“Dudley Newright” wrote on X:
I was there, in the 2010s, when they stopped hiring white guys. I worked for a big media company in the big city. Terrible pay, but fun to hang out with creative types all day. Everyone was white.
One day one of us wrote a snarkier headline than our usual fare. The piece triggered huge engagement from angry boomer conservatives. Where were they coming from? Facebook, it turned out.
Yarvin traces “woke” to a mutation of Protestantism. Others place it at the feet of Marx or Foucault or the Frankfurt School. I blame Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook was becoming something more than just a place to look at your buddy’s new girlfriend’s beach vacation pics. They had just IPO’d, and in order to keep growing they had to be a site you’d want to check when you woke up, on your lunch break, or for hours at a time. The “newsfeed” was already years old, but it was evolving from a collection of updates from your friends – people you actually knew IRL – to ALL news.
Facebook was not just a site that you’d visit, but THE site, an always-on portal to the rest of the internet. Before that, people used to actually type “gawker dot com” into their browser’s address bar and then peruse a listing of the most recent posts. Now, all content discovery was starting to happen via social feeds, like the one you’re looking at right now. Back then, it was happening mostly through Facebook, which controlled the biggest feed by far.
We writers knew that it was a losing game in the long term. We knew ad-supported media was a race to the bottom, but if you could please this thing we were starting to call “The Algorithm,” you could get millions of hits and a fat performance bonus for your story.
So hundreds of 20-somethings in Brooklyn began writing with the goal of trolling Facebook boomers to harvest their attention for ad revenue. Every site quickly became a politics site. If you were writing about tech or sports or celeb gossip or your first period (Teen Vogue), you had to be pushing at the boundaries of what older heartland dwellers found acceptable, so that they would flip out, leave a comment, and juice The Algorithm. A new ideologically-driven class of jumped up millennial journalists figured out that they could make a little money condemning and ridiculing their parents. They weren’t earning enough to establish themselves as adults, but they were “making an impact.”
Before this, your mother-in-law in Boise probably did not care much about politics. She just wanted to look at her niece’s baby pics. But Zuckerberg made her look at ten ragebait articles to do so. And after 20 years of this, she’s now a psychotic libtard. Now everyone’s psychotic about politics. Thanks, Mark.
Quite suddenly, every person in the developed world was exposed to a firehose of the political opinions of a few hundred Brooklynite hipsters with pretty fringe politics, all trying to outdo each other in how provocative they could be, because their rent depended on it.
It’s not like sensationalist news didn’t exist before, but this content flooded the feed so comprehensively that it was all you’d ever see. You weren’t looking at the front page of a newspaper with a bunch of carefully arranged stories intended to represent a broad look at current events anymore, you were getting drip fed the most unhinged content – one insane take after another. And if you were a normie, you internalized this, and began to see this extreme brand of politics as far more normative than it actually was, because it was all you and everyone else were seeing online. Thanks Mark!
This is when the deranged headlines began to appear ("Inspiring: Area Mom Holds Inclusive Beauty Pageant for Queer Toddlers"). A slew of clickbaity media startups (Mic, Buzzfeed, Daily Dot, Mashable) arose to exploit what was essentially a temporary infinite money glitch enabled by Facebook. Legacy media companies had to start playing the game too, lest they lose their audiences to edgier platforms.
One of the most reliable ways to get a ton of traffic was to “call out” an organization for not being sufficiently down with the cause. The massive global scale that Facebook had enabled made cancellations a bread-and-butter content genre. A new class of op-ed writers styling themselves as influencers created a new news beat, calling out organizations of all types for not being sufficiently down with the progressive cause. They even called out their own companies’ leadership, and for the first time, got away with it. A decade prior they would have just fired your ass. But the leadership of these companies shrugged their shoulders and let the kids run wild because the money was pouring in and they didn’t want to be the ones to get got.
As this escalated, it became increasingly untenable from an optics perspective for media companies to maintain majority-white-male staff when they were so busy calling everything out. It looked better to hire women to call out men, and blacks to call out whites. It wasn’t an official meeting, or an articulated directive, it was an off-hand comment made by an editor: “We gotta get some women in here, lol.” Then, “we gotta get some POC in here, lol.” Increasingly nervous laughter.
Almost overnight, nobody wanted to run an office with the “About Us” page featuring nothing but a bunch of crusty, musty white guys. You didn’t have to be the most diverse group, but you couldn’t put a target on your back by being the least. And then once HR hired a few nons, they didn’t want to be accused of bringing in a few tokens just for plausible deniability. So they hired more.
It was an especially cheap and effortless hack for media companies to do this because tons of VC dollars were sloshing around to try to capture all that Facebook traffic. The money flowed and the ratchet turned. Soon other industries with highly-educated, oversocialized employees likely to care about progressive issues – academia, Hollywood, tech – followed suit.
At first it was just blatantly discriminatory hiring practices ("C’mon HR, chill with the white guy resumes,” and within a few years it was institutionalized in fellowships, mentorships, employee resource groups – an entirely new HR superstructure built up with the implicit, and in some cases explicit, goal of de-centering the voices of creative-ass white boys. Everything in Jacob Savage’s viral essay about this is true, and it all shifted over the course of about a year. Everyone knew it was happening and either thought white guys had it coming, or didn’t dare protest for fear of total career annihilation.
At every step, the (white) leadership of these companies let the kids run wild, because the money was rolling in, and it wasn’t hurting the quarterly earnings report (yet). They knew they’d face annoying PR and legal problems if they fought it, so they let the ratchet turn. At every step, they did the math that it would be less risky to let the insane leftist egregore have a small bite of their company. Most of these brands have since been sold and re-sold and stripped for parts btw. It wasn’t just the abandonment of merit-based hiring that killed these companies – the Facebook money spigot couldn’t flow forever – but it didn’t help.
I remember visiting a media company around 2015 that was very “hot” at the time, and the news floor was a sea of very young and hip-looking faces, mostly women and POC. Every once in a while a Steve Ballmer-looking guy in pleated khakis would emerge grinning from a corner office for a coffee refill. He’d peer out over the open-plan desks and hear fingers busily tapping on Macbooks. I sometimes wonder if that guy was smiling because he took pride in being a force for change, or if he was just waiting out the clock, and thinking about that lakehouse on Zillow.
* * *
My favorite memory from this era is this picture of a dozen white women, which was tweeted out in 2016 with the caption: “Notice anything about this Huffington Post editors meeting? 💃💃💪🏼💪🏼”
Some poor girl thought this was going to be an iconic image of a bold new media era, where finally women would have a voice, only for it to be roundly ridiculed across dozens of thinkpieces for not including enough POC.
