That’s part of my excuse for knowing about Gawker and its innocent sequel Buzz Feed. I wanted to be in the know.
I don’t know as I’ve ever become so devoted to an enemy. I’ve known that this happens in life, but it’s never happened to me. I visited Gawker frequently, as if I were entertained instead of regularly and reliably enraged. Its writers and editors were alternately Stasi-like informants when sincere, childish, mealy mouthed tattlers when they are ‘joking’. It’s adoring and loyal community of commenters were a sneering, ill-tempered Smart Set, mutual admirers, out-spoken snobs, elite and actually quite conventional and predictable in their attitudes and tastes (which they wore like freak flags, so very proud). As I’m sure I make clear, it was this ‘comment-arriate’ I disliked the most. Gawker was hugely popular for an internet enterprise so this was a large group of people, talking about a great many subjects (Gawker could have from 20 to 50 posts a day). Now and then someone —maybe a smart, saintly troll though I never came across any other and I doubt it—would write simply and beautifully: “I love irony”.
