What do you do when video game journalism is crumbling around you? Gita can help you with that.
“The other thing about Aftermath specifically is I would trust those motherfuckers with my life. There's so much money that goes into that bank account and I don't see any of it. And I just trust that they're not depleting it, you know? I trust them so much that even when they piss me off, I still want to run a business with them. So I feel like my internal bullshit calibrator is very, very strong.”
Gita Jackson is the co-owner of Aftermath, a worker-owned news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them. She is also the co-host of 52 Pickup, a podcast about the DC Comics series 52, with Alex Jaffe.
Credits
- Hosts: Eric Silver & Amanda McLoughlin
- Producer: Brandon Grugle
- Editor: Mischa Stanton
- Graphic Designer: Shae McMullin
- A Multitude production
About The Show
Interviews with online creators about how their jobs work and how they got there. Hear the personal stories behind seismic events in digital media and learn what concrete steps we can take to build a sustainable media landscape. Hosted by longtime podcasters and business owners Eric Silver and Amanda McLoughlin, Attach Your Résumé proves that the best credential for deciding the future of media is actually making stuff. New episodes every Thursday until we run out of episodes and have to go make more.
Transcript
Amanda: Welcome to Attach Your Resume, the interview show with some of the people behind your favorite work online talking about how they got there and why they’re hopeful for the future. I’m Amanda McLoughlin.
Eric: I’m Eric Silver. I’m also hopeful for the future, cause we still have this podcast.
Amanda: Yay!
Eric: Rupert Murdoch has not hired his spies to shoot us and assassinate us under mysterious circumstances just yet. We can keep doing this.
Amanda: I mean, listen, if he wiredtapped my phone, he’d see a lot of pictures of Moo Deng, so he’s welcome to it.
Eric: Now, I’m imagining Michael Barbaro as a silent assassin. That’s why he’s up so early so that he can record The Daily. Because he’s an international assassin.
Amanda: All right, Eric, tell me about the guest that you’ve brought to us today.
Eric: We’re talking to Gita Jackson, co-founder of Aftermath and one of my favorite video game writers and podcasters out there. I feel like Gita’s been online forever. You might know Gita from getting into fights with many people on Twitter, because no one on Twitter knows how to read, so they jump on Gita. But also, I’ve been following them since they worked at Vice, at Motherboard and Waypoint, and at Kotaku. They’ve also written for MTV News, GQ, and Paste magazine. I feel like they’ve been in video game writing for as long as I have had a Twitter, which is, upsettingly, 12, 13 years. They’ve always been around on my feed as I’ve searched for good video game writers to follow.
Amanda: Gita has a real “born in the dark” energy, and the dark is the hellscape of Twitter, which they have navigated professionally for years.
Eric: Truly.
Amanda: Something I really appreciate about this conversation you have with Gita is teasing apart the different strands of, like, reporting, deep-dive journalism, and criticism, which is something that, Gita identifies, as you said, as a writer and critic. And they do a really good job of explaining why criticism is really useful, like you say, in video games, very common, and in movies, where Gita also got some of their education, to have critical reviews that you can learn something from, even when don’t agree with it — which maybe, again, Hot Take Express here, you don’t have to read things you only agree with. And that’s something that I needed to be reminded of.
Eric: It’s something that’s increasingly happening in video game journalism. I mean, between Gamergate 1 and Gamergate 2, there’s just fully eliminating all of that. And video game companies, I think, are relying on influencers who already like what they’re doing, or people who are super into looking at AI lady butts, to carry the water for this whole thing. It’s almost like video games as an institution has gotten so top-heavy and reliant on massive home runs of massive budgets that there is no room for good-faith actual, capital-C, criticism.
Amanda: Well, Gita’s making room for it at Aftermath, and I loved talking about their origin story and making the site, and also what they think should happen to evolve the future of worker-owned subscription journalism sites. Just beyond the fact of them to, like, what happens next?
Eric: This is our second worker-owned subscription website that we’ve talked to, and once we get five, I’ll be able to summon Exodia.
Amanda: Oh, it’s a Yu-Gi-Oh reference. Nice!
Eric: There you go.
Amanda: Well, folks, if you are enjoying the show, we would love for you to check out what we do over at Multitude, multitude dot productions. If you’re someone who wants to make a podcast or just make a living as a creator online, we have a ton of free resources, even free consulting. You can meet with Eric and me and talk about your career and what jobs you want to get. So go on over to multitude dot productions for a bunch of free and low-cost options.
Eric: If you like the show, we can do it for you, as well.
Amanda: Wow!
Eric: All right, I’m gonna talk to Gita.
[theme music]
Gita Jackson: Well, you’ve heard it before.
Eric: I have heard it. I’m like, I wish Gita was here.
Gita: I wish I could be on it more, because I love talking.
Eric: Talking’s great!
Gita: Talking is a lot of fun!
Eric: Yeah, this is the app fest about this stuff. Amanda, how you doing? Should we start? Okay, thank you.
Gita: That’s great.
Eric: I’m like, that’s just my wife who’s in a box right now.
Gita: “My wife’s in a box!”
Eric: Yeah. They should have put the lady in the — in Jane Austen, they should have put her in a box instead of — Put her in the podcast studio.
Gita: Yeah.
Eric: That would have been much better for Jane Austen.
Gita: Oh, my God. I’m just thinking. I mean, they’ve already done Bridget Jones’s Diary, but updating it again for the podcast era. Bridget Jones would be a podcaster.
Eric: She would be.
Gita: There’s no way she’d work in publishing.
Eric: No.
Gita: No!
Eric: Erin Brockovich and Bridget Jones would have a podcast together.
Gita: They both would have a podcast together!
Eric: That’d be sick!
Gita: Oh my God, that would be so good!
Eric: They would each have their own, but they would also guest on each other’s podcasts all the time.
Gita: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eric: You’re right. That’s something.
Gita: People would be begging for a collab. “Bridget Jones, you should collab with Erin!” Erin Brockovich would have more substance in her podcasts.
Eric: Oh, sure.
Gita: Bridget Jones would mostly be, like, “Well, I’m thinking about losing some weight, but I don’t want my boobs to become smaller.” This is a real problem she has.
Eric: Yeah, but Bridget Jones, she would have like 5,000 listeners, but every single one of those listeners, like, all work in publishing.
Gita: Yes.
Eric: Like, at The Cut.
Gita: Yes, yes, yes. It would be like the Deuxmoi podcast where she just talks about publishing gossip, and she would probably sell a lot of ads for publishing-related bullshit.
Eric: Does Deuxmoi have a podcast?
Gita: They do.
Eric: How did they get away with that?
Gita: I don’t know. Right?
Eric: Do they have a vocoder on at all times?
Gita: It’s like, “Hello, my podcast where I talk about all the lies that I publish.”
Eric: “And how everyone’s not supposed to know who I am.”
Gita: Yeah. God, I love that she keeps getting called out for insisting that Taylor Swift secretly married her previous, her ex-boyfriend in England. And then her excuse was, “Oh, it’s a UK-only marriage.” As if, like, there’s a marriage that’s only legally recognized in the United Kingdom.
