THE ZOMBIE WEB MARCHES ON

This week Deadspin, as we knew it, died. If you didn’t read Deadspin regularly, it - like most of the former Gawker subsites - was a generally left-wing sports coverage site with a bunch of lifestyle and politics stuff on the side. It was profitable and popular despite having been through multiple ownership changes, and that will probably change in the near future because this is how business works now.

Deadspin is presently owned by G/O Media, a company that was formed when a private equity firm named Great Hill Partners bought it from Univision along with the other former Gawker Media sites (like Kotaku, Jalopnik, Gizmodo and Jezebel - and also The Onion, which wasn’t a Gawker site but which was folded into the website group when Univision bought a stake in The Onion), which had in turn purchased it from Gawker Media when Gawker spiralled into bankruptcy after Peter Thiel funded a defamation lawsuit launched by Hulk Hogan with the obvious intent of bankrupting a media outlet that had been critical of him, which was really the canary in the coal mine with respect to billionaires co-opting the entire journalism industry. Deadspin housed most of the more left-wing authors at G/O Media - great writers like Drew Magary, Albert Burneko, David Roth, Lauren Theisen, Patrick Redford and many others. These writers were not, like, moonlighting at Jacobin or anything; we are not talking about radical Marxists here, but left-wing writers with high-quality bullshit filters (so, so important in sportswriting) who wanted to write about sports and mostly did so very well. The writers were popular, the site was profitable - it is important to stress that this website made money - and things were generally good.

Over the past six months, G/O Media have been gradually ramping up editorial influence on their website network - in particular firing multiple experienced editors and complaining about stories focused on, well, G/O Media. (Go read “The Adults In The Room” by Megan Greenwell, which is a harsh and excellent piece of writing about MBA-think and how it has applied to Gawker Media properties. Since it’s on Deadspin, read it before they delete it - which is definitely a possibility.) This past week G/O Media execs handed down the edict from on high to Deadspin - “stick to sports.” Never mind that Deadspin could prove with actual data that non-sports pieces were consistently some of their most popular stories: G/O Media didn’t want all that non-sports in their sports site. Staff responded to this edict in the only way possible: namely, by publishing only non-sports stories for a day. The non-sports stories all did extremely well in terms of pageviews and analytics and other web-publishy things, of course. (The champion story in terms of reader engagement was entitled “Three Good Dogs I Met,” written by Tom Ley, about three dogs he recently met while in Mexico City.) Commenters flooded the site to support Deadspin as it existed, and in response the site shut down all comments, because why would you want your readers to tell you you’re wrong?

G/O Media then fired Deadspin editor Barry Petchesky for “not sticking to sports.” Within the next two days, the entire staff of Deadspin quit in response, because A) the writing was now on the wall and B) fuck those bosses. Deadspin still technically exists, of course - although at this point new articles are all bylined “by Deadspin Staff” because nobody willing to take a paycheque from G/O Media wants to be known as a scab - but the quality and pride is obviously gone. It exists now only as a brand, much in the same way that Sports Illustrated fired most of its online staff earlier this year or how LA Weekly fired most of its editorial staff right after being bought by a new conservative publisher or how numerous other existing and respected media properties have been hollowed out. Partially this is because news writing is valued less and less these days, but partially it’s because rich people don’t like being told “you’re wrong” and they also don’t like being criticized and journalists are often the sort of people who will do both.

Again: this is how the media world works now, and all the moreso as corporate concentration of media hollows out more and more newspapers and websites all around the world. (It’s happening in Canada right now with PostMedia, which is running on enormous amounts of debt and cutting staff at all of the papers they operate. The board of directors still gets pay raises, of course.) All of this is, of course, extremely depressing.

THIS WEEK IN BAD CLIMATE CHANGE NEWS

So it turns out all of our oceanic sea-rise data was wrong, and wrong in the way that means it is actually worse than it is.

