Of Douchebags and Asshats

Vanessa Grigoriadis has a 6,300-word piece in this week’s issue of New York Magazine about the web phenomenon known as Gawker Media, a digital empire founded by English recluse Nick Denton. Gawker’s holdings include Gizmodo (consumer electronics), Wonkette (Washington politics), Defamer (the entertainment industry), and Fleshbot (pornography). Grigoriadis’s sole focus, however, is Denton’s flagship site, gawker.com, which chronicles Manhattan media. Its mission is inscribed cheekily in its masthead: “Reporting live from the wordwide headquarters for the lucrative trade in ad hominem Internet biliousness.” I’ve visited the site daily for almost a year now and it pretty much defines the notion of guilty pleasure. Its tone of disgruntled bitchiness produces a style that, because of its superficiality, is eminently readable, but it can leave one pretty hollow if indulged in too compulsively. “Snarky” is the word commonly used to describe the Gawker style and Grigoriadis correctly identifies its infectiousness: “The tone [Denton] used for Gawker became the most important stylistic influence on the emerging field of blogging and has turned into the de facto voice of blogs today.” I want to find fault with the sweeping universality of this statement, but it’s pretty hard to argue with. When I think of blogging prose, I think snark, and for that I must begrudgingly tip my hat to Nick Denton.

Because its abuse is hurled primarily at the practitioners of traditional (i.e., printed) media, Gawker provides the vicarious pleasure of being in on the joke. It’s a site that treats journalists like celebrities and then gives them the Perez Hilton treatment. This application of tabloid hysteria to decidedly un-hip Gray-Old-Lady veterans is part of the site’s main appeal. For instance, Gawker writers practically salivate at any insider information on The New York Times, often printing e-mails sent by management and leaked by staffers, including several memorable memos taking reporters to task for flying first-class. It covered the death of “TimesSelect” with the kind of hyperbolic gusto usually reserved for corporate mergers.

Sometimes it seems that Gawker will post anything, no matter how insignificant, that comes from inside the newspaper of record. Last week, when a fire alarm went off at The New York Times's new headquarters on Eighth Avenue, Gawker immediately uploaded a post about this completely insignificant non-event, solely so its writers could fire off a couple of inside jokes. “THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER, RENZO PIANO,” a Gawker poster wrote, thus encapsulating in one sentence two primary Gawker characteristics. The first characteristic is a staff composed of over-educated liberal arts majors, whose knowledge of Yeats (from whom the above quotation is lifted) has ill-prepared them for a new media climate that increasingly devalues the printed word. The second characteristic is suggested by the expectation that you’ll know who Renzo Piano is. Unless you’re an architecture buff--or work for a Manhattan media company--you probably don’t know that Piano is the Italian architect who designed the new New York Times building. Gawker, above all else, prizes its own knowingness, despite the fact that the tone of most of its posts is that of a bitchy outsider.

Grigoriadis’s article is titled “Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass.” “Rage” may seem a but much, and I would have inserted “New York” before “creative underclass,” but otherwise it’s a perfect title. Everybody probably does suck when you are, as Grigoriadis writes, “depressed over the state of the industry and [your] inability to locate challenging work or a job with health insurance.” Gawker’s rise, Grigoriadis suggests, “dovetails” with the decline of printed media and its rants “fulfill a need” and that need is basically some sort of psychic release. “Youthful anxiety and generational angst about having been completely cheated out of ownership of Manhattan, and only sporadically gaining it in Brooklyn and Queens, has fostered a bloodlust for the heads of the douchebags who stole the city,” Grigoriadis writes.

And who are these douchebags? Well, they’re not solely media mavens whose bylines Gawker editors secretly covet. Recently, prolific Gawker poster Emily Gould submitted a profile of an Atlanta I-Banker named John Fitzgerald Page, in which she bestowed on him the title of “Worst Person in the World.” Apparently, Page, an aspiring actor as well as banker, had been approached on an Internet dating website by some woman who indicated, by sending him a "wink," she was interested in him. The response he sent back contained all manner of boorish boasts and dunderheaded queries. “I work out 4 times a week at LA Fitness,” Page wrote. “Do you exercise regularly? I am 6 feet tall, 185 pounds - what about yourself?” This display of machismo turned the lady off apparently, and she sent him a form e-mail in response saying she was no longer interested. Page, in turn, responded to her, saying:

“I think you forgot how this works. You hit on me, and therefore have to impress ME and pass MY criteria and standards - not vice versa. 6 pictures of just your head and your inability to answer a simple question lets me know one thing. You are not in shape. I am a trainer on the side, in fact, I am heading to the gym in 26 minutes!”

Page concluded his rant by noting that he can “bench/squat/leg press over 1200 lbs” (which is confusing, come to think of it; is he saying that he can actually bench 1200 lbs?) and suggesting that the “next time you meet a guy of my caliber, instead of trying to turn it around, just get to the gym!” So where does Gawker come into all of this? Well, the woman to whom Page unwisely subjected his ire, decided, rather than sit silent, to forward Mr. Page’s imperious diatribe to several hundred of her closest friends, at least one of whom, it would appear, works for Gawker.

Emily Gould, in full Gawker rage, slaughtered Page, and in an instant, transformed him from anonymous I-banker/background actor into a notorious Internet celebrity. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story on him, in which Page declined to comment unless paid. “Inside Edition is offering me cash for an exclusive,” he said. Page let his anger be known to Gawker, as well, threatening to get his “legal team” involved. Five days after that threat, a new page appeared on his website, hawking custom-made t-shirts with slogans taken from his e-mails, including, “I’ve had lunch with the Secretary of Defense,” and “I drive a Bimmer [sic] convertible.”

Page was a real find for Gould, Gawker’s 26-year-old editor cum sexpot, who was quoted by Grigoriadis as saying “Peering into my in-box in the morning is like looking at the id of every journalist in the city." It’s an angry, vindictive id, and Gawker writers are encouraged to give it full vent. Gawker, Grigoriadis writes, “pushes its writers to be honest in a way that’s not always found in print publications. Little is repressed; the id, and everything else, is part of the discourse (including exhibition and narcissism).” So much venting would seem to be cathartic, and no doubt it is to some degree—both for readers and for writers. But there’s clearly a cost. It can be measured in the degree to which the intensity of Gawker’s fury can turn a truly noxious person like John Fitzgerald Page into a nearly-pitiable subject. Early in her article, Grigoriadis has a telling quote from Gawker senior editor Choire Sicha, “Not a week goes by I don’t want to quit this job, because staring at New York this way makes me sick.”