Eric: Yeah, the angle was she started a new church, and therefore it only worked in the UK.
Gita: Of course.
Eric: Yeah.
Gita: That makes sense.
Eric: If anyone was gonna start a new Anglican Church, it would be Taylor Swift, and that would be great.
Gita: That would be so scary. [laughter] I would really be afraid, actually, if she did that.
Eric: That would be scary. But I don’t know who else would do it. I mean, that’s pretty much what she did when she recorded her new albums, is she invented a new rule.
Gita: Yeah.
Eric: It’s the same thing as the Anglican Church.
Gita: No, you’re right. You’re absolutely correct. There’s been another schism in Christianity. [laughs] Okay. We’re going to talk about podcasts.
Eric: We will. We’re going to.
Gita: Or not podcasts, but like media and whatever.
Eric: Yeah. Oh no, we’ll get started — Okay. Let’s do it.
Gita: All right.
Eric: All right. So, Gita, I would love it if you could introduce yourself, say your name, and then what you think your job is —
Gita: Okay.
Eric: — how you would describe your job.
Gita: My name is Gita Jackson, and I’m the co-founder of Aftermath dot site, which is a website where I’m allowed to shitpost professionally.
Eric: Good. Good. Good.
Gita: Yeah.
Eric: I like that.
Gita: It’s my job. I write things down and people tell me if they’re good or bad or not. And sometimes I email an expert and they’re like, “You were wrong about the things you made assumptions about.” Or, “There’s some really bad stuff going on at this company.” And then I write those things down too. But a lot of the time I like writing blogs. Like, I wrote a blog just called “I Hate Technology” where I just described all of the ways that modern technology have actually made it harder for me to get things done in my life and in my house.
Eric: Oh yeah.
Gita: Yeah, I got this crazy Bluetooth speaker situation that every time you play — We can play music off of it, which we do, and it hooks up to the TV, but going from music playing to the TV —
Eric: Oh, yeah.
Gita: You have to, like, restart the TV several times for it to actually sync to the TV, and sometimes it’ll just drop for no reason.
Eric: There’s something about technology in general. It’s funny, that’s like a really good metaphor for what we’re about to talk about, how Bluetooth, I think, was made for the best possible scenario. Like, it’s so crazy that you can hit a button and let it pair and then wirelessly it goes from one thing to another. But no one ever considers any of the downsides or any of the friction that goes along with that.
Gita: Yeah. Like, what if you live in a shitty apartment where for some reason nothing works, always? Our wi-fi —
Eric: What if you have two pieces of technology? What if you have two?
Gita: What if you have a second piece of technology? What if you want to use the really big speaker to listen to music, to listen to “Not Like Us” extremely loudly, and then you think, “I want to watch the music video for ‘Not Like Us’ also, that should work immediately.” And then then it just never works. Yeah. God. And also my favorite technology thing that happens in my life is that the little box, the rat’s nest of wires that my router hooks into, is outside —
Eric: No!
Gita: — and I don’t have access to it, and every time it rains, it gets full of water and my internet stops working.
Eric: That’s bad.
Gita: It’s really bad!
Eric: From what I know about electronics, that’s bad.
Gita: It’s really, and we — Our landlord doesn’t do anything in our lives.
Eric: No.
Gita: So I’ve contemplated just breaking into the box, so I can get all the water out of it, frequently.
Eric: I think you should just do that. The thing about landlords is that as long as they don’t know, or at least as long as they’re not trying to actively get you out of the apartment, they don’t want to talk to you.
Gita: No, he’s very happy that a young Jewish couple lives in this apartment.
Eric: Oh yeah, they’re always so excited.
Gita: Yeah.
Eric: Even the guy here, he’s a Hasidic landlord. And I went up there, and Amanda converted to Judaism, but I’m still like, “He’s not gonna count. Just don’t talk. It’s fine.”
Gita: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eric: So I went up there, and it was right around — it was right around Passover. So I was like, “Oh, we’re gonna talk about renewing the lease, but I’m gonna go see my dad for Pesach” —
Gita: Oh, yeah —
Eric: — and he’s like, “Pesach?” I’m like, “Yeah, dude!”
Gita: Yeah. “And we don’t even say ‘Passover’! We say ‘Pesach’!” Yeah, absolutely.
Eric: My favorite thing about Hasidic landlords is that they are surprised if you’re Jewish as well.
Gita: Yes, I know. I love that. Cause they won’t believe you.
Eric: No, they won’t.
Gita: No, David wears a kippah every time we go to —
Eric: Oh, you have to.
Gita: Yeah, when we go into Crown Heights to get, you know, go to Gombo’s Heimishe Bakery and get — [Eric cackles] It’s a really good bakery —
Eric: That sounds incredible.
Gita: And they make great challah. I mean, every time we go — One time we went around Hanukkah and he was wearing a kippah and I was just not. Like, letting him talk to all the Hasidic men by myself.
Eric: Sure.
Gita: Because I’m not, I’m just not even gonna — yeah —
Eric: No, you have to. You have to.
Gita: That’s just like, that’s his job, right? And they started telling him, like, when Hanukkah was. And I was like, it’s really gross to me that they see you, the way that you look. And then on top of that, you’re wearing Jewish paraphernalia. And they’re still, like, you don’t know when Hanukkah is.
Eric: Right. Well, Gita, I did have you on because you are my favorite Talmudic scholar of the 21st century.
Gita: Of course. Of course.
Eric: Really excited to have you on. [laughter] But actually, it’s worth talking about this, because we’re going to talk about Aftermath and a lot of the stuff that you do. But you do something that a lot of people don’t do right now, which is that you are still actively on Twitter.
Gita: I know, and I don’t know why a lot of the time. It sucks on there; it’s bad.
Eric: It’s bad. I think I’m at the point, especially because you know, when you talk to people and they’re like, “Oh, you’re still on Twitter?” I’m like, “No one is ever going to take my things away from me” —
Gita: Yes.
Eric: — “and I will be here longer than Elon will be.”
Gita: Yes. I’m walking backwards and going straight into hell, you know? Like, that’s — Okay. So, my dad got a router and dial-up internet when I was like 11 years old.
Eric: Oh, hell yeah.
Gita: So, I have been posting —
Eric: You’re the 10,000 hours person that they were talking about.
Gita: Yeeees.
Eric: Malcolm Gladwell was talking about you! [laughs]
Gita: That’s why I’m so good at posting! I’ve been doing it straight for 25 years, basically.
Eric: This is Steve Jobs accidentally getting a computer early in his life. This is you!
Gita: Yeah. Yeah. This is me. I made several different Sailor Moon websites using — My mom works for a college that gave my dad a little bit of hosting space, so he gave me a little bit of hosting space.
Eric: Oh, wow.
Gita: So this is on a private university’s hosting space that I made a couple of Sailor Moon websites.
Eric: Sure.
