The Chaos at Condé Nast(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
The Chaos at Condé Nast
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/style/details-dan-peres-book.html
46 comments
The show "Californication" is a pretty good representation of the time period.
> The fashion magazine business was about selling pharma and cosmetic ad space in front of people who can both read and yet still choose to read about celebrities. I don't know how it survives now.
Your opening point was poorly articulated. The US has a literacy rate of 99%. Similar rates prevail throughout the developed world.
Your opening point was poorly articulated. The US has a literacy rate of 99%. Similar rates prevail throughout the developed world.
those must the the readers mentioned above
https://twitter.com/LovelyGeezer66/status/122965701535142297...
> "It was obviously bad that this culture existed the way it did, but it started because they valued creativity and the kind of people that were creative.”
No, no, no. Being an asshole is not a signal you are creative. It's a signal of limited market options for the people that have to put up with you. In this case, there were a limited number of "cool" magazines in NYC to work at an extreme amounts of competition for the limited spots.
You know what group of people are crazy creative and not assholes? Session musicians. It's literally their job to show up and make up something good on the spot, but equally importantly, not derail the production with bullshit. And you know why? Because the people working with them have lots of other options for the most part.
No, no, no. Being an asshole is not a signal you are creative. It's a signal of limited market options for the people that have to put up with you. In this case, there were a limited number of "cool" magazines in NYC to work at an extreme amounts of competition for the limited spots.
You know what group of people are crazy creative and not assholes? Session musicians. It's literally their job to show up and make up something good on the spot, but equally importantly, not derail the production with bullshit. And you know why? Because the people working with them have lots of other options for the most part.
Takes me back to the 10x programmer converstaion on HN a day or two back. People are really bad at identifying what actually makes people productive and so you have a million people who not only think that being productive excuses being an asshole but that somehow being an asshole is inextricably linked with their productiveness. Imagine is we had a group of people who insisted they wear red jumpers because that's what 10x-ers do. Oh wait, that's literally fashion and that's literally a mechanism people in creative industries signal they're the right type of creative.
I feel like there's a lot of parallels in tech, with the exception maybe being consultants <-> session musicians, in that they are often hired based on checklist criteria and ability to sell themselves.
It's a cesspool coated with gloss.
Even when they talk about it today you can smell the pretentiousness, grandiose fake nihilism and the sorry-not-sorry in their words.
And these vapid know-it-alls are still calling the shots today in terms of "culture", bad words and cancel culture. It's mostly not in print but these people have an amazing capability of putting themselves close to power and money.
Even when they talk about it today you can smell the pretentiousness, grandiose fake nihilism and the sorry-not-sorry in their words.
And these vapid know-it-alls are still calling the shots today in terms of "culture", bad words and cancel culture. It's mostly not in print but these people have an amazing capability of putting themselves close to power and money.
One of the reasons it seems outlandish to us here is that computer stuff generally requires a mental acuity that is difficult to achieve when you're strung out on drugs/partying. So people like this typically wash out pretty fast.
But I did once work with a "Chief Architect of Data Science" who was only putting in 10 hours a week remotely for what was supposed to be a full time position.
The magic trifecta was that he was well credentialed, somebody's crony, and completely full of shit; so the hedge fund guys employing him didn't know any better.
But I did once work with a "Chief Architect of Data Science" who was only putting in 10 hours a week remotely for what was supposed to be a full time position.
The magic trifecta was that he was well credentialed, somebody's crony, and completely full of shit; so the hedge fund guys employing him didn't know any better.
> fake nihilism
Who would fake nihilism? And why?
Who would fake nihilism? And why?
Because when faced with the meaningless of everything it's cool to look cool and detached while behind closed doors shitting yourself and popping pills left and right trying to maintain that image.
Your initial comment is on-point, except I don't think any of these people are identifying with or as nihilists.
They are invariably politically leftists. Which is where contemporary "bad words and cancel culture" come from.
The irony of being ostensibly "leftist" while flashing a 0.1% lifestyle of "knowing the room service menu at the Ritz by heart" and getting high in first class.
