The Dotcom Funeral
by James Norton
Automatic Media is dead; the Golden Age of Content is over. The heroes are going down to a final, great sleep. Paragraph tags are being stripped out of HTML files and tucked away into tiny individual envelopes, to be stockpiled in warehouses in Chicago, Brooklyn and Tallahassee.
Everything I love seems to be fading away.
Smartguy content sites Suck, Feed and Plastic all belonged to Automatic Media. Suck is "on summer vacation." Feed is "on ice." Plastic is soldiering on, bravely — but for how long?
In other news, TimmyBigHands folded months ago. Amazon has been on thin ice for almost a year. The Web's great old standards and young roustabouts alike are all coughing up blood. Everyone suddenly realized that all the money was coming from ads bought by venture capitalists, promoting sites dependent on ads bought by venture capitalists.
It's time to say goodbye — to the dead, to the dying, and to the feeble websites with broken hips. You guys were the best.
Goodbye, Suck. The words of Polly Esther and the drawings of Terry Colon made such sweet, funny music together. What the hell — how can a synergy this beautiful ever end? Why won't those lousy investors just ONCE put money into something just because it's trenchant, and clever, and makes people laugh? Why does it always have to be about money?
Investors, you are like the prostitutes in movies, but less beautiful, and less resourceful. You do not have a heart of gold.
Goodbye, Salon. Oh, I realize you're not dead yet, but you've been dining on your own stomach for quite a while now. It can only last so long. Thank you for posting content that I mostly didn't read because it all seemed to be written by recently graduated English majors from Stanford and Berkeley who are now living in San Francisco and sleeping with multiple people every weekend and drinking wine. Except for that one multi-part story about Wizards of the Coast, which was actually really good.
Goodbye, Feed Magazine. You guys were very serious, and discussed very important issues, and that took a lot of pressure off sites like Flak. You will be missed.
Goodbye, Plastic. Boy, did your page take a long time to load. But thanks for linking to Flak stories semi-occasionally.
Goodbye, TimmyBigHands. The crew that did Mystery Science Theater 3000 deserved better than an eBay auction as their fate. And damn. Those syrup ads were funny. I repeat: damn.
Finally, and most importantly: Goodbye, Amazon.com. Of all the goodbyes, this may be the most premature, but like a lover seeing his girlfriend sign up for a semester abroad in Paris, I plan to get the painful bit over quickly.
You were my pop culture baby, my repository of all things listenable and readable. My wish list was nigh-infinite — it was the crystal/digital box that held my dreams.
Your book and CD cover scans were plentiful like the stars in the night sky, and were easy to resize in Photoshop for use on Flak. Unlike the stars in the night sky, which would probably really fuck up Photoshop if they got within, say, a mile or two of the computer.
It's really over.
I can't believe it.
It's over, and it now falls to us — the Internet's unkillable cockroaches — to carry on. Flak will be there. Filmfodder will be there. Sweet Fancy Moses will be there. Ironminds will be there, although less frequently than in days past. The blogs will be there — the blogs got our back. We will carry on gallantly, surreptitiously running our FTPs during lunch and spending our evening hours editing content that gets read by a small audience of people we generally love.
And damned if we aren't fortunate to have the opportunity. God bless the Web, and in the name of the fallen, huzzah! Let the high-quality, non-pornographic, more-than-semi-literate posting and hitting continue!
E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.