Gita: And then I taught myself HTML, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I still really miss sparkly marquees. It’s sad that we lost the marquee. Flashing text. You can put sparkly banners behind them. I was so good at coding marquees in HTML. I learned how to use frames in HTML before, with PHP. That was a very intensive — I learned how to, like, do bitmap marking also. Anyway —
Eric: No, this is incredible.
Gita: — had my own list of stuff when I was like 14 years old. And then I discovered LiveJournal, then I discovered Tumblr, then I discovered Twitter, essentially. You know, I was always like a Something Awful lurker, and then I saw that a lot of Something Awful posters that I thought were really funny moved to Twitter, and then I’ve been on there for a really long time, and it just feels weird to not open the app up, or go to www.twitter.com. And the thing is, though, despite how bad the website has gotten, just in terms of the frequency and how much it surfaces really awful content, like stuff from Nazis, straight up really racist stuff, Elon Musk’s own posts — which are not only bad, but often bigoted — that kind of thing.
Eric: And unfunny, it’s worth saying.
Gita: Oh my God, he’s so unfunny. It’s really, really sad. Even though that stuff is more frequent now, because of who I am demographically, that’s also always been a part of my Twitter experience, so it doesn’t feel too different. It just feels like it’s 10% more toxic, I would say, or like that — I can no longer count on these accounts being terms-of-serviced, you know?
Eric: Well, I mean, it’s fair. I was gonna say the reason why I know you’re an incredible Talmudic scholar is because you tweet about it. I see you tweeting about a lot of stuff and I’ve learned quite a lot from your Twitter. But at the same time you are constantly in a fight with someone who has, like, a Hufflepuff avatar —
Gita: I don’t know why.
Eric: — thinking that you said something that you didn’t.
Gita: People like to get mad, which is — I like to get mad too. Especially when you feel righteous in your anger, it feels really, really, really good. Like, I bet J.K. Rowling feels amazing every day, because she thinks she’s in a righteous fight for justice. She fucked around and found out, though. She was mistaken about her cause. But when you feel like you have a cause, then that yelling, that release of stress, that ability to dehumanize another person, and just scream at them and make them the recipient of all your bad feelings, that feels so good and so justified, you know? That’s why, you know, everyone feels so good about the video of Richard Spencer getting punched, right? Like, he’s a Nazi, so it feels, like — that’s an acceptable target.
Eric: Oh, I think about that when I want to go to sleep. It’s nice.
Gita: Absolutely, it’s so soothing!
Eric: It’s so good.
Gita: All the different memes were so fun. Also, when people do videos of Nazis getting punched and then they edit in the Mario coin sounds? It’s really great to me, I love it a lot.
Eric: That’s a good one. I want a Sega announcer from, like, Crazy Taxi —
Gita: Yeah.
Eric: — to say, like, “Time bonus!”
Gita: Yes! [laughs]
Eric: That would sound incredible.
Gita: It drives me bonkers that there hasn’t been an adaptation of the new Wolfenstein games, like an HBO miniseries. I just remember that moment at E3 where one of the developers was like, “There’s a lot of things you can do with a Nazi and a hatchet.” And just thinking, feeling, in my body, so overjoyed to hear that phrase at a business presentation.
Eric: I mean, but it’s also like the backbone of a majority of mainstream action movies, like that’s literally what Indiana Jones is about, that’s what Superman was about.
Gita: Yeah, absolutely. No, like beating up Nazis, beating up the Klan, those are the two acceptable targets, right? The fascist ideology is anti-human, so it must be rooted out wherever it occurs.
Eric: I mean, literally Nazi zombies, like that’s the backbone of the biggest franchise in video games.
Gita: Yes, yes. You know, a lot of modern gaming comes from shooting Nazis and beating up Nazis. I think that even in the 2016 Doom game, you find out eventually that Doomguy is on Mars because executives fracked into Hell accidentally. [laughter]
Eric: I didn’t know that. That’s so funny.
Gita: Yes, it’s really, really great. And then one of the VC people is like, “You have to understand. We tried, we had the utmost caution. We were doing the best — ” And while that person is making all the dumb VC excuses, all the same language you’ve heard about climate change from VC-type people, Doomguy just crushes the communicator. This is satisfying —
Eric: It’s very satisfying.
Gita: — because I hate these people and I think they’re ruining the world. But the thing is, there’s other people out there who I personally think are evil, that think I’m ruining the world. Mostly because of demographic stuff.
Eric: Right, okay. So you’re hitting on something, I think I already know the answer a little bit, connecting back to Twitter. It’s like, Richard Spencer and Nazi zombies and demons from Mars are very obviously bad people. And maybe from what you explained about the amount of hate that you get as a non-binary person, someone with brown skin on the internet, it’s just the regular amount, right? But at least now it’s obvious. Do you stay on Twitter because at least it’s a little more obvious of who is garbage, and then you’re just kind of doing the thing that you’re best at?
Gita: Oh yeah, I mean, the mask-off situation, it does make it easier to — Like, I’ve trained my audience on Twitter. My followers are, like, I think of them as like a gun sometimes.
Eric: I’m thinking about — did you play the crab Soulslike?
Gita: Yes.
Eric: Another Crab’s Treasure.
Gita: Luke Plunkett from Aftermath, he hates Soulslikes, but then when he found out you could give the crab a gun, he was sooo excited for it.
Eric: That game rips. You can give the crab— you can give your character a gun. Yeah, okay.
Gita: I watched an extremely long Let’s Play video of that with my husband, which he never—
Eric: I 100% did, and it’s incredible.
Gita: — he’s not an LP person, but he was like, “Look at all the characters!” It was really sweet. Yeah. No, it’s that. And also I look at the alternatives, and they’re all kind of imperfect for me, as just a poster. Bluesky I like, but with 150,000 active users, every time there’s drama, it will involve someone you know.
Eric: Sure. Okay.
Gita: So it will be someone you have some kind of emotional attachment to, either being yelled at or doing the yelling, or like having something unjust happen to them.
Eric: Like you can’t avoid being the main character, you know, the whole thing you say on Twitter.
Gita: Or at least adjacent to the main character. Like, the idea of winning Twitter is just to not be noticed and to do your little posts. But on Bluesky, you really cannot just be doing your little posts. Somebody will notice and they will get really upset. I’ve been trying — I talk about political activism in terms of bullying. Like, I feel like you should bully all politicians and I was trying to describe that, well, when an elected official isn’t doing the things that they said they would do to earn your vote, you should bully them. You should show up to their office in person. You should call them every day. You should send them faxes of all black so that their toner runs out, all that stuff. And someone accused me of being abusive on Bluesky and I was like, okay, well, this place has the juice, but it has too much juice.
Eric: Okay. The way I’ve been describing it is when you learned about the concept of utopia in your freshman year college classes and your literature classes, you read, like, Thomas Paine’s Utopia and it’s like, “Oh, this was created for someone to try to make a perfect place, but it’s not, because once you get out of theory, it’s now real and it’s unwieldy.”