You may be referring to a particular brand of "excuse me for being a degenerate occasionally, but you know my heart is in the right place and I'm a friend of the proletariat" sort of leftism, but it's definitely not a nihilism and they'll definitely parrot the right leftist lines at parties or they'll lose their little perch in a heartbeat.
They are invariably politically leftists. Which is where contemporary "bad words and cancel culture" come from.
The irony of being ostensibly "leftist" while flashing a 0.1% lifestyle of "knowing the room service menu at the Ritz by heart" and getting high in first class.
You may be referring to a particular brand of "excuse me for being a degenerate occasionally, but you know my heart is in the right place and I'm a friend of the proletariat" sort of leftism, but it's definitely not a nihilism and they'll definitely parrot the right leftist lines at parties or they'll lose their little perch in a heartbeat.
I think leftism has a particular appeal for culture types because it's traditionally been the case (until 1980 or so) that capitalism didn't really have much of a place for culture - which was traditionally a poor product, and the better it was as culture, the worse it sold.
There's also the traditional aristocratic looking-down-upon-the-bourgeois for their grubby and banal mindsets, which has got sort of subsumed into leftism because there aren't many aristocrats left. Adorno is a kind of good exposition of this sort of thing.
Lastly, it's very traditional. The French revolution, at least in the early stages, was basically bankrolled and sheltered by L Phillipe de Orlean, the first prince of the blood.
There's also the traditional aristocratic looking-down-upon-the-bourgeois for their grubby and banal mindsets, which has got sort of subsumed into leftism because there aren't many aristocrats left. Adorno is a kind of good exposition of this sort of thing.
Lastly, it's very traditional. The French revolution, at least in the early stages, was basically bankrolled and sheltered by L Phillipe de Orlean, the first prince of the blood.
People who want to look too cool for school.
Clearly they aren't actually nihilists because they care about money and status.
Clearly they aren't actually nihilists because they care about money and status.
> In one seven-week period Ms. Ozturk sent at least five emails to staff canceling meetings
There are a number of other parts of this article that look bad, but why is this one a big deal? At the more meeting-intensive jobs I've had, it's near the center of the bell curve.
There are a number of other parts of this article that look bad, but why is this one a big deal? At the more meeting-intensive jobs I've had, it's near the center of the bell curve.
If those emails are being sent at or before the start time of the meeting these folks are way ahead of a lot of businesses.
There's nothing wrong with cancelling meetings. In fact, I appreciate my managers doing so. (More than I appreciate them having meetings...)
Well if we have to choose i'd prefer to not have them scheduled in the first place.
Unfortunately, this is mostly about The Chaos at Details, some kind of vapid lifestyle magazine, happily defunct.
Yeah, was expecting more about the Conde Naste digital media stuff.
It’s astonishing to read about this grandiose waste and look at all my friends who went into this industry only to be given sub-poverty line salaries and working hours to kill a horse.
Eventually I realized that publishing, like much of the rest of New York, is built on the principle of 1%er ideology, where the actual workers get hosed and say “Thank you,” while a select few kings (mostly queens now) with the right connections, family background, and bravado live very high on the hog.
Eventually I realized that publishing, like much of the rest of New York, is built on the principle of 1%er ideology, where the actual workers get hosed and say “Thank you,” while a select few kings (mostly queens now) with the right connections, family background, and bravado live very high on the hog.
This shouldn't really be any surprise, it's basically been the publishing business model for a century.
More interesting still is how some 1%'rs (e.g. Bezos) will operate something like the Washington Post at a loss simply to retain the actual power that having a top tier media company provides, in terms of narrative control.
> select few kings (mostly queens now)
It's still going to be investors behind the scenes who really pull these strings. The name at the top of the masthead isn't the owner....
More interesting still is how some 1%'rs (e.g. Bezos) will operate something like the Washington Post at a loss simply to retain the actual power that having a top tier media company provides, in terms of narrative control.
