4 the Baffler

Volume 2 NOl
Totentanz
TIwmas Frank, Dave Mulcahey, Conor O'Neil
When we launched this magazine back in 1988,
our beef with the world was simple and singular.
We objected to the deliberately obscure academic
style that was then applauded as political engage-
ment of the most advanced sort. We thought it
would be fun to heave some dead cats into the
sanctuary of high theory. The priestly class was
not amused.
One battle led to another, and over the years
we took on the culture industry's clamoring for
"alternative," its adoration of middleness, its cult
of youth. Through it all, what remained constant
was a sense of the poverty of profit, the absurdity
of the market, and the sheer, thundering clueless-
ness of mainstream cultural commentary.
It all came together for us in the late Nineties,
with all the new varieties of libertarianism that
arose to sing the coming of the millennial tech-
nogasm. The media were gulled as usual: The free-
market New Jerusalem was at hand, they agreed;
the information utopia had arrived.
We disagreed, of course. This was the beginning
of a high-tech "dark age," we insisted, not a ren-
aissance. It was a political triumph for particular
interests masquerading as an age of enlightenment.
If anything, the great Nineties info-glut marked
the termination of certain forms of economic rea-
soning' the replacement of traditional democratic
forms with the populism of the focus group. Oh,
for a day of reckoning, some historical earthquake
in which all the misconceptions were corrected
and all the charlatans exposed!
In retrospect, the catastrophes that have befallen
our friends in the "mainstream media" seem to
have been almost inevitable. The industry was
contemptuous of doubters like us. Its solons were
dedicated utterly to the superstitions of the mar-
ket, convinced in the face of all that is obvious
that the formula for success was to drain the last
bit of personality out of their product.
Although it's hard to remember nowadays, the
chieftains of monopoly journalism had arrogance
to burn. Their product was tepid, even banal, but
their attitude was Olympian. No sooner had their
"golden age" commenced in the Seventies than
they were celebrating themselves as "The Powers
That Be," as chuffed with their influence and as
enamored with the customs and rituals of author-
ity as have been any bunch of professional
courtiers since the dawn of time.
And now. In the space of a few short years, they
have gone from lofty lordliness to whimpering
irrelevance. The wipe-out has been awesome in
its sweep, and it grows more devastating by the
day. In the legendary newspaper town of Chicago,
both surviving papers are in bankruptcy. Labor
reporters are gone; book review sections are just
about extinct; newsroom staffs are being deci-
mated; investigative units are disappearing. Towns
go from two papers to one paper to no paper, and
it generates not even a ripple of surprise.
We take no joy in watching this danse macabre.
Newspapers may have done their job poorly, but
the answer is hardly to renounce the job itself.
With their eclipse is coming a parallel collapse of
public knowledge, a catastrophic shutdown of
scrutiny whose costs we will never be able to cal-
culate. Places such as New York and Washington,
of course, will always be over-described territory,
abundant plains where the dwindling tribe of the
pundits can hunt their game in perpetuity. But in
the lesser metropolises of the republic, the lights
are already going out. Already the people of those
places don't know much more about those who
rule them than their rulers choose to divulge. We
fear that TV producer David Simon has it right
when he warns, "The next 10 to 15 years will be
halcyon days for local corruption. It's going to
be a great time to be a corrupt politician. "
What has precipitated the great journalism
die-off, ironically, is a massive overproduction
The Raffler
TOlenlazl Thomas Frank, Dave Mulcahey, Conor O'Neil
of content. The abundance of information and
connectivity we were promised in the early days
of the World Wide Web has duly arrived, trailing
its clouds of glory. But it is the consumer, not the
producer, who sings hosanna. The voracious news
reader- and there are more of us than ever- has
countless newspapers at his disposal, proffering
their contents for free. But it seems free is not a
very good price for publishers.
And so we read, we comment, we blog volu-
minously. But what we can't do on our own is
the kind of literary work that requires reporters,
editors, organizations.
It is doubly ironic that we are losing our facul-
ties of inquiry at precisely the moment when
public-minded scrutiny of our institutions is
most needed. The economic collapse oi 2008 was
a direct consequence of scrutiny's demise, in his
case as a result of the great political project of
regulatory rollback. with bankers and brokers
and mortgage entrepreneurs freed from the
intrusive gaze of the public. Financial journalists,
too, played their appointed role in the disaster,
transforming themselves over the years into cheer-
leaders for the market and fans of this or that
hero CEO. The coming collapse of journalism will
merely finish the job of deregulation that the
market's allies began.
And surely it can only be described as a bonus
triple-irony hat-trick that what the nation is
doing to fend off the coming reign of ignorance-
i.e., nothing- is already being described in the
happy, reassuring terms of the very order that
has brought us to these straits: "The marketplace
will sort this out," says Chris Anderson of good
old Wired magazine, an institution that will
apparently stand forever beyond the sobering
influences of shame or bankruptcy.
And as we stand before the market's judgment
seat awaiting that great sort -out - which will
undoubtedly cause all surviving journalistic
organisms to evolve ever closer to the libertarian
views of the foundations that will fund them-
we can't help but ponder the perversity of it all.
The great, long-running contest between art
and commerce is coming to an end, and com-
merce is preparing to declare unconditional
victory. From experimental novelists right down
to journalistiC legmen, those who work with
words are to become society's interns. We will
all work for free, the market is telling us, or we
won't work at all.
But those who provide the useful social function
of crafting derivatives and corporate mergers-
why, nothing is too good for them. They can even
crash the global economy, and society will reach
out a helping hand to get them on their feet again.
Art is short, but Wall Street is forever.
And so the culture war fmally comes home.
Not only is our criticism debatable; the very exist-
ence of journals like this one is a standing affront,
a condition of which society will soon be cured.
For us, of course, that means it's the perfect
time to re-launch The Baffler magazine. As the
world careens one way we faithfully steer the
other. Print is dead, they say; we double down
in our commitment to the printed word. Brevity
is the fashion; we bring you long-form cultural
criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality.
We look out at this upside-down landscape and
are convinced that what it requires is not silence
but a strong dose of our particular brand of scoff-
ing: Strong ideas, elegantly expressed. And so,
once more into the breach.