19 Screenshots that Reveal the Hollowness of Business Insider and Modern Culture in General

Dilbert IS business, basically. Laugh and care about it to advance your career!

In an era of clickbait nonsense aggregation bullshit, online content in general is in danger of becoming a lobotomized, numbers-driven, shortform mess. When I state with confidence that using the internet can make a person extremely dumb, paranoid, hateful, angry, etc... I am speaking mostly about the content aggregator sites, although mainstream media websites and the 'respected' online only publications are also wracked with issues like poor editorial standards and their habit of mixing serious stories with internet culture fluff. The end result is an uncritical and uninformed mass of people with simplistic world-views and ideas who are around you, and vote and have jobs and discuss whatever malformed ideas they have with like-minded people and shout at those who disagree with them.

I started reading Business Insider earlier this year. I don't know why, I suppose I wanted a wider selection of sites and I'd never really frequented an aggregator before. I figured it would be helpful in determining what wider news trends were... but I was wrong, because Business Insider isn't a news site. It's an aggregator with a 'business' lifestyle slant, which means it will present you with the idols of the cult of success, the accouterments of the cult of success, and Forbes-like fawning and panic about wealth with a subset of stories about actual business some of which may have been bought and paid for by the businesses prominent in that story. Looking at you Shake Shack, Soul Cycle, whatever the newest 'Chipotle-killer' is, etc...

What kept me reading was that I wanted to see how low they'd go. Some of their clickbait articles are so obvious that the site functions as a sort of case study in the decline of news caused by the massive expansion into the void of the internet. The fact that the site was successful enough to be sold for millions (more millions than I'm comfortable with) is a sign that this kind of operation appeals to someone – even if that someone is just advertising and/or PR agencies or some guy with a cargo-cult mentality who thinks reading the imaginatively titled Business Insider will get him a corner office or board seat.

That's the thing, it's not insider information, it's widely available information with a few home-brewed stories... on the one hand they put money in the hands of the people who write useless internet articles, and as much as I do pity them, they are my kind and it's better that there are still jobs where people who write get jobs (even if they go through six or more years of post-secondary education just to write for Buzzfeed or BI). To me, it doesn't matter if that person cannot spell or use words properly,and doesn't know how to use contractions, doesn't have any real passion for language or writing... they could be the biggest, least ink-stained hack of all time but if they're getting six cents a word while a video producer or hype man is out of work, I'm happy. On the other, less expansive hand, they don't produce any 'good' stuff. They provide a service that generally repeats information for a layman crowd. Longform is dead, et cetera...

It's a website that's good at being a brand, and one of those new kinds of brands launched and owned by people slightly more web-savvy than the people who run newspapers, which even as I type it seems crazy, because everyone uses the internet now. The fact remains that traditional media have not adapted super well, I guess, because there are voids where a shrewd person can set up shop and in a few years be valued at millions of dollars.

But what kind of content... that's the important question, right? What's the kind of content they got? Well, it's an eyeful, and I've been filing away some of the more mordant, absurd, and frivolous examples:

The headlines are a schizoid mix of important news and 'content', which may affect the minds of long term readers.

Interested in the insider 'hack' about hotels that you probably never knew about?

["Oh, word?" -Ed.]

The Big Sigh: A Tired Take on Imgur

Imgur is an internet-famous image hosting service that grew into notoriety by giving reddit users a place to easily host, link, and post stuff. Somehow it became its own community, and, as you might expect from an image hosting service-turned-social hangout, it's a bizarre community filled with great examples of why I (and others like me) hate the internet. It's mildly disgusting, full of self-congratulation, exhibitionism, 'I'm a doctor and..." types of self experts, achievement sharers, content reposters, bottom-of-the-barrel memes, and all the stuff you wish would stop making you depressed and uncertain (or is that just me?) about the future of humanity.

I first used Imgur in 2011 because older image hosting services had expired, or I'd forgotten passwords, or were not as Web 2.0 easy to use and therefore afforded me very little in the way of quality service. Naturally I used it for a month, uploaded a total of eight images, and then forgot my password and didn't bother to use it for a long time. In that time I once again failed to be an internet poweruser and didn't get famous or really succeed at anything... but that's beside the point.

I'm not sure what the deal was in 2011 but I recently logged back in [Note: you don't have to log in to see pictures] and checked Imgur out because I'd heard somewhere that it was a hive of idiocy, reposted content, and was almost at the point where it would give Facebook or user comment sections a run for their money. Naturally, following the cringe-wave of modern internet trends, and hating myself, and out of damned curiosity, I dared to tread where so many retreaders tread water... I went in. I looked around... and I cringed like I had rarely cringed before. Oh I also saw a couple of cool things, so all in all I'd recommend the site. It's like reddit without (most of) the text. Interesting, for an image sharing website, it has a 'trophy' system and messaging services. If you love feature bloat, cyber inbreeding, and shaking your head in stunned belief – you're in luck, gentle reader!

What follows is an incomplete selection of self-unawares, overshares, and things that made me sigh and feel like I belonged to a dead-end species helping itself into a steep decline that will be interrupted when the machines which facilitated our decay finally achieve sentience... turning the world into a preschool/retirement community for a species that peaked sometime between fire and thumb twiddling about A.I. Enjoy the spectacle!

This gif is great. I don't know where it comes from. Probably some millenial kind of movie or show or youtube sensation. I've seen it a million times, but never seen it used to alert the internet to future sex. Good work and godspeed, young internet user and potential-sex-getter.

I believe I took a screenshot of this as a 'slice of life' of Imgur, if you will. Perhaps as a future project I will make an average aggregate slice which will always contain one kind of stupid meme, one kind of twitter repost, one cute animal thing, and a couple of bizarre 'who gives a shit?' images. That said, I might just enter the fray for those sweet, sweet Internet Points. You see, Imgur allows the same sort of content voting that reddit is famous for. Like child, like parent...

Here I took another slice for posterity... This one's worth a detailed look. A compiled and curated list of these would be amazingly depressing. More depressing than someone using a meme to alert the internet about an averted suicidal reasoning or cute gift ideas (hint: always fill in coupon with some kind of nonstandard sex act). That's two suicide posts in one slice... if this was a game of Imgur Bingo (copyright, me, 2015) this would probably win me an used iPod nano.

Hey girl, maybe focus on the wedding... this is ridiculous. You're almost a parody of the media's 'Millenial'. Maybe it's all just a joke, I hope so. Are the rest of the images worthwhile? You, as ever, decide. I didn't like it so much.