Vice, the irreverent and offbeat magazine and publishing empire,
announced last week that it was shutting down. Harry Cheadle, who wrote
for Vice for years, gets to the heart of where they went wrong:
“Vice’s founders, [Cory Doctorow] wrote, ‘built a massive, highly
lucrative media empire on [young people’s] free labor. … Whatever
problems Vice had, they weren’t problems with Vice’s workers—it was
a problem with Vice’s bosses.’
“Doctorow meant to be scathing, but if anything he was too generous.
Vice was only ‘highly lucrative’ in the sense that it had a lot of
money sloshing around. It had a big fancy Brooklyn headquarters,
a dozen or more international offices, and hundreds of people on the
payroll, some of whom would fly around the world to report from
conflict zones. As it grew, it founded a record label and an ad
agency, acquired smaller media companies like Refinery29 and i-D, and
had TV shows on MTV and HBO before getting its own cable channel. The
company even bought a bar and started brewing its own beer, called Old
Blue Last, which tasted like the tail end of a long night out. During
one holiday party, co-founder Shane Smith handed out envelopes to
employees containing $1,500 in cash.”
“In ditching its original identity,” Cheadle writes, “Vice gained
respectability but couldn’t make respectability work for it.” That’s
about the shape of it. The path from counterculture to mainstream
culture is well-trodden, but most often ends up in a messy compromise
that pleases no-one. #
