truism has since changed fundamentally. Once I was forced out of the media brand I helped to build, it was clearer than ever that I essentially had zero control over what happened to virtually my entire portfolio and the evidence of my working life for more than 15 years. I created it, but I don’t own it, and I don’t get any say on what happens to it (which was mostly true even when I still worked there). I’ve come to rely on Google and my past work as much as my own brain when it comes to trying to remember what movies I saw in 2012 or my interests in 2017.

As I write this, Uproxx still exists, and along with it a fair amount of the work I’d say I’m most proud of. Most of my oldest posts from 2007 to 2010, are gone completely (which in a lot of cases I’m happy about, though not all), and much of the accompanying art from the next nine or 10 years has been purged from the writing — part of the periodic blanket image purges to keep copyright trolls from suing. In the early days of the blog years, we pretty much just used any old picture from Google, whether we had the rights to it or not. That was just how it was done. Still, lots of art I either Photoshopped together or photographed myself got deleted along with anything that might’ve formed the basis for legal claims. So now it’s just gone.

In any case, as I say, Uproxx still exists, but there’s no promise that it will continue to. Yahoo just laid off a bunch of people. Spotify is planning to lay off 1,500 people, as of this week. They didn’t even bother to wait until after Christmas just to make it look better. And you don’t have to look far for examples of what can happen when ownership changes hands.

In the media world as in everything else, lots of very rich people and entities acquire a lot of things they don’t particularly seem to care about or enjoy very much. And in the media world, someone always seems to have it worse than you do. I loved the relaunched version of Gawker. It was a daily read for me, a notable exception to the rule that everything on the ad-supported internet has to be choked with ads and shitty, designed for maximum search traffic and seemingly not much else, which was already a pretty established paradigm by 2021 when it started.

I can imagine how heartbreaking it must be for all the great writers who made Gawker what it was, for the fruits of their labor to be all but invisible now, based on rich guy whims or worse, the vagaries of faceless moneyed entities. It’s heartbreaking for me, just as a reader. And they found out about it almost when I did, noticing this scrub barely a week before I started writing this (this according to a former new-Gawker writer I asked about it).

If you’re just looking to find something on Gawker, I managed to get in touch with Mark Graham at the Wayback Machine, who said he managed the entire Gawker archive project himself. Had I known, I could’ve searched it from the “Collection Search” drop down menu at the bottom of the Wayback Machine site and probably found what I was looking for.

Graham said he may have, in fact, learned that the Gawker archive was down from my own tweet. I mention this not to toot my own horn, but to illustrate how new all of this is, and how, with sites dying and search breaking down, parts of the web are turning back into a sort of word-of-mouth system.

People had been worried about this exact Gawker scenario long before it actually came to pass. In 2018, Daniel Victor at the New York Times wrote an article called “Saving Gawker and Alt-Weeklies From Deletion.” The piece focused on a Freedom of the Press Foundation project to archive Gawker and LA Weekly. I’m not sure what became of that project (perhaps it was folded into the Wayback Machine’s archiving effort), but all of the Gawker links the piece reference (as a way to illustrate things worthy of saving) now go to 404 error pages, a “what if” scenario made real.

How’s that for grim?

Finding Mark Graham and the Gawker archive at the Wayback Machine I suppose gives the story a happy ending, but only just barely.

In the time between starting this essay and finishing it, Discourse Blog (a newsletter that formed when the site Splinter News disbanded and laid off all the writers) wrote about this same scenario. Gawker, it turns out, which was briefly revived by Bustle Media Group from 2021-2023, a company owned by Bryan Goldberg, who once spent $1.4 million on Napoleon’s hat, was recently bought by Meng Ru Kuok, a Singoporean CEO of a music company called Caldecott Music Group.

The holdings of Kuok’s Caldecott Music Group include BandLab Technologies, which develops and tools and services for music creators; media company NME Networks, which comprises music publications NME, Guitar.com and MusicTech; and Vista Musical Instruments, whose brands include Mono, Harmony, Teisco, Heritage Guitars, Swee Lee and Dawsons. [Variety]

Kuok is also, according to Variety, the son of a palm oil billionaire, and previously owned a 49% stake in Rolling Stone — which, along with Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Indiewire, Deadline (the list goes on), is owned by Penske Media, founded by Jay Penske, the heir to a car racing fortune.

It seems like we get fewer and fewer websites every day, but more versions of Kendall Roy almost as often. (No offense, guys! I’m still available to accept writing and editing work for reasonable pay!).