Gita: Yes, very much so. It reveals difference, I think, when you are just in an enclosed space like that. And what’s also true is that on Bluesky, a lot of the people there, especially trans people, are there because they do not feel safe on other platforms. So gatekeeping that space becomes incredibly important to them, because they don’t want the same things that have happened to them on every single other social media site to also happen here, the one place where they feel safe. So I can’t be mad at these people for making the space really hostile, but it’s not an energy I love. Tumblr is hanging on by a thread, like, bad business decisions up the wazoo, also incredibly hostile to trans people. Cohost I know too much about. Just on a personal level, don’t like the people who make it; on a non-personal business level, I think that they have done a very bad job of running the space, and it seems like it’s on its way out.
Eric: Sure.
Gita: Let’s see. I don’t do video content, like, so Instagram and TikTok: I took TikTok off my phone because it’s too loud.
Eric: Smart.
Gita: And I feel like every time I opened it, I felt like it was yelling at me. I didn’t like it.
Eric: Every time you listen to it, you feel like you’re one of those kids on the subway who listens to Drake songs out loud.
Gita: Yes. Yes!
Eric: And like, even if your headphones are in, you feel that way.
Gita: Yes, that’s how I feel. And it made me feel bad. I didn’t like it at all. It’s very funny, I was out to dinner with my older brother and his long-term partner. And me and his partner, we both realized that we do the same thing for TikTok, which is we rely on our husbands to find the good ones. And then they show them to us.
Eric: I do that for Amanda on Twitter.
Gita: Yeah. That’s really good.
Eric: I do that and then she sends me Big Brother clips in response.
Gita: Oh, that’s wonderful! I love that, yeah.
Eric: That’s what you bring to a relationship: you both need to be good at different things.
Gita: Absolutely. I introduced David — my beautiful husband, David Grossman — I introduced him —
Eric: Good, we’ll clip that. That’s gonna be the breakout clip, Gita.
Gita: Well, everyone loves David! Every time I go anywhere, David has made a new friend. And I just think that everybody likes him especially much. He’s coming with me to XOXO and I think by the end of it, they’re going to be carrying him out, like, on their shoulders: “David! David!”
Eric: “I love how you internet, David! Thank you!”
Gita: I love him so much.
Eric: Is that also why you see Twitter as good? Because David Grossman, if you don’t know, he goes viral once every two, three days?
Gita: Yeah.
Eric: And I think that that’s what Twitter is for. It’s for surfacing.
Gita: Yeah, absolutely.
Eric: And what I think about is like, there was that profile of Dril. For those of you on the internet who don’t know, Dril is a very popular Twitter person. But in this profile, he’s just like a dude who lives in LA, who’s having a really hard time being a writer on TV shows. And it’s like, well, Twitter isn’t supposed to turn into anything, it’s just for Twitter. So have you seen the ideal? You’ve seen the worst of what it could be from your experience, and have you seen what the best it possibly could be as well?
Gita: I mean, yeah. I met David through a Twitter group chat, right? Well, we met in person at a Fourth of July party, so if you’ve heard that story, that is true. But we were in a group chat together, and that’s where we first got to know of each other’s existence. And it’s not like I’ve gotten jobs off of Twitter, but before I moved to New York, most of my interaction with the games press was through the internet. And there was a time when you could get at least gigs off of Twitter. You could get in contact with an editor that was like, “Oh, we should work together.” But for most people, that never occurs, right? Twitter doesn’t turn into something. And the time when you could have a TV show deal over your novelty Twitter account about shit your dad says is long, long past. That is a millennial fever dream. It’s over now.
Eric: Yeah, you can’t even have a Tumblr account that turns into a coffee table book anymore.
Gita: No, you can’t. Tweets of God? Not gonna happen anymore. I have seen the high highs of Twitter, I think the most — I’m not one of those people that got rich off of Twitter, which would be incredible, but I did get a steady paying job and a bunch of really good gigs that way. I have affection for it, but I think really, it’s just in my heart, I am an agent of chaos, and Twitter is chaos. I do have a poster’s soul, I think.
Eric: It’s from the 10,000 hours.
Gita: It really is.
Eric: Malcolm Gladwell is typing right now!
Gita: My sense of humor has been so finely tuned by the internet that the funniest things in the world to me are on twitter.com. Including Dril tweets; he is an incredibly funny writer.
Eric: 100%.
Gita: I really admire, like, not just his ability to create jokes that use the language of the internet to such a good effect, but also the phraseology is so funny. Fourth of July; “this all smacks of gender, I say, turning the Fourth of July into the fourth of shit.” Like, it’s incredible!
Eric: I mean, you did quote earlier in this conversation, that you were going to walk backwards into hell.
Gita: Yeah, that sounds like something that comes from Chaucer or something, but it’s not. It’s from Dril.
Eric: Exactly.
Gita: Yeah. It’s really, really wonderful. But you see on Dril’s recent tweets, as people started speculating if there’s a different Dril, it’s like, no, it’s just Twitter sucks so much that it started to get to him. And now his posts are more angry because Twitter is a terrible place to spend a lot of time.
Eric: And I think larger for this entire conversation we’re having, what happens when the thing you love, or the platform you love or are good at, what happens when it starts to deteriorate under you?
Gita: Yeah, the past 10 years of my life, yes. That’s where we’re going.
Eric: Maybe you start like a subscription-based sort of thing to make it happen.
Gita: Yeah, maybe you start a small business with your friends, yeah, and then you hope that people will give you enough money to sustain that small business. Yeah.
Eric: I guess what I wanna ask you as someone who has so much experience in the space, both of like being online as a poster, being online as a larger creator, and resisting, as you’re saying, the pivot to video, which has come in so many ways and continues to come for us constantly —
Gita: Which is so funny cause I’m really great on video, also. Like, I’m really, really good at it. I would do fantastically on short-form video, as long as I don’t have to edit it and cut it —
Eric: You should have been on Quibi.
Gita: I should have been on Quibi. “Here’s your gaming minute.” I would have been amazing.
Eric: You would have crushed it.
Gita: No one had enough faith in me.
Eric: I remember there is one particular article that you’ve written on Aftermath, which I didn’t think you’d be able to write anywhere else, called, “It Happened to Me: I Was a Daily Video Game Blogger.”
Gita: Oh my God, yes. Sometimes in our Slack, we call Aftermath “Kotaku therapy.”
Eric: Well, I mean, isn’t that all of these websites —
Gita: Yes, it is —
Eric: — that everyone worked at one place, it exploded, and then everyone’s deeply psychologically traumatized by it?
Gita: Oh, yeah.
Eric: And then you start that while pulling the same ethos forward. I mean, I could think of ten other websites that do that as well.