> select few kings (mostly queens now)
It's still going to be investors behind the scenes who really pull these strings. The name at the top of the masthead isn't the owner....
>(e.g. Bezos) will operate something like the Washington Post at a loss
the Post has been profitable since 2017. https://www.axios.com/washington-post-1515418495-9c9dc541-16...
the Post has been profitable since 2017. https://www.axios.com/washington-post-1515418495-9c9dc541-16...
Not just publishing but capitalism in general.
If you're a replaceable cog in the machine, you're probably not getting paid much. If you want to get rich in a capitalist society, either have scarse skills allowing you a good bargaining position or find a way to own the means of production.
If you're a replaceable cog in the machine, you're probably not getting paid much. If you want to get rich in a capitalist society, either have scarse skills allowing you a good bargaining position or find a way to own the means of production.
It hasn't been about "the means of production" in a long time. When Marx wrote that, the primary barrier to the employees going into business for themselves was that a factory cost (in today's money) millions of dollars. The employees didn't have millions of dollars so they had to work for capitalists instead of going into business for themselves.
The reason you're not Facebook today isn't that you can't get ahold of some servers. The reason you're not CNN isn't that you can't afford a video camera sufficient for news reporting. The reason you're not Starbucks isn't that you lack the capacity to make coffee.
The reasons the workers can't strike out out their own without capital in the modern world are increasingly regulatory barriers and gatekeeping.
It would be a lot easier to build your own Facebook if you could bootstrap on their social graph with the permission of the users but not of Facebook, but then there's the CFAA and the DMCA etc. It would be a lot easier to build your own CNN if we had a system for small anonymous irreversible micropayments with correspondingly low transaction costs, but then there's the byzantine hellscape of financial regulations and KYC laws. It would be a lot easier to build your own Starbucks if you could start off by operating out of your own home, but tell that to zoning regulations that prohibit commerce in the residential areas where your customers live.
It's no longer about the means of production. Now the problem is that the regulatory barriers to entry give advantage to larger entities with more scale, but the larger the entity is the more people there are at the bottom of the pyramid.
The reason you're not Facebook today isn't that you can't get ahold of some servers. The reason you're not CNN isn't that you can't afford a video camera sufficient for news reporting. The reason you're not Starbucks isn't that you lack the capacity to make coffee.
The reasons the workers can't strike out out their own without capital in the modern world are increasingly regulatory barriers and gatekeeping.
It would be a lot easier to build your own Facebook if you could bootstrap on their social graph with the permission of the users but not of Facebook, but then there's the CFAA and the DMCA etc. It would be a lot easier to build your own CNN if we had a system for small anonymous irreversible micropayments with correspondingly low transaction costs, but then there's the byzantine hellscape of financial regulations and KYC laws. It would be a lot easier to build your own Starbucks if you could start off by operating out of your own home, but tell that to zoning regulations that prohibit commerce in the residential areas where your customers live.
It's no longer about the means of production. Now the problem is that the regulatory barriers to entry give advantage to larger entities with more scale, but the larger the entity is the more people there are at the bottom of the pyramid.
Sure its not literally about the physical means of production, but more the abstract notion around creating/owning a bussiness. A hard problem that does involve real skill and lots of risk.
The reason you're not starbucks isn't that you can't serve coffee out of your house. Do you think that independent coffee houses don't exist? Do you think that new coffee franchises don't come into being regularly?
The reason you're not facebook has nothing to do with dmca or cfaa (relatively easy to comply with regulations). Do you think that facebook didn't have to deal with that when they started? They were hardly the first social network either so its not like they had first-movers advantage.
The reason you're not starbucks isn't that you can't serve coffee out of your house. Do you think that independent coffee houses don't exist? Do you think that new coffee franchises don't come into being regularly?
The reason you're not facebook has nothing to do with dmca or cfaa (relatively easy to comply with regulations). Do you think that facebook didn't have to deal with that when they started? They were hardly the first social network either so its not like they had first-movers advantage.
> Sure its not literally about the physical means of production, but more the abstract notion around creating/owning a bussiness. A hard problem that does involve real skill and lots of risk.
