Unjust by Noah Rothman

Author:Noah Rothman [Rothman, Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621579052
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

An Unethical Business Model

Anyone examining the modern social justice movement quickly encounters a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Which came first, a movement that is so myopically obsessed with identity that it can’t distinguish a legitimate case of discrimination from a ginned-up contretemps, or the media culture that exploits that obsession for profit? For clarity on this question, consider the rise and decline of Mic.com.

PolicyMic, a website targeting a burgeoning audience of news-consuming millennials, launched in 2010. Like many sites of that period, it cast a wide a net by publishing a lot of material, often with the help of “aggregation”—scraping content from other sites with bigger budgets and real reporters and writing some original opinion around it, thereby avoiding the legal mess associated with the outright theft of material. Many aggregators paid their staffers poorly, if at all, but they gave young writers a valuable platform. Their potential in the early age of social media—and it was often just potential—led to speculative ten-figure valuations and venture funding in the tens of millions of dollars.

PolicyMic was one of the more successful such sites. By 2013, it had found its niche as a left-leaning outlet catering to the growing obsession with identity, launching a section dedicated exclusively to Identitarianism and the traffic generated by that special brand of narcissism.

“At PolicyMic Identities, we aim to feature articles as thoughtful, complex, and unique as the stories of our generation,” read a job listing for that site. “We examine what it’s like to be a white woman of color, explore what it means to be a male feminist, talk back to the Pope as a young gay man, and reflect on how Abercrombie & Fitch failed you and other homeless youth.”35 Vital stuff.

The site expanded rapidly. By the end of 2013, it published almost a hundred posts per day, generating tens of millions of unique visitors and boasting a network of thousands of writers. That success was reduced to a formula, and that formula was built around the idea that social justice activism was fueled by anxiety, a preoccupation with oneself, and the need for a constant stream of new enemies.

In 2014, PolicyMic rebranded itself “Mic” and dedicated its staff to chasing whatever traffic Facebook had sent its way the day prior. “I think a lot of people in today’s day and age want to know, ‘What are we supposed to be outraged about?’ ” a former Mic staffer told the liberal website The Outline. “Mic realized earlier than most places that they could commodify people’s feelings about race and gender.”36

Mic relied on rote efforts to stoke anger—anything that encouraged the perception that the Anglo-American West, in particular, is steeped in racial injustice. “ ‘Minority Report’ Is Real—And It’s Really Reporting Minorities,” read one typical headline. In another, a description in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph of the first female head of the BBC as a “mother of three” was described by one no doubt childless Mic reporter as “sexism at its worst.” When the comedian Sasheer Zamata left NBC’s Saturday

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