Gita: No, I mean, we would be remiss to say that Aftermath didn’t take a huge inspiration from the exodus of the Deadspin employees to create Defector, which, like, I was there at the company when that happened. Like, I don’t think I’ve recovered from the trauma of all that. I remember logging onto Slack and bursting into tears because I saw that Barry Petchesky had been fired. And union Slack was very active, and everyone was telling us what was going on. I walked out into my living room where I lived with roommates at the time, and my roommate had to comfort me as I was, snot pouring down my face, ugly crying about how it felt like the people who owned my company didn’t trust us, wanted to strip everything that we did for parts, wanted to ruin a lot of things that I personally had put a lot of work into, into developing a better community culture and really good work that made a lot of money for these people.
Eric: Right. So let me ask you a really ham-fisted question: If you were someone who worked at Kotaku, and you were a — what was your job title?
Gita: Staff writer.
Eric: Staff writer, okay. So that’s perfect. If you were someone who had any sort of power to effect change at Kotaku, what would you have done instead of anything that people did when you were working there?
Gita: We came close to striking, and we should have struck. Everybody, we should have all walked out. We had a contract with a no-strike clause at the time, and that was the fear. But they did strike a few years later, and they did get everything they wanted. So we were actually too terrified by these new lawyers. I’ll give G/O media credit for one exact thing: they’re a great opposition, they have a great legal team that went through that contract with a fine-toothed comb and found every single way they could violate our contract without violating it, essentially. And I’m sure they would have fired all of us, but that would have been better than the slow death that I’m watching all these sites experience now. There are people I really like that work at Kotaku. Ethan Gach, and — I’ve never known how to say his name. Ethan Gatch? Ethan Gawk?
Eric: I respect — when I see, and this is another guy whose last name I don’t know how to pronounce, Zachary Zwiezen —
Gita: Yeah, I know. What’s his name?
Eric: He writes good lists and I’m like, you did have to make these into slides, but you are doing a good job.
Gita: Yeah, no, he’s a born blogger. I really respect him. And then Alyssa Mercante, obviously. We’re hanging out tonight actually.
Eric: Oh, hell yeah.
Gita: We’re going to a Brat-themed party.
Eric: That’s gonna timestamp this episode, but hell yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s funny to think that, like, we’re talking about how Kotaku has slowly been dying, and a Kotaku writer was at the center of Gamergate 2.0 here in 2024.
Gita: She, I mean, that’s always been — The brand Kotaku, on the internet only, has this piranha of bad-faith interactors that we never did a good enough job community moderating to get these people to shut the fuck up. But it just sucks, cause Alyssa’s work is really great and really fun. She has such a fun voice in her work. And you see, just based on what’s happening to her online, she is clearly not getting enough institutional support. And it wouldn’t surprise me if they were trying to drive her out of the company because any controversy makes it harder to sell this brand name. But Riley wrote that great post for Aftermath, “How Stupid Do They Think We Are,” the effort from the people who hold the purse strings now is to get all of the people who do the writing that people like out of these brands, and just sell the brand, because they think the consumers are too stupid to know the difference. But if you look at the traffic numbers for Deadspin versus what they used to be, you will see that that is not true.
Eric: Yeah. The thing that you said about Alyssa, trying to get her out of the company while she’s doing — is, like, “What does controversy mean when you’re an outlet?” If we were a newspaper in the 1920s and I was a newsie, I’d be like, “Oh, news selling newspapers?” You just get more clicks. It doesn’t matter if they’re hate clicks or not, clicks are clicks.
Gita: Yeah. Chartbeat doesn’t know the difference —
Eric: Exactly.
Gita: — whether this person is clicking ironically or not, you know? She brings a lot of positive attention to the brand, alongside negative attention from people you don’t want to be in your consumer base anyway. Like, do you really want like people who like Grummz and think that Mark Kern is a reasonable person to be a part of the people that read Kotaku? No. Everything that brand is about is antagonistic to that person and those values. You want to create an inclusive space for people that already like you, which is what we’re experiencing at Aftermath in a lot of ways. People are deliberately choosing us, so our interactions with our fanbase are so much more positive than the experiences I had when I was at Kotaku. You just see a lot more positivity when people want to be there.
Eric: Right. What are Aftermath readers looking for? I think the biggest difference between some of the other subscription-based websites and Aftermath is that Aftermath is already walking into a landscape of Patreon-based or subscription-based stuff. I can think about — Well it’s because video game websites were exploding first, and then turned into other things. So I remember when Aftermath was launching, you were like, “We’re not Remap. I want to make it clear that we’re not Remap, we’re not this other stuff.” So what are Aftermath readers looking for when they come to Aftermath?
Gita: Most of what they’re looking for is honest, usually left-wing politically, business analysis and original reporting, on top of anything that we want to write. They are looking for what our specific opinions are; one thing we decided early on is that we were not gonna do the breaking news game. Like, we are not gonna be first and fastest, which was often the case at Kotaku, we’d always fight to break things first before other outlets because we had great SEO, we had great Google placement. We don’t have that anymore. So we don’t have to be writing about the next season of Fortnite or whatever. We don’t have to be chasing the SEO for funny tweets when something happens. We can just write about the stuff that we like. What Riley MacLeod, who edits all of our pieces, often says is: “The blogs are our money.” Every time you write a blog, no matter what kind, people discover our voice and they’re into it.
But what I think people also really like, in terms of our news analysis, is that we don’t feel beholden to making these companies happy in any way, because our money does not come from being the first to post our review, like hitting the review embargo date. We don’t have to worry about whether or not Bethesda is happy with us. We can just post things that we believe are true about Bethesda. And we frequently do post stuff that I never would have been able to post, even at Kotaku. I never would have been able to post at Vice, even. Just stuff that is clearheaded about the totally mismatched levels of power between workers and CEOs in the gaming industry. And we get a lot of attention from readers for those stories, because I think there is a hunger for video game news that people feel is unbiased, but also comes from journalists who know what they are doing.
You were talking about — There’s a lot of Patreons and et cetera, Ko-fis in this space, you know? That’s true, but they’re mostly for influencer types that want to do influencer-type content. We don’t do influencer content. We don’t even stream video games, although I would really like to stream the Crusader Kings III “A Song of Ice and Fire” total conversion mod, which is going to add dragons pretty soon. I got early access to dragons and, dude, it fucking rocks. It’s so good.
Eric: This is what being a journalist is like, guys. You get early access to dragons. That’s why you work in the space. That’s what you’re supposed to learn from this episode.
Gita: Yeah. I’m playing a Targaryen dynasty and one of the distant Targaryen cousins hatched a dragon and named it Porkchop. And —
Eric: That’s pretty cool.
Gita: — I would die for Porkchop now. Porkchop is my love, Porkchop is life.
Eric: That was just inserted as a randomly generated name? That’s awesome.
Gita: Yes, they told me they dumped a lot of the non-flavor names, but they couldn’t get rid of Porkchop.
Eric: “It was stuck in the code! ‘Porkchop’ is load-bearing code, I’m sorry.”
Gita: There’s gotta be a dumb Targaryen, right, that names their dragon Porkchop?
Eric: I think that that’s what the new dragon show is about —
Gita: Oh, yeah, it’s about all the dumb Targaryens?
Eric: — the dumb Targaryens.
