Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
Usually, there would be two weeks’ worth of THR newsletter images in this post, but because of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, there’s only one — we took the week off. So you get one, but at least all of them are kind of great and colorful…? Just imagine that the missing images translate as me taking it easy for once.
So, I cancelled my New York Times subscription.
I’d subscribed digitally just after Trump was inaugurated, in part because I wanted to support journalism in an era that would need journalism, and also because I knew realistically that I’d want access to more than the 10 articles a month limit you get without a subscription. I wasn’t the biggest Times booster, even though I enjoyed a bunch of writers there (and particularly enjoyed their podcasts, too; The Daily was a must every day for a long time), but it felt important to finally sign up to the Times as an accompaniment to my already present Washington Post subscription.
(I’d been a Post subscriber for longer for two reasons; I prefer that paper’s political coverage by far, and the digital subscription was far, far cheaper. The Times subscription felt overpriced for what I was getting out of it, to be honest.)
I stayed a Times subscriber through multiple concerns about coverage and weakness in both reporting and editorial point of view; sure, my readership of it dropped to almost non-existent outside of the big stories, but I was still supporting journalism, dammit! As a journalist myself, it was a point of principle, even when the journalism being practiced didn’t seem to uphold the principles I would’ve wanted it to. And then the Tom Cotton op-ed ran.
There’s so much about that op-ed and the circumstances of its creation and publication that are, to say the least, troubling, that came out in the days after its publication — that the section editor didn’t read it prior to publishing, that it was pitched to Cotton by the paper, that it didn’t go through fact checks and was subsequently found to fall under the paper’s own journalistic standards — but for me, even just seeing the headline “Send In The Troops” was enough. It was time to cancel.
(The piece was trash, of course, but it was lying, dangerous trash calling for martial law in a public venue that should not, under any circumstances, publish such inflammatory bullshit at a time like now. Days later, I’m still incandescent with anger over how irresponsible the piece was, how drastically the Times failed in not only allowing it to run, but commissioning it in the first place.)
There’s a whole process you have to go through in order to cancel your Times subscription, it turns out; it’s not like you can just click a button. In total, it took me an hour or so, and an online chat with someone called Eric to shut it down. What stands out about the whole thing, though, was Eric’s response when I told him why I was cancelling. He dropped the attempts to keep me by lowering the price or offering additional add-one, and just thanked me for being “an important voice for change.”
When even your sales staff think some things are worth cancelling over, that’s probably a sign you’ve fucked up, surely.
I saw Warren Ellis write in his weekly newsletter the other week that people should turn off their Twitter and Facebook accounts in these times to end “doomscrolling,” a catchy term that is immediately understandable without the need for further instruction — to read it is to know what he’s talking about, and probably feel just a little bit guilty for taking part even unintentionally at some point or another. This past couple of weeks has been full of doomscrolling.
In our defense, it’s been hard to know what else to do. It feels as if there are only three options available to anyone in the US at this particular moment in history: Protest, donate, or speak out. (The latter translating, for me as a white man, as shutting up and promoting voices of Black people speaking out; I literally can’t add anything of value to the conversation personally other than saying I agree!, so…) Everything else? Everything else is doomscrolling. What is the alternate? To pretend everything is fine?
And there’s been so much to scroll through — if the last few years have seemed like an endless torrent of shitty news, the last couple of weeks has turned that up to near unthinkable levels. Every night, the country is filled with protests turned into police-led riots; every day features politicians responding in ways that either fall short of what’s needed or, worse, seem designed to heighten tensions and inflame anger even more. There’s no end to it, it feels like.
(And all of this is happening even as we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, with the police using tear gas in the middle of a pandemic, really doubling down on that whole “this is inhuman and unthinkable” thing because cruelty and control is the entire point, of course.)
I was emailing with a friend yesterday, both of us checking in and essentially asking, what are you doing, donating, protesting, something else…? Because, in a way, that feels like the only conversation to have right now. What are you doing? There has to be more than doomscrolling. That isn’t anywhere near enough.
The thing I’ll miss most about Wired is, of course, the thing I’ll miss least about Wired. Because why should I expect anything else?
I started there through nepotism, kind of: Laura Hudson, formerly editor of Comic Alliance, had taken over as culture editor for the website, and we were friends. I suspect the fact that I’d already been writing for places like io9 and Time worked in my favor, too; I had experience working for “mainstream” outlets instead of just the comic press, and I think it was comforting on some level to feel like I wouldn’t be completely inept if given the opportunity to write for something on the scale of Wired. (Just partially inept; I’m still me, after all.)
I must have done something right, because I outlasted Laura, who left editorial after a couple of years, and also the man who replaced her, Peter Rubin. All told, I ended up staying seven years at the site, which feels pretty incredible to me, to be honest. (Not least of which because there was once a point where it felt as if two years was the outer limit of my tenure anywhere.)
I’m leaving because of that most common reason these days: COVID-related cutbacks. Wired’s parent company Condé Nast has been pulling back all across the shop, despite increased readership because there’s no advertising dollars right now, so I knew it was coming even before getting the phone call a month ago, and we left it with a mutual hope that I might be able to do occasional freelance stuff for them in the future — I hope that happens l because I want to continue to be connected to the outlet in some way. It’s been good to me in all manner of ways; I have happy memories there.
As to the thing I’ll miss most and least… Well, the meat of my last few years at the site was While You Were Offline, a weekly column that picked five social media conversations each week and curated them, explained them and tried to put them into some kind of context. It was, in many ways, like a version of Fanboy Rampage!!!, the thing that started my career off in the first place, and it became this strange, welcome primal scream into the void during the Trump era.
It was also a fucker to do every week, eating up hours of my life and changing the way I interacted with the internet and media in general, and to be blunt, now that it’s gone, I’m not quite sure what it’s going to be like without it. I’ll no longer have to go down a research hole for hours every Wednesday and Thursday…! But at the same time, I’ll no longer go down research holes every Wednesday and Thursday…! It feels like a death, in the oddest way, which feels fitting, somehow. That’s how it feels to leave Wired as a regular contributor, as a whole.