But that makes it a completely different problem. There is no longer a prohibitively expensive "means of production" causing the problem, to which a solution might have been collective ownership, but now instead a collection of barriers to entry to what might otherwise reasonably have been employee-owned businesses if not for the barriers that increase the scale required for success past what the employees can afford.
> The reason you're not starbucks isn't that you can't serve coffee out of your house.
Sure it is. If you can't serve it out of your house then you have to buy separate commercial property from where you live in order to start out. That dramatically increases the barrier to entry and excludes most of the prospective entrants. It also makes it that much more likely for the small entities that do exist to fail, because they have higher expenses. So you get more Starbucks and fewer independent coffee shops than you would have otherwise.
> The reason you're not facebook has nothing to do with dmca or cfaa (relatively easy to comply with regulations).
It's not about compliance costs in that case, it's about the regulations prohibiting a method of competition (adversarially bootstrapping from a competitor's social graph), which entrenches the incumbents.
> Do you think that facebook didn't have to deal with that when they started? They were hardly the first social network either so its not like they had first-movers advantage.
It's not about first-movers advantage either. It's about rules that promote scale and thwart competition, by e.g. de facto inhibiting network forks. It's why Facebook (or whoever is winning this year) has a billion users instead of there being nobody that big and thousands of independently operated community networks each with a fraction of the users.
The problem isn't that nobody can be Facebook. Facebook is clearly Facebook. The problem is that there shouldn't be this much consolidation, and making your own Facebook is harder than it ought to be.
But that makes it a completely different problem. There is no longer a prohibitively expensive "means of production" causing the problem, to which a solution might have been collective ownership, but now instead a collection of barriers to entry to what might otherwise reasonably have been employee-owned businesses if not for the barriers that increase the scale required for success past what the employees can afford.
> The reason you're not starbucks isn't that you can't serve coffee out of your house.
Sure it is. If you can't serve it out of your house then you have to buy separate commercial property from where you live in order to start out. That dramatically increases the barrier to entry and excludes most of the prospective entrants. It also makes it that much more likely for the small entities that do exist to fail, because they have higher expenses. So you get more Starbucks and fewer independent coffee shops than you would have otherwise.
> The reason you're not facebook has nothing to do with dmca or cfaa (relatively easy to comply with regulations).
It's not about compliance costs in that case, it's about the regulations prohibiting a method of competition (adversarially bootstrapping from a competitor's social graph), which entrenches the incumbents.
> Do you think that facebook didn't have to deal with that when they started? They were hardly the first social network either so its not like they had first-movers advantage.
It's not about first-movers advantage either. It's about rules that promote scale and thwart competition, by e.g. de facto inhibiting network forks. It's why Facebook (or whoever is winning this year) has a billion users instead of there being nobody that big and thousands of independently operated community networks each with a fraction of the users.
The problem isn't that nobody can be Facebook. Facebook is clearly Facebook. The problem is that there shouldn't be this much consolidation, and making your own Facebook is harder than it ought to be.
>But that makes it a completely different problem. There is no longer a prohibitively expensive "means of production" causing the problem, to which a solution might have been collective ownership, but now instead a collection of barriers to entry to what might otherwise reasonably have been employee-owned businesses if not for the barriers that increase the scale required for success past what the employees can afford.
Startup capital is still very much a problem you need to solve to start a businesses. Its just spent on different things than people did in the 1800s
Startup capital is still very much a problem you need to solve to start a businesses. Its just spent on different things than people did in the 1800s
That's the point. What people couldn't afford then was factory machines, so the proposed solution (collective ownership) was for that problem.
What people can't afford now is to scale to the entity size necessary in this regulatory environment. Collective ownership doesn't solve that -- these huge conglomerates are already "collectively owned" in the sense that everybody owns one ten-millionth of them in their retirement account. The problem is that the entity size is too large for your one ten-millionth to allow you to exercise any meaningful control over the company. So the solution now has to be a larger number of smaller companies, and a regulatory environment that facilitates rather than impedes that.
