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.]

Wikipedia Style Guide

If there was a style guide for Wikipedia (I didn't check) it would above all recommend 'the clinical tone of impartial record/sterile chronicle', which is an understandable and even commendable tone for a project that aims to encompass and provide the sum of human knowledge via the internet. However there are moments in which one can discern a personality beyond the dry Wikipedia tone ^{[citation needed]}. Sometimes it's a vandal or prankster, and those always lead to the greatest moments of Wikipedia, or the lowest, really. Most of the time it's just the earnest work of the tireless Wikipedian.

I wrote this because I don't believe there is a style guide for Wikipedia at all. There should be a set of loose recommendations and perhaps an editor. I can't blame a non-profit organization for not hiring a full time editor and I can't imagine anyone would particularly want the job (except hungry washed-out writers and editorial staff currently retraining out of Journalism into promising careers like banking, plumbing, or manual labor). Still, it would help a bit. I'm sure that individuals with a highly developed sense of grammar or the English language at large could find spelling and grammar errors at a ratio of .79 : 1 per Wikipedia page.

I know there's not a style guide because articles vary so wildly. Many are written in a serviceable and innocuous style. In the best articles there is no digression and very little error. In the worst, well, you find some surprising laziness. I don't know who exactly the wikipedia editors are – and I'm sure many of them are very well-intentioned,  knowledgeable, and capable people – but I get the sense they all have a musty internet smell about them ^{[citation needed]}. If they are the standard model for the librarians of the future, we may be doomed, for they will push the business of information right into the private market and/or entertainment industry. Maybe that prediction is a bit pessimistic, but we have no way of knowing whether it was something I wrote with an ironic smirk or caustic dismissal.

Unemployed university graduates, well-intentioned but 'eccentric' private citizens, and pedants make up probably 60% of Wikipedia editors, according to my highly amusing mental image of the average Wikipeditor. The other 40% is probably a remarkable melange of humanity, but I like to focus on the imaginary majority. They are all selflessly promoting the encapsulation and easy retrieval of verified, unbiased, correct information. It's a goal so lofty and impressive it makes me tender-hearted. I wish to offer my sincere thanks for the service, which has absorbed many of my spare hours and to which many more will doubtless be sacrificed, as long as the quality and tone do not spiral out of control.

Am I ridiculous? Allow me to demonstrate my point about Style and Usage, and a further point about the Illiteracy of the Internet Person. I will visit a prominent page of high stature (RoboCop, the 1985 Paul Verhoven movie) and traffic and look around innocently enough for some awkward constructions, grammar violations, and whatever else I deem fucked enough for notice.

Ah. These are the excerpts that inspired me. A pair of beauties. Shall I? I don't particularly want to, you understand: I get no pleasure from this, it's just part of the thing I'm writing a blog post about and nothing personal. I don't know if the RoboCop article gets the Wikipedia Writing A-Team, and if it doesn't, as stated above ^[where?] I understand that it's not professional copy or anything jesus christ leave an old man alone!

Anyways, 'having come off doing the special effects' as a construction is bad even for the 'first year University student's first hungover all-nighter' level. It's a special blend of missing prepositions and hazy colloquialism. I think it stinks, quite honestly. Shit. If this was written by a person with a post-secondary degree, any degree at all, they can fuck off and get schooled about how to write or leave their helpful insights out of the mix ^{[citation needed]}. Even done right ('Having come off of doing the special effects') the phrase is an inefficient abortion. The green line serves to indicate the thrust of the sentence, which asserts (via the erratic grammar of an illiterate) that the studio deciding about Bottin was itself coming off of doing the special effects for John Carpenter's The Thing. Where Bottin is even involved is impossible to discern, unless of course you're not a grammar machine and understand context. However, the lazy error stands, and goddamn it.

As for the inclusion of the second excerpt, I believe you know why I included the second excerpt. Redundancy is wasteful even at the level of the miniscule amount of bytes it takes to write a redundant element into a sentence. It also makes reading anything suck more than it has to, and in that way encourages illiteracy. Unacceptable. I'm not offended or outraged, I'm just having a bit of a laugh ^{[oh yeah?]} because 1) I want to have fun, and 2) I think that impeccable content is impossible in Wikipedia, which means the amount of awkward sentences and poorly disguised opinion (which I didn't even get into at all, but might at a later date) is potentially limitless! It's kind of fun, to me at least, and could be funny to others as well! Yeah, jokin' about Wikipedia. Good stuff.