Gita: No, it’s so true. Every time I watch it, I’m like, “Everyone in the show is so stupid.” I love it, though. It really is anti-ruling class propaganda, because they don’t know any better than us. This all happened because two lesbians couldn’t come out.
Eric: That’s true. That’s what we learned in Season 2. That’s what it —
Gita: Absolutely.
Eric: Oh my God.
Gita: Alicent and Rhaenyra are completely in love with each other, and if they could have just come out and ruled together, none of that would have happened. Gay rights.
Eric: It’s funny that we’re having this conversation about this. What people don’t understand about working in this industry, it is the constant push and pull of nonsense decisions and then the creation of stuff that comes out of it. Like, we are talking about a silly thing that came out of the need for Warner Brothers to create the IP and extrapolate an entire TV show out of three lines of text. Right? And that’s how I feel talking about anything when we’re talking about media. It’s like, we are trying to do the best that we can under the parameters of absolute nonsense.
Gita: Yeah. Yeah. It really cracks me up on Twitter when people are harassing me and they talk about journalistic ethics and standards. And it’s, like, I have a degree in cinema studies from Oberlin College, right? So you’re talking to the wrong person, number one. Number two, I would know more about that, having been a working journalist for 10 years doing hard journalism. I’m not always a person that just posts about, you know, fucking buttholes or whatever I write about. But, you know, I’ve been in ethically tricky situations before and the thing is, though, a lot of it does just run on vibes, is what you discover. There is never an actual right answer to any of the ethical problems, because everyone is just trying to do their best.
Eric: I don’t know about “best.” I mean, the journalists, yes, but maybe someone’s trying to do the thing that makes them the most money right now, or following the trend.
Gita: Yeah, some of the journalists are doing that too.
Eric: Yeah, that’s true.
Gita: Like, there are people out there that are interested — I mean, the internet, Twitter, especially, has made it more possible to push your personal brands than ever before. And in the world of journalism and the world of writing, it is much very lucrative to have a personal brand, you know, I’m XOXO, Gossip Gita. I introduced myself by saying, “I’m Gita,” you know, like that’s —
Eric: Oh, you’re Gita?
Gita: I’m Gita!
Eric: Oh, I didn’t — I got confused.
Gita: My mom hates it when I say my name that way. My name is pronounced Gi-Tah, but I’m Gita.
Eric: And until she understands what exactly it is your job is, I think that you’re allowed to do whatever you want.
Gita: She doesn’t listen to podcasts.
Eric: No, she doesn’t.
Gita: She doesn’t.
Eric: That’s okay; my mom’s probably not listening to this one either.
Gita: Oh, great. We love that.
Eric: She wants to be on podcasts. I let her be on one, and now she’s, like, fiending to be on every single one of my podcasts, and I’m like —
Gita: Oh my God. So the joke is my mom would be an incredible podcaster. She’s a professor! So she has a beautiful, mellifluous voice. She can lecture like nobody’s business. She has a great recall for random facts and all that stuff. Wonderful conversationalist. But I think she would just panic because she would be, like, this goes on the internet? And then people listen to me? Like, that’s crazy.
Eric: That’s the whole point. That’s like what you’re doing when you’re lecturing! Can we talk about your cinema studies degree for a second? At the risk of me quoting you back to you, this was about your cinema studies at Oberlin. “When I was in college earning my degree in cinema studies (lol)” — that’s what you wrote, it was pretty good — “I learned quickly that the best way to be well-versed in the language of cinema is to just watch as many movies as you can. Even bad movies have lessons for you. The same is true for playing video games — working that hard, playing as many games as I did for so long, has given me the language to describe gameplay systems and the tension of playing a game to a greater degree of skill than I had before then. It has also taken the bloom away from the rose a little bit. It’s hard to be excited for something when you know that you’ll be staring at it in the dark of your apartment at midnight, long after your roommates have gone to bed. It’s hard to be excited for something that fundamentally feels like unpaid work.” I think that was from the article —
Gita: Yeah, that was from “I Was Once A Video Game Blogger.”
Eric: That was part of the larger conversation you were having about needing to play video games and then writing about it later; only being on the clock was actually you writing about it, not just playing. I wish you were paid to do it because it’s kind of an inherent thing about being a creative worker, is that you need to watch stuff, you need to consume stuff. And I think everyone forgets that as soon as they come into what they now have to realize is a creative job.
Gita: Yes. I think in video games, especially, there are a lot of people that get into it with the intention of being a paid fan. They want to be a fan professionally. And then they get confused by things like the recent controversy with Valve, which will also date this episode. But recently, there is a thing where reporters from The Verge played this game that Valve put out that has like a semi-public beta, where if you know somebody you can get an invite code. And there’s a pop-up that says, “Please don’t talk about this,” but that’s not binding in any way. And if you’re a journalist, the fact that Valve has put out a secret game that you can play, maybe, kind of: that just is a story.
Eric: That sounds like news! Sounds like news.
Gita: That’s news, you know? So there’s a lot of people, some people in the influencer sphere, they are confused by the actions of journalists here. Because if they did that, then they would be risking brand synergy with Valve. But the role of a journalist is not to make companies happy. So Valve can do whatever they want; it’s pretty clear that, you know, The Verge is probably likely going to lose access to the game after publishing an article like that. I feel like everybody probably knew that there. But also it is one of those things that I constantly find myself having to push back against when you see video game influencers online try to talk about what it is they do. It’s like, no, I don’t take stuff from companies that I report on. I don’t want a big swag box from people. AMC sent me some nice stuff about Interview with the Vampire, but it’s not like I’m doing hard reporting on that. I just think the show is really good.
Eric: Right. It’s like, “And I’m gonna take it. I’m not gonna post about it. I’m just gonna enjoy the vampire slippers you sent me.”
Gita: They send me a little velvet journal.
Eric: Okay, that’s kind of cute.
Gita: It’s kind of adorable. And a tumbler with Lestat’s face on it.
Eric: That’s funny.
Gita: It’s really adorable. But it’s like, I remember when Fallout 4 came out and there are people talking about how other people must have just been — like, they don’t understand why journalists were upset about the game, while wearing their Pip-Boy merch. And it’s like, “Dog, you look like a chump. You look like you’ve been bought.” And I cannot have the appearance of being bought by a company. That jeopardizes my credibility as a journalist that’s trying to tell people, make value judgments about whether or not business moves are right or wrong.
Eric: Yeah. So, what do we forget when we move into a new medium, maybe a more digital medium? Like going from movies to video games, or to — I spend a lot of time being mad about Dungeons & Dragons online. Obviously there are popular critics, like Ebert and Roeper, Pauline Kael. They were important because they had the ability to rip things apart and show people what movies were about. What do we lose, what do we forget, when we move mediums and all of a sudden it’s better to be a stan or a lapdog, honestly, than actually being a critical person just for the health of the art form? Which, supposedly, you and the Pip-Boy wearer both want video games to be good. So what do we forget about the necessary existence of criticism?