What people can't afford now is to scale to the entity size necessary in this regulatory environment. Collective ownership doesn't solve that -- these huge conglomerates are already "collectively owned" in the sense that everybody owns one ten-millionth of them in their retirement account. The problem is that the entity size is too large for your one ten-millionth to allow you to exercise any meaningful control over the company. So the solution now has to be a larger number of smaller companies, and a regulatory environment that facilitates rather than impedes that.
Or a different way than companies. Perhaps if antitrust law permitted productive individuals to coordinate their interactions in other ways, running a company would not be the only way to do well.
Antitrust predominantly applies to entities that are already too big, so what are you suggesting it's interfering with?
If people can't start selling coffee out of their homes because of zoning, and can't start selling coffee out of a shop downtown because they can't afford that property in addition to their homes, I have a hard time seeing how any relaxation of antitrust is going to improve that.
If people can't start selling coffee out of their homes because of zoning, and can't start selling coffee out of a shop downtown because they can't afford that property in addition to their homes, I have a hard time seeing how any relaxation of antitrust is going to improve that.
It interferes with people who are not part of the same company coordinating. You can imagine an association of neighbourhood coffee sellers lobbying to change the zoning laws to allow people to sell coffee from home. But that association is very difficult to form because - with those neighbourhood coffee sellers all being different companies - it would be seen as an antitrust violation.
IIRC working in publishing (not as a little drone, mind you, but as someone in a position of at least some small power) is among the professions Fussell calls out in Class for optionally-working members of his Upper Middle or for Upper folks who haven’t begun to let go of work being tied up in personal value so they can begin to ascend to the Top-Out-of-Sight. So yes, an enclave of social privilege.
Andrew Essex published a response today about the "Dudes Who Dish" article being credited to Kurt Andersen when he didn't write it: https://www.cjr.org/first_person/details-conde-nast-andersen...
This is fascinating. As a writer and coder, I find the subsumption of longform culture into the a niche blogosphere genre gives me chills.
Say what you will about Condé Nast, this implosion is poignant for anyone who has dreamed of supporting themselves with mere words.
These days, the only "reader" that seems to pay enough for my keyboard time is Babel. ;)
Say what you will about Condé Nast, this implosion is poignant for anyone who has dreamed of supporting themselves with mere words.
These days, the only "reader" that seems to pay enough for my keyboard time is Babel. ;)
> At 48, Dan Peres is already an old hand at being a former magazine editor. Condé Nast shut down Details, the men’s glossy that he had been editor of for 15 years, in 2015
Wait, if my math is correct he became editor at 28. Was that common at the time? (circa 2000)
Wait, if my math is correct he became editor at 28. Was that common at the time? (circa 2000)
Well those magazines (Details and similarly GQ) try to project a young-and-successful image. They want the readers to think that's the target audience, or the real audience. It ties into interviewing young and successful artists, athletes...sometimes entrepreneurs too. It's aspirational.
So I could totally see them promoting a 28-year-old man to editor and thereby manufacture a bit of stardom to help with their image.
So I could totally see them promoting a 28-year-old man to editor and thereby manufacture a bit of stardom to help with their image.
The late 90s and early 2000s were a weird time in America.
Was writing for newspapers and magazines around this time. Never for Conde Nast, but my impression was nobody in that business knew how to make money, it had already been made and they were just spending it like a third generation inheritance. They rode coattails in and while there were a few sharks on the corporate side, below the first name or two on the masthead it was hangers-on all the way down. It was a bubble.
The '00's were this odd period where it was easy to be seduced by the idea you could be famous for being clever. Men published and even read literary fiction. Before it became the troubled former child star of content it is today, Vice was actually a funny and subversive upstart. Book launches were society events. Being a columnist was a thing. It's hard to see how excesses of that period could be relevant today.
I commented on them in a previous thread about reddit, odd to see them here again. If Conde Nast is still staffed by people who cut their teeth in that era, they're going to need restructuring.