VOL 1, NO 10

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What was Vice? / If a tree falls in the woods and someone pulps it into a 90s’ magazine, is that a DOs or a DON’Ts?

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Vice is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

For much of its history, Vice (the royal Vice—an ever-evolving magazine thing and website thing and news thing and video thing and brand thing and aesthetic thing) seemed both outside and ahead and irreverent, but also reckless and gross and, well, douchebaggy. I loved Vice, even if they did seem singularly dedicated to never quite being the adult in the room.

I went to university in a small town in eastern Nova Scotia. We did not get Vice. If you were lucky (and happened to be in Halifax), you could get one at Blowers Street before they sold out. Occasionally I’d get some back issues sent to me via an informal network on a Canadian University Press listserv.

Here’s a screenshot of my first ever Amazon order:

That book was in the bathroom of me and my wife’s first apartment for five years, so I read it a lot of times, at least until iPhones got really good. A few years ago, I met Mack at a thing and told him I thought his dives into the right-wing extremes of Canada was the most important journalism happening. Vice was really cool!

But also: ❝Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership.❞ Well, yeah. There’s that. And that, too. This is a pretty a comprehensive accounting. It ain’t great. History is messy or something.

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Everything remains terrible. / 📰 When websites die, their content disappears. ❝Journalists spent the day downloading their articles as PDFs and saving links on public archive websites like the Wayback Machine.❞ / It’s getting pretty bad. ❝There are signs that the whole concept of ‘news’ is fading.❞ / It’ll probably get worse but also maybe better. Who knows. / Save newspapers: publish poetry. / 💽 Reddit and Tumblr and Wordpress, oh my. ❝The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for allegedly using its expansive archives without permission to train chatbots. […] Other companies have decided to make deals.❞ / 🍔 Surge-pricing your Baconator.

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