Gita: You know, I remember writing my critical review of Final Fantasy XVI, which was — I mean, I say it’s critical, but it was mixed. There are a lot of things in that game that I really liked. I thought the boss fights in the game were truly, truly — You go to space and you fight a dragon. Like, that was sick as hell. You’re not going to tell me that — Dudes will see that and say “Hell yeah.” And I was saying, like, my husband walked behind the couch and was like —
Eric: That’s what Sephiroth is there for!
Gita: — Exactly!
Eric: Yeah, that’s in the bones of Final Fantasy.
Gita: But then like you watch the rest of the cutscenes, and it’s like egregiously sexist for no reason. And then there’s a whole weirdness of it being a slavery narrative and no nonwhite — like, no Black people are in the game. There are some people that are clearly based on a fantasy idea of Arabia, but that’s also offensive for other reasons.
Eric: Shout out to the fantasy genre. Love you.
Gita: Love you guys.
Eric: You guys are crushing it. Thank you.
Gita: And people were really, really, really upset with me for writing that, because other reviewers gave it really good reviews. And —
Eric: That’s what I don’t understand.
Gita: I really don’t get it either.
Eric: Because, like, that’s why they invented the Metacritic score. Or inherently, that’s why they invented Rotten Tomatoes, so that you can see the aggregate. That’s what I don’t understand.
Gita: And it’s also, like, as a critic, I read critics I don’t agree with frequently. Because it helps me calibrate my own level of taste, right? Like, Armond White. Me and him? Diametrically opposed. We are exact opposites, when it comes to what films we like and what we appreciate about the medium. That means I can read an Armond White review and appreciate it, because I can see how he arrives at his conclusions critically, and then just think, “Well, I’m probably going to hate this movie he loves, because I don’t like the things he’s lauding about this.” I love it when people tell me, “I read your review, but I’m still going to buy the game, because a lot of the things you mentioned as negatives just don’t feel like a negative to me.” I love that, you know? That means my work was useful to someone, and it helped them understand the thing they’re about to make. I’m not writing a buyer’s guide. I’m writing a critical analysis of the experience I just had, and you might agree with some of those things, and you might disagree with some of those things, but you should be able to, in your own brain, with your own thoughts, figure out how you might feel about a video game based on the conclusions I draw and the arguments I make.
Eric: Right. That sounds good, for video games.
Gita: Sounds good for the culture generally. I mean, we’ve seen the sort of defanging of review culture across all media. I’ve seen this new trend in book reviews: outlets will run a positive and a negative review at once. And I think maybe that’s better than not running any negative reviews ever, but it’s weird.
Eric: That’s interesting to do in general, but not interesting to do because you’re worried about what everyone’s gonna say.
Gita: Yeah. You should have faith in your critics to be able to write things that are true. And the audience should not be looking at critical reviews as validations of how they already feel, but perspectives that they might not have considered. That’s the point of reading reviews and criticism, is problematizing things, you know? Taking things, interrogating them from perspectives that you might not have considered before, right? Like, I think that something got lost in the popularity of the, like, “feminist framing” of criticism for many years. Like, all throughout the 2010s, everything was sort of, “From a feminist perspective, blah, blah, blah.” It’s not like feminist critical analysis is bad.
Eric: I’m envisioning the YouTube video that came from, that’s very funny.
Gita: Yeah. People forgot that that is just a specific frame that people are interrogating a text from. That does not mean anything about the quality or entertainment value of that piece of media, that text. That just means if you look at it from this perspective, through this framework, here are some interesting problems that occur with it. My friend Nico Deyo wrote something for Polygon about the Elden Ring boss Malenia that was specifically feminist critique. And people got really upset that this was being done at all. And that, I think, is the thing, you know. People look at articles as: this is the viewpoint of everyone that works at this publication, and they’re writing this to shame me personally. When, no, sometimes you write just to ask questions, sometimes you write to discover. But the idea of art and play being a part of our lives, intellectual inquiry just being a normal part of our human experiences, is completely evaporated from American culture. Like, it’s just, we are here to sit in front of the bad screen and then go home and transfer to the good screen. And then if the new movie that comes out isn’t the best thing we’ve ever seen in our lives, shit our pants and die.
Eric: I’m envisioning someone watching Wolverine & Deadpool when shitting their pants and then dying when you said that.
Gita: Yeah. No, that’s what I was thinking about too! [laughs]
Eric: Gita, I could literally listen to you talk about this all the time. I really do like listening to you talk about podcasts; I’ve been listening to you for a long time. Do you think you’re as good now talking about this stuff as you were in 2016, when you were named best video game blogger of the year?
Gita: Oh my God. Oh my God! That was — I remember when that happened. Critical Distance is such a cool blog.
Eric: It is.
Gita: I really love it, and I remember being like, this is really important, industry people declare this, and I was at dinner with my parents and I like passed the phone around and my mom, like, read the entry out loud.
Eric: That’s what awards are for. It’s only for showing your parents and grandparents.
Gita: So my mom has context for what the fuck I’m doing with my life.
Eric: I’m doing a good job. Someone said I’m doing a good job regardless of what that even means.
Gita: Yeah, no. I had a quote of mine post embedded in a fucking BuzzFeed post and my mom texted me and she’s like, “Gita, there’s some of your writings on BuzzFeed!” And I saw it was a tweet and I was like —
Eric: “Oh?? That’s not what I wanted you to see!” Can I share with you something you said in an Inverse article that you got interviewed for when you got the commendation?
Gita: Sure.
Eric: Okay. So — I’m sorry, I am going to quote you back from 2016. Sorry. So, Inverse asks this question: “You just got recognized for doing incredible work in a very small field. How does it feel? Are you headed to Disneyland?”
Gita: Oh my God.
Eric: And here’s what you said. “Still can’t quite believe it. I’m eating pizza in bed right now. This isn’t the first time I’ve done pizza in bed this year. There are at least 10 days of pizza in bed this year. It’s weird to have won an award”, question mark? “I am successful now”, question mark? “My credit card company has also been calling me for a month straight, three times a day, every single day.”
Gita: Yeah. I mean, the only thing that’s really different is that the credit card company is not paying me that much and I’m lactose intolerant, so I can’t have cheese as frequently as I used to.
Eric: You can have pizza in bed and have Lactaid.
Gita: That’s true, but also I don’t eat pizza in bed anymore because I have a cat. And pizza and french fries, those are the two things that she wants. She doesn’t like human food otherwise, but she will eat those two things. So that plus crumbs in the bed, you know, don’t want David to go through that. Yeah, I mean, to me, every day I wake up and I’m like, “Oh, people care about the things that I write. And I have, like, a career in writing,” to me, it feels like a big joke. And I know it’s not a big joke, but it feels like a big joke, because it’s hard for me to take myself seriously, because I constantly am having an existential crisis about whether or not I’m a good writer, like every single day. So yeah, that isn’t the first award I won. It’s not the last award I won, also. I won an award a couple of years ago for excellence in media from a Black-specific group. It’s a very cool plaque that they sent me, and I hung it in my office, and that’s not the last honor I’ve received. You’d think that the positive reinforcement at one point would stick for me, but no. The thing is the lack of sustainability, and also the lack of institutional support for this field specifically, makes it hard to feel satisfied with the work you’ve done. So I just see bigger and bigger prizes, bigger and bigger opportunities to push the work forward, and I’m just never satisfied.
