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.]

Continuing Canadian Context

Go ahead and ask them now, some weeks later, what the political landscape of Canada is. It features nothing the Group of Seven might have done except for the map with its abstract political colours. Harper is blue, Ignatieff is red, Layton is orange and May is green. Let's ponder these colours. Green is the colour of life, Orange is the colour of Hollander royalty, red is the colour of life (but also Soviets and the dying Maple Leaf). Blue is the colour of disenchantment, also of life, and thirdly of lack of options.

Since the election has been announced there has been a deafening silence about the government deficit and the global depression (or recession if you're an optimist, or end of capitalism if you're an alarmist) and everyone opened volleys of 'family politics' and other types of sensationalism. In this country you do not play politics on weighty issues. Let me explain: families, in Canada, are doing well. Most families are in the easy-to-control low-to-mid middle class, relatively wealthy, perhaps overspending on credit, but doing well and employed, with an exception rate of less than 10%. This comes out to maybe 15,000 out-of-work families facing destitution or hard times, probably half that and maybe even less than that.  There is no particular zone of concentration as in the '90s. The east coast probably can be weighted a little.

What makes this weak politics is that this group of people is easy to hoodwink. They think their fair taxes are monolithic tithes to the state. All an aspiring prime minister has to do is promise that these taxes will be reinvested into the middle class family background that pays the majority of them. It goes without saying that the poverty line does not discriminate between families and individuals, but families are more important. Help them, and help yourself to a political majority. This is all theory, but the parties have acted on it as if it were a rule.

So each of the big three politicians started election season by flogging family politics. Some friends of mine distilled it thusly: Conservatives meant a straight family with not even a gay child, while the Liberals and NDP would help any family.  Never mind the family unit is the sort of ancient structure that is known to be able to survive all kinds of nonsense. Maybe in the 'post-industrial' era families are endangered or suddenly overwhelmed by the corporate world structure. Anyways, because in most countries all people come from families, they are the safest bet for politics, and that is why for weeks there were shameless attempts by each party to win this faction over.

This is how majority politics works. I have no idea how these aspiring governments are planning to fund their extravagant family subsidies, but it will probably include wasteful consulting, forms in triplicate, and a communications blackout. Nearsightedness is a curse on the populace, but a blessing to the politicians.