Announcing The Bitter Files

A new monthly bonus feature for paying subscribers

So all the way back in 2015 or so I started writing a book that I never finished.

The working title was Social Justice Warriors: The War for Geek Culture From Ghostbusters to Gamergate. Basically, it was a running commentary on a rather significant and depressing episode of internet history that was unfolding at that time.

You’re probably all old enough to remember he internet during the years just before and during the Trump presidency, but just in case I have any subscribers from the generation after Gen Z, whatever they’re calling that: Social justice warriors or SJWs were what they used to call wokeists or whatever the accepted nomenclature is now. Next week it’ll be codderwadders or flim-floozies. Reactionaries are caught in a treadmill of trying to come up with alternate terms for progressives while trying to avoid associating them with progress.

What was happening in pop culture at around this time was a surge in the politicization of hobbies. “Gamergate” was the most well known of them, but there were also flare-ups in the communities of science fiction, comics, and other pastimes often associated with geek culture.

What happened to this project was ultimately a terminal case of scope creep. The folly of attempting to document a cultural phenomenon like this as it happens was that new information kept coming to light that ballooned the entire story and required extensive and ongoing revision—plus the story as a whole became too big for me as I came to realise what I initially thought was just an online geek slapfight had some genuine conspiracies behind it, all the way up to figures like Steve Bannon. This was a project for professional journalists, not a Cracked columnist.

What I had left, eventually, was a dead manuscript and a shelf full of books, many of them written by some really shit people. Really shit people.

In an effort to recoup some kind of return on my investment, as well as provide some perk to my paying subscribers, I’m announcing a project I’m sardonically calling The Bitter Files. In which I will cannibalise and repurpose my SJW manuscript into a series of articles available to paid subscriptions only. If you don’t care about that, though, I’m still going to push out my free column every Friday or Saturday depending on which timezone you’re in.

The series will run on the first of each month beginning two weeks from now, and each episode will deal with one aspect or event from this awful time to be on the internet. From the architects of the whole mess to the grifters who benefited from it, and what we can learn from it all.

The first episode will land on August 1. Do consider upgrading if you’d like to come along for the ride. For the rest of you, see you the same time every weekend, you bunch of soy-caked wax-munching flim-floozies.

-SPD