Seven West stares into internet abyss
From Osborne Park to Chicago, we're all headed down one rabbit hole or another.
This week, The Last Place on Earth was the first to reveal changes in editorial lineup at The West Australian – a day earlier than The West Australian itself. The once-disgraced Christopher Dore has become the paper's permanent editor-in-chief. He's served in the role in recent months since his predecessor Anthony de Ceglie was sent to clean up the mess at Seven News. Sarah-Jane Tasker has now become the paper's first woman editor. These two appointments could be sending mixed messages about how the Seven West empire plans to deal with allegations of cultural toxicity.
Gerard Mazza
But what else has been happening in The West and beyond?
A Nightly dose of cringe
We sometimes wonder who the audience for Seven West's new digital paper The Nightly actually is (aside from federal politicians who couldn't quite be reached by Stokes propaganda in The West). Well, Kim Macdonald's grumbling opinion column on Gen Z slang provides one possible answer: confused parents. But Macdonald could have done with a bit more research time on Urban Dictionary and 4Chan, because her parsing of internet parlance doesn't always hit the mark. Firstly, she misses the real story here: Gen Z's colloquial habits are redpilled (or maybe blackpilled... it's complicated.) The majority of the terms she discusses have emerged from the overlapping online worlds of the alt-right, the pick-up artist manosphere, and the incel community. She defines 'sigma' as simply meaning 'cool', ignoring its roots in evolutionary bro-science taxonomy. What she calls 'look-maxing' is actually known to insecure young males the world over as looksmaxxing. She says the incel practice was "invented when teen boys discovered hygiene", but that's softmaxxing at best – looksmaxxing can also include flying to Türkiye to get a doctor to break your legs and make you taller. 'Mewing' is the practice of placing your tongue against the roof of your to redefine your jaw shape, but Macdonald mistakes it for some other dubious hack involving scraping fingers along the jawline. I could go on (it's nice to have my amateur internet anthropology sort of come in useful for once), but my point is – the real problem with Gen Z/Alpha slang is not that adults don't understand it, but rather that it's migrated from some of the most depressing and disturbed parts of the internet, straight to a playground near you.
The Traumatising of the Reportorial Mind
Perhaps Macdonald should have asked her Seven West colleague Caleb Runciman for help with her column. He clearly understands how the internet works, or at least, knows how to intentionally find gore on Instagram, which seems to have been his main assignment in recent weeks. His 'Meta Murders' investigative series has detailed how young kids can easily find disturbing video content on social media apps. It just so happened to focus on the company that pulled the pin earlier this year on payments for Australian news producers. "In a special investigation by The West Australian, it took just minutes for graphic footage of shootings, violence and cold-blooded killings to appear on our Meta-owned Instagram feed," his report went last Saturday. "Moments after engaging with an account, the algorithm keeps pumping screens full of horrific images — giving users little reprieve from content historically found on the darkest parts of the internet... Countless videos seen by this masthead are far too graphic to write about." Of course, the availability of this stuff is just one of the many genuinely concerning things about our lives online, but, given I've spent plenty of time doomscrolling on Insta and never come anywhere near it, I suspect you have to go looking. It begs one of the great philosophical questions of the internet age: Does my algorithm make me, or do I make my algorithm? By Thursday, Runciman could triumphantly report that Meta had taken down five accounts he'd covered, but it was only a drop in the ocean. "Since the beginning of The West’s investigation, dozens of other accounts filled with extreme violence are popping up on Meta’s Instagram feed," he said. Let's just hope The West at least gave their reporter a burner device for his Instagram adventures, otherwise, the worker's comp claim could be sizeable.
Politimania
The WWE-ification of American politics continues apace. The Democratic National Convention may not have had an appearance from an actual pro wrestler like its Republican equivalent, but it had more theatrics and posturing than the WWE Elimination Chamber at Optus Stadium back in February, not least a surprise entrance by Lil Jon singing 'Turn Down for What'.
My favourite piece of footage to emerge from the DNC was of a 'lock him up' chant breaking out as Hilary Clinton spoke about Donald Trump's felonies. As Hilary grinned from the podium, one guy in a nose-ring and keffiyeh, who looked like he really should have been at the protests outside, got seriously into it, pumping his fist along with the chant. If you put the political signifiers of the MAGA right, the liberal establishment, and the radical left into a blender, this is what you get. The Dems have been getting it half right recently, but the Republicans aren't the only ones who are weird and getting weirder.
