this ladder is a hamster wheel

we never needed online part ii

Mylius via Wikimedia Commons

There’s a rumor that Vice is shutting down its website—a rumor that is, as far as I know at this time, not verified. [Edit: verified now.] But people are running with it because it feels plausible. This would be terrible news for a lot of people in direct, material terms: lost jobs, lost bylines, lost bodies of work. I never wrote for Vice but I did not save all my Gawker pieces and now they’re just sort of gone.

But it would also be bad symbolic news—because Vice was certainly one of the places that really defined the image of “digital media” as something that was cool, that wasn’t stodgy, that was more open to newcomers and outsiders than the New York Times. The other websites that similarly defined the digital media aesthetic are mostly either gone (Gawker, The Awl) or have jettisoned the aspects that made them seem so central (Buzzfeed). Some of them are still going strong—like Slate—but mostly, the things built over the last, let’s say, fifteen years ar…