There’s a very famous interactive map out there that depicts the effects of global sea rise on a Google Maps projection - you can find it easily enough without my help but you’ve almost certainly seen it already sometime in the past decade and fiddled with it to see when your home gets submerged. But here is the problem: that map is based on elevation data that is faulty, because when satellite imaging tries to depict elevation, it sort of gets confused by, say, thick tree cover. Or the tops of buildings. Basically, when you have a lot of taller than average things in a compressed space, the computers get confused and decide that the top of the tall things is the actual surface level of the ground.

So some clever scientists found a way to correct for this and then fed the new elevation data into the flooding model, and oh man it’s such bad news. The most dramatic part is where essentially all of southern Vietnam - all of it - is underwater at high tide by 2050. Bangladesh is also mostly entirely underwater as well. If that’s not enough for you, plenty of major cities are likewise submerged - Mumbai, Bangkok, New Orleans, Sacramento, Guangzhou, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Shanghai, London, and Hiroshima are all basically completely underwater, and plenty of other major cities will have significant portions of their cities flooded. (For Canadian readers, the only city that is completely submerged is Richmond, BC - but Vancouver, Halifax, Quebec City and Fredericton all also suffer major flooding.)

Again: 2050. This is most likely within my lifetime, and probably yours as well.

(Speaking of climate change news: a recent report by Carbon Tracker suggests that in order to meet 2040 carbon targets, fossil fuel companies worldwide will have to collectively cut production by forty percent. I mention this just as some Wexit ralliers in Alberta are being retweeted into my Twitter feed, because humans have priorities that are not always sensible.)

TRADE NEWS: THE NEWS THAT IS BORING BUT IMPORTANT!

Trade deals are some of the driest reading imaginable because A) large-scale trade flows are hard for us mere mortals to comprehend most of the time so we resort to microeconomic scaling metaphors about “your avocados and toasters will be cheaper now but your florist will probably go out of business” which both tend to be sort of wrong and don’t really make anybody smarter about this, and B) because trade policy is inherently boring and the deals take years to be agreed upon and the effects take years after the deal gets agreed upon to really become evident. But it’s still important, so let’s chat briefly about the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, even though those four words together just… sound boring, don’t they?

The RCEP is a proposed trade bloc that would be the biggest in the world in terms of sheer population: it would include (deep breath, here we go) China, India, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. These sixteen countries are sometimes called “ASEAN Plus Six” because the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been a regional intergovernmental co-operation agency for almost sixty years now but it’s mostly been the smaller countries in the region and the bigger powers (China, India, South Korea and Japan) and the still-white-dominant ones (Australia and New Zealand) have been gradually trying to figure out how they should all mesh together. (By all accounts India is still the biggest sticking point, which makes sense because, well, it’s huge and relatively rich.)

Until 2016, the United States was also heavily involved in this, and in fact this was the entire idea behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the trade policy that lots of people hated, many of whom could not reasonably explain why (and a few who could, of course). The basic idea behind TPP - and I am painting in super broad strokes here, so broad that Bob Ross would be concerned - was that the USA wanted to contain China’s trading power by creating a large trade alliance of Everybody Around China Except Not China, which would encourage international trade around China rather than what often happens now, which is that China is sort of a trade hub where everybody trades with them first and foremost because they’re huge. It took basically a decade to put together, and I say this with some reservation because I actually can explain why TPP was in some respects quite bad (the intellectual property rules it would have created are a major part of it). But it was a mammoth amount of work to get all those countries to agree to what was essentially a contain-China policy intended to, let’s be honest, primarily benefit the United States. And then Donald Trump killed it, and that was that.

China, naturally, saw opportunity here because of course there’s opportunity here, so they’ve been working diligently to create a new Asia-first trade bloc that leaves the USA (and Canada, of course) out. It still might not pan out, because as I said India is already hedging and also because negotating these deals takes years and years. But: it’s happening (slowly), and the thing about trade deals is that they reshape society (slowly), not just in an economic sense but in all other respects as well.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Ad Astra (2019, James Gray, theatre) - 4/5

Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho, theatre) - 5/5

Catch-22 (1970, Mike Nichols, Kanopy) - 4/5

Missing Link (2019, Chris Butler, Amazon Prime) - 3.5/5

Pretty good week for movies! And that was pretty much all we did this week.

See you in seven.