The basic trouble (as I’ve written) is that the system for measuring and assigning value to internet traffic is fundamentally broken. People learned to game and manipulate traffic so well and did it so often that it’s became incredibly difficult to tell “good” internet traffic (reading something you like, say, or searching for something and finding it) from “bad” internet traffic (pinging around a rat maze of chum boxes, AI-written content, and scams for a while until you get disgusted and log off).

When I first wrote that months ago, the truth of it seemed so obvious as to not require specific examples. But if you ever needed to know how the internet got so bad from a single Tweet thread, I think this one does a pretty good job.

In case it gets deleted, here’s a chunk:

We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor.

We got 489,509 traffic in October alone.

Here's how we did it:

We pulled off an SEO heist using AI.

1. Exported a competitor’s sitemap

2. Turned their list of URLs into article titles

3. Created 1,800 articles from those titles at scale using AI

18 months later, we have stolen:

- 3.6M total traffic

- 490K monthly traffic

Wow, neato, dude!

Now, did this guy actually do all this or is he just saying it in order to sell some kind of SEO expertise? Unclear, but do we really doubt that things like this are happening all the time?

For a time, people learned to add “Reddit” to the end of their Google searches to try to filter out AI-generated answers to whatever question they were asking. “SEO hackers” appear to have figured that one out too. Search results are frequently unhelpful these days, because people have figured out how to monkey with them for their own ends, and Google hasn’t done a good enough job fixing the problem (if they even want to). Meanwhile, Google is still basically the only player in the game. We’re building bots to answer questions only other bots asked, drowning out anything we actually want.

So, how does this relate to the idea of the things we write and read disappearing forever, usually because of some billionaire asshole? I suppose the question that connects them is, if a normal person can’t find it on the internet, does it really still exist?

We’ve clearly outsourced some of our collective cultural memories to the virtual world, under the barely-acknowledged assumption that whatever we put there we’ll still be able to find the next time we need it. Such that when you know you remember something but can’t find it, it feels like someone is messing with your circuitry. Buying a website hasn’t been that big a deal for most of the time the internet has existed; we let any asshole with a Napoleon hat and a palm oil plantation buy one. This under the assumption that having the most money is the best qualification to own something (and generally the system we’ve developed for how buying stuff works).

But more and more I think we’re coming to realize that owning one of these things, which both produces and warehouses cultural content, is more complicated than owning a racecar or a hat. Ideally we need whatever the internet equivalent is of someone who genuinely wants to be “a steward of the land.” And this crop of virtual landlords seems, by and large, patently, comically unfit for the job.

If that all sounds pretty depressing, in some sense it is. But I’m actually finding reasons for hope. Because if whatever equivalent to Gawker.com is competing on basically an equal playing field for clicks with a guy who designed a program to scrape their catalog and reproduce it with AI, how valuable could any of those clicks really be?

Maybe the silver lining of enshittification is that we’ve made the idea of owning websites and media brands so unattractive that the biggest assholes won’t want to anymore. If owning this kind of information isn’t a massively profitable endeavor, why would you bother unless you actually cared about it? Maybe it’s hopelessly naive to think so, but I have to think a time is coming when the money one makes from destroying a once-good website isn’t going to be worth the trouble of doing so.

Also:

A new Pod Yourself The Wire! Subscribe on Patreon for the new-new ad-free, Apple or other places for the free version. Our latest is season four episode 12.

HBO

“Solve the murders first, then find all the bodies.” -Kristi Yamagucciamane

Coming straight out of Wilmywood, this week’s guest, a co-host of the JortsCenter podcast, and man of many online names, Kristy Yamaguccimane AKA Will, joins Matt and Vince to talk about The Wire season four episode twelve, “That’s Got His Own.”

Vince’s synopsis of the episode: Lester Freamon is fighting with the brass over whether he can open an almost literal can of worms, Mayor Carcetti is trying to figure out how much of his reform agenda will be doomed by a massive school budget debt, Bunny Colvin tries to save his program, Namond accepts once and for all that he’ll never be a gangster, Bubbles comes up with a great plan to escape a predator, and Omar commits arguably his greatest act of war yet.

They talk about the episode, of course, but they also take a moment to appreciate the actor who plays Norman, Reg E. Cathey, who you may not remember from the movie Airheads. He’s the guy who says “Back off man, you’re stepping on my dick!” 

Instead of stepping our dicks, why don’t you leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts?

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