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| A young Ted Kaczynski, who would later write the last big pre-internet manifesto |
Still nobody has
figured out the internet. Still.
Sure, some people
have figured out their own specific version of the internet pretty good. The
guy from Amazon seems to have a fairly firm grip on his idea of the internet.
Mark Zuckerberg has his whole thing sussed. And so, presumably, does Johnny
Google, or whoever the Google guys are. These people have two important things
in common: 1. They’ve used the internet to enlist large numbers of people in
the task of more effectively selling themselves to themselves on the internet,
and 2. They’re billionaires. That’s how we know they’ve figured things out. If
you have a billion dollars, people tend to think you’ve done a few things
right.
I also mentioned
something these internet people have in common is they’ve all figured out ways
to get people to sell themselves to themselves on the internet. Amazon has
recommendation algorithms. Facebook has preference algorithms. Google knows
everything you’ve ever done. All of these mega-successful web-based businesses
are designed to show you to yourself when you go on the internet, and they make
gobs of money from this.
You know who else is
filthy rich from the internet using roughly the same idea of selling people to themselves? Certain
content
providers. And more power to them. They worked hard for it. They deserve
it. It's not the only way, but the easiest way to measure the value of a thing
is by the amount of money that somebody is willing to pay for it. $300 million (see links)
is a LOT of damn money. $300 million is, like, rent for a whole year times
infinity.
And so the question
arises: who’s getting that money? The interns? The freelance contributors? The
staff members? Probably not a HUGE portion of it. Probably most of that money
is going into the pockets of the people who own the business. Which is fine.
They started it. They own it. What they do with the money it generates is their
prerogative.
We here at Total Bozo
see all this happening, and it bothers us. Mostly because we don't own anything
but a name and an idea, and we don't suck.
(Let’s not beat
around the bush, "we" means Ben
Johnson and Kelly McClure)
At least we like to
think that we don’t suck. We realize we’re wrong about that, we’re just saying
what we like to think. Everybody, especially including us, sucks. It’s just
nice to think that we don’t suck. If it meant having to suck at being a website
a little more than we’d like to imagine we currently do, we would probably not
scoff at having a hundred million dollars or two. We figure we could suck just
as well as some of the other $300-million-plus-valuation content providers do.
And we actually have somewhat of a plan to get there that involves some fairly
easy concepts.
1. Be transparent. We want money. We
want to grow and become a thing that seems like it should be worth a shitload
of money to some idiot in a board room somewhere who routinely says things out
loud like “Look at these NUMBERS!” That is what we eventually want to do with
Total Bozo Magazine, and it’s been done before and it can and will be done
again, and we want a piece of that action, and we see no reason to be coy about
it.
2. Streamline. Let’s say instead of
a fancy office somewhere full of unpaid interns, instead it’s just a website
where if you write or do something good your thing gets put up on that website.
We take pieces instead of pitches. People write or do something, we put it up
if we like it. End of process.
3. Do things that are as
good tomorrow as they are now. The internet is full of disposable,
attention-grabbing things. Lists. Celebrities. Sports. Politics. “Hot takes”
and “fresh narratives” on whatever current non-issue has been drummed up in
order to sustain the hot takes and fresh narratives industry. Like for instance
the whole “Indian
American Miss America Controversy,” which if you’re reading this in 2015 is
a thing that happened once upon a time that otherwise intelligent people actually
decided to talk about. Let’s avoid all that. Let’s try to be human and think
human thoughts and say human things, and only mention Miley Cyrus if she’s
doing or causing something in our lives. Or at least let's try and have a sense
of humor about ourselves if and when we fail, instead of always having to be
THE authority on What Color Shoes We Think Andy Samberg Should Be Wearing
(purple, duh, to match the oft-strangled head of his likely circumcised penis).
Let’s be a place you could go for that.
4. Encourage each other. You know how people
are fucking crazy in the comments section of anything ever? They say “the
person who wrote this article doesn’t know what the fuck they are talking
about.” You read these comments and the knock on them is always, “Why would you
bother saying that in a comments section instead of just not reading things
like this from now on?” This is a valid question. But also valid is the larger
frustration of the person in the comments section. “This does not represent my
point of view on a subject I care about!” the person is saying. “I feel as
though I have been duped into reading this by a misleading headline and now I
have given this article a few minutes of my life that I can never get back, and
this happens to me often, and I have some weird sense that it’s all only so I
can be told about the new Grand Theft Auto game yet again, and because I’m not
as strong of a communicator as the person who wrote this article, I am
frustratingly unable to articulate this! It’s like I’m frustrated about being
frustrated!!” This point of view is completely, maybe even centrally, valid,
even if it comes out as “kill urself bro.” Well, what if everybody ever, even
“kill urself bro” Guy, had a chance to express their point of view to a larger audience
than whoever happens to come across a comments section? That would be great. We
should encourage that.
5. Invest in each other. Let’s say every time
you write something that goes up on a website, you own a little bit more of a
chunk of that website. Say one basis point. 0.01%. Which is not much for a
website that is not worth anything, but for a website that somebody eventually
pays $300 million for, it’d be worth $30,000. I bet even Bill Murray would
write a dumb thing in 20 minutes for 30 grand. Either way, it beats the hell
out of the regular $50 freelance money you'd get from Brooklyn Vegan for your
thinkpiece about the Eagles Reunion Tour that got rejected by GQ. Let’s say
instead of killing yourself writing about shit you don’t care about, like the
Eagles Reunion Tour, on the off chance it earns you some chump change you can
pay for food with, you really delved into something personal and true, and got
it up on Total Bozo, and you’re now a partial owner of Total Bozo. Wouldn’t you
want to share Total Bozo with other people from then on? Wouldn’t you just
retweet the shit out of everything we do? Wouldn’t you love to be a part of the
Total Bozo family? We bet you would. We think that kind of a thing would just
take off like a supersonic airplane full of hot cakes.
If you read that and
you thought “that’s a hell of a lot of ambition and pretense from a place that
publishes 1,000
word diatribes about ALF,” then you’re right. You should write something to
that effect and then send it to us at all-one-word Total Bozo Magazine at gmail
dot com. If we like it, we will put it up, and if we prove you wrong someday,
the fact that you wrote that about us might be worth a year of college tuition.
And if not, all this will just be a loud, visible failure that eventually gets
us staff positions at www.DumbledoreFarts.com or whatever other "hot" thing exists in two years. So it’s pretty win-win.
Let’s do it, you
guys. Let’s figure out the internet. Let's sell ourselves to ourselves, but let's own ourselves too.
Thanks,
And by all means
follow us at @TotalBozo
