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.]

Swiss Fail to Change Important Thing: Small Swiss Story

In Switzerland, often mentioned as one of the best places in the world to be born into (it's basically a super elite club even if you sweep the streets or are congenitally unemployable – but your German better be legible). It's the perfect blend of right wing nonsense (stolen Jewish wealth, mandatory conscription, high rates of gun ownership) with left wing nonsense (neutrality, direct democracy [non of the corrupt and apathetic representative shit], multilingualism, environmental awareness, and scientific aspiration) and stuff anyone can enjoy like a literate and well educated populace, wealth beyond measure, and low crime rates. It makes wealthy enclaves in otherwise first world countries look like rat holes for spiteful misers, and it makes one think it will take about a million years for the rest of the world to get anywhere near that point. Switzerland is roughly that good, so good it makes Germany look less perfect (but you're still pretty good, Germany, keep your head up, your most corrupt industries probably help Switzerland all the time) but because Switzerland is a human enterprise*, it's a damn ways away from perfect.

"But even we, the vaunted and legendary Swiss, will hold our well-to-do poor hostage for increased profit and an 'A+' grade by business fuckers like Forbes Weekly. "**

The most recent initiative, which was overturned by direct democracy, was to limit executive pay to only 12 times what the lowest earner in the company made. Seems pretty good, right? The man or woman sitting on his or her ass and occasionally sweating when tax season or investigators come around still gets to make waaaaay more than the person sweeping the floors and cleaning the toilets. And this is Switzerland, so the person cleaning the toilets is banking decent pay in a very stable currency. In many ways, had it passed, it would have set a precedent that agitators around the world could've used to influence their corporate/government complexes to perhaps setting a 1:50 or 1:100 cap. But capping max pay is not a free market thing, apparently, even though it frees up wealth to do other things than pay 30,000 dollar tabs and buy 25 million dollar yachts and drink 1000 dollar mineral waters and whatever the hell else good money is pissed away into these days.

Needless to say, the trickle-down crowd won a spiritual victory in Switzerland earlier this year.

Inequality is the cause celebre of anyone who gives a fuck about the poor right now. Incidentally, correcting this imbalance will probably also have good effects on other non-destitute levels of society around the world and only be moderately bad to luxury industries that are populated by assholes and cater mostly to exhibitionists, miser spendthrifts, borderline sociopaths, and their hopeless children. With opulence running out of hand while poor people openly starve (in the era when humanity can split the atom [and see beyond it] and use robots to land robots on the surface of Mars) it is pretty obvious that wealth inequality is a problem. It's too complex to solve via blog, I am certain of that much. In a repressive oligarchy like anything in the Americas one would not expect any rich person, from drug warlord to white collar criminal to CEO (most of these guys work together and sometimes all three are the same guy), to give up a cent of their millions/billions for the poor, but in Europe, that 'socialist' den, they actually don't go crazy for the idea either.

You're outta luck, poor people! Aha, but then you're used to that....

It was something like 65% to 34%. Turns out Switzerland could give a fuck what the USA thinks about being the most right and prosperous country, because Switzerland pretty much invented inhuman rightist corporatism and are too neutral to be proud even. Anyone else get a chill down their spine just now? The downtrodden of the world are still looking for a precedent while the rampant worship of fundamentalist extremist oligarchy continues unabated and without any checks on its progress. The small people can eat their hats, as usual, so don't get excited or anything.

(* - I'm beginning to doubt the Swiss even did anything about the poisoned dolphin situation)

(** - not an actual quote or intended to represent any actual Swiss oligarch)