What the heck happened to Boing Boing?
Back during the Heroic Age of the indie web—between the dot com crash and before the web shrunk to a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four, Boing Boing felt absolutely essential. Nerd culture! The beginning of the maker movement! The EFFs battles against big tech! Counterculture! “Wonderful things!”
Now it’s like a failed downtown mall—choked with sales for low-quality grift-y products, and lower-quality writing. Far from being at the front of internet culture, the whole site seems increasingly out of touch; not just stale, but from a worldview completely decoupled from the world we live in now.
(And, it’s absolutely none of our business why Cory Doctorow or Xeni Jardin left the site, but I’ll just casually mention that Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic continues to be the same sort of essential reading boing boing used to be. I’m sure boing boing becoming a seedy sales channel and Doctorow starting his own site are completely unrelated phenomena.)
What finally pushed me over the edge, though, was the endless videos of “look how stupid these redhats are!” This isn’t even the usual brain rot that “if we show them the truth they’ll change their minds”, instead it’s just post after post drenched in their own smug superiority that some old white dude in a red hat is being “hypocritical”.
It’s not the summer of 2016 anymore, guys. They’re not hypocrites, they’re white supremacist fascists. They know exactly what they’re saying, quit acting like you don’t so you can, what, score points, with… someone? Making fun of them on a website and nothing else was how we lost that election. Everyone else has figured this out, but no, boing boing is still stuck in the middle of the last decade.
Usually this is the point where someone counters by talking about the value of humor speaking truth to power or some other such self-aggrandizing justification. When that happens I always pull out this quote from a Norm McDonald Interview:
They say humor is the ray of light that illuminates the evil or whatever, but I was reading that in Germany and Adolf Hitler times, everybody was making fun of Hitler. Every cartoon was against Hitler, there were comedy troupes doing sketches about Hitler being an idiot with a stupid mustache and what a stupid little idiot he was. So anyway, there goes that theory about the power of comedy. It doesn’t work at all.
Ron Gilbert thinks boing boing are all sellouts, but that’s not quite it somehow. Like a lot of turn-of-the-century Gen-X vaguely-edgelordy (mostly white) counterculture, it’s has a borderline-nihilistic attitude that nothing really matters, the worst thing you can do be be caught caring about something, and the only morally correct thing to do is snark at anyone who does.
And, just, that was a crappy attitude in 2010, but then we elected a racist gameshow host as president, wikileaks turned out to be an op by the Russians, literal nazis started marching in the streets, and a million people and counting died of the plague. The world has changed since the early teens, or rather, things that were already there became impossible to ignore.
It’s not so much that they got old, it’s that they failed to grow.