by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m kind of drunk, but cognizant enough to give you my hot take on undead Gawker. The issue with undead Gawker is it’s trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist — I don’t know about you, but I get 99% of my content passively on Twitter these days. And, what’s more, the very thing that made the original Gawker both great and problematic — snark — has so become a part of Twitter culture that, lulz, undead Gawker is moot.
And, really, I don’t even know if my go-to solution to this moot problem — turning undead Gawker into a really cool Twitter clone with a paid staff — would even fix the problem. That ship has sailed. That window of opportunity is no more.
In fact, I would go so far as to say the entire content production universe is kind of in a holding pattern until the kinks are figure out with the Metaverse. Blogs are dead, if you will. Apps are dead, if you will. There’s just nothing going on right now.
It is simply impossible for undead Gawker to bring back the glory of the hateful old Gawker because that moment in media history has past. For Gawker to exist at all is a self-indulgent nostalgia circle jerk. Now, because I have a huge ego, I believe if they would like me write for them that I would at least make things interesting in my little corner of its online presence.
I may be a kook, but I’m at least a thought provoking kook. I’d be a really cheap hire and would love to do crazy, nutty things simply to get attention. Though, of course, either I would have to work remotely or they would have to pay for me to crash on someone’s couch in Brooklyn.
This reminds me — if I ever somehow magically found myself living in New York City, I would start up a zine again. It would be so much fun to see if I could create a successor to the Village Voice. The process of starting a new print zine is so much fun, especially the handing it out ot strangers part. I would stake out the New York Times building and hand the zine out, hoping one of their writers might like it so much that they wrote about it.
Bring back zines! And someone help me move to NYC! Wink.
Jesus Christ can I be a delusional dreamer at times. But one man’s delusion is another man’s dream, I guess.
Anyway, the point is, in a sense, undead Gawker is like undead Newsweek. It’s coasting off the fumes of its namebrand without much point. The old Gawker live in moment in time when blogs mattered. That moment in time is over. Bring on the Metaverse!