Eric: Sure. So if I ask you the same question that Inverse asked you, God, more than eight years ago, right? It’s like, you got recognized for doing incredible work in a small field. I would say an even smaller field, because Aftermath is a real business that’s actually running sustainably.
Gita: It’s crazy, right? They let me run a business.
Eric: It’s pretty good. It’s pretty good. So how does it feel? Do you feel like you want to go to Disneyland a little bit more because Aftermath exists, in what you’re doing now, as compared to what you were doing when you were working at Paste? Which, again, was not even — When we were talking about the two places that were important for you to work at Kotaku and at Vice, you didn’t even mention that.
Gita: Paste was cool because I got to be an editor and I got to, like, commission pieces and shit and like that never happened again. Nobody gave me that much power ever again, which, I mean, I think was wrong of them. I think I’m a great editor. But I can’t even be happy about Aftermath’s so far successful not-even-first year, because I’m thinking towards the next thing. I’m thinking towards, “Okay, when are we going to make enough money through subscriptions or other deals that we might make, investment deals we might make, that will allow us to have an office space? Allow us to hire more people to work for us. How can we create a sort of alt-weekly of video games that exists online?”
I’ve been thinking recently of the sort of 404, Defector, Rascal News, that kind of thing as an alt-weekly space. Like there used to be The Village Voice, and now we have Hell Gate, you know? Like, there used to be people who were interested in covering the stories that were not going to be covered by national newspapers, by creating their own small alternative newspapers. And while there are some cities like Seattle and Portland, where that culture has remained really strong, one of the things that’s affecting all media is the inability to fund small local journalism. So we are recreating the alt-weekly, in a way. We’re finding another way to finance the thing that The Village Voice used to be able to do. I look at that, and we’re not there yet, so. You know, I remember when Bernie Sanders was doing a debate, and one of the other candidates was clearly starstruck. God, the billionaire guy that was running was starstruck came up to him —
Eric: Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Gita: — and he was like, “Hi. It’s so great to meet you.” He’s like, “Uh-huh. Yeah. Good.” That’s how I feel when people congratulate me on Aftermath. It’s like, I’m thinking about the next thing, though. I’m thinking about how we can take this and create a network where people like me, who have careers in media but haven’t been able to get the institutional support they need, can create an institution where we all lift each other up.
Eric: The rising tide, of course. I think that people, going back to something we said about everyone forgetting what happened in the past, either when we’re changing mediums or even when we go from — when we’re talking about Nazis, right? We forget literally something that was a tentpole in the past. That is how companies rise and fall, especially in media. Obviously, all of the layoffs that happened throughout all of media have been terrible, but that’s because companies overspent, and now they laid people off because they’re fucking stupid. They could have not overspent, or video game companies couldn’t have thought that 2020’s revenue wasn’t going to be the same forever, but they did, so now they have to lay people off. It’s not the end of the world; it’s the cycle. And I think part of that cycle is: this is where things start. I’m really excited for the future of media and new companies starting, because these are the seeds that grow into something.
Gita: Yeah. No, we’re seeing now institutional knowledge being built again.
Eric: Exactly.
Gita: One of the problems of the sort of dissolution of digital media is that brain drain is very real. Like, you look at the masthead for Kotaku and Carolyn Petit is, like, she’s fucking incredible. But almost everyone else that’s there is extremely green. And that’s not a problem, unless there are no other seasoned journalists there that can help show them the ropes. When I got to Kotaku, I got to know Tim Marchman. I got to know Evan Narcisse, who is my blogfather. I love that guy. I had Jason sitting next to me, he types with his —
Eric: The video game bogeyman himself.
Gita: Oh my God, he types with his hoodie over the top of his fingers, he’s incredibly cold in the Gawker offices. So he’d just be, like, slamming at the cords. Every time he says something in Slack that annoyed me, I’d just be like, “Fucking penguin ass.” I love him. There’s one time when there was a video game March Madness draft that was really viral, and we posted it in Slack, and I was sitting next to him, so I knew he was typing furiously and I saw what he was typing was, “The seeding is all wrong. I don’t have enough time to look into this.”
Eric: It’s like, “Yeah, dude, yeah.” That is the kind of person that’s going to go on to do what he’s doing, absolutely.
Gita: Absolutely, no. He’s just like a mad dog. He will not let go. I appreciate it so — having him in the union was sooo good. It was amazing. It was very helpful. I feel like, though, a lot of these voices are no longer at these legacy sites. I worry for the people who are at G/O Media right now; every time I had a sticky ethical question, I knew there was somebody who had a ton of experience that could answer those questions. One of my first couple of months on the job, Jezebel ran a clinic on how to report sexual assault cases.
Eric: Oh, that’s awesome.
Gita: It was really — It was Anna Merlan and Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, who have so much experience and were incredibly helpful, had stapled packets to give to everybody. And then were also on call any time on Slack, if you had a story that had a question that your editor couldn’t answer for you. What’s lucky is that we are now building new workplaces where we can begin to rebuild that knowledge back up. But also, we have the benefit of having a Hell Gate, a Discourse Blog, a Defector, all these other places have been doing it for a couple of years now, where they can help us with some of the growing pains of our own business, right? Hopefully — my dream would be — a return to the webring, you know? Where on our home page, there would be like, “Visit the other sites in our ring!” And you know, it’d be 404, Defector, Hell Gate, et cetera, et cetera.
Eric: That would be nice.
Gita: Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be sick? It would be amazing if we could create a system where you could, you know, like the streaming package deal, you could subscribe to a bunch for a discounted price. That would be amazing. These are things that, we’ll leap over those when we get there. We are kind of reinventing the wheel, but at the very least, we are going in there with some success stories to draw from. Some people that are always all so excited to help you, too, because layoffs are happening every day in media. Outlets are shuttering every day, you know? And even in independent media, you are seeing some examples of projects that didn’t work out, which is unfortunate. But as we all keep doing it, the more we learn about what it takes to run a business of this kind.
Eric: Yeah. All right, well, Gita, I have one last question for you. Because it is a presidential year, I always like those questions where they’re like, “Hey, why should you be president?” And then they’re always like [mumbling noises] and then just say their stump speech. But like, what if they actually answered those questions? And I think that CEOs of media companies need to answer these questions, and I’m very excited to ask them to more CEOs. But I want to ask you, because you are technically a co-owner of Aftermath, as one of the four worker-owners of Aftermath. So Gita Jackson, why should you co-run a media company?
Gita: Because I’m really good at delegating and knowing when people are smarter than me. I’m not going to ever force through a decision if I’m shown evidence that my opinions are bad. Because, for the most part, I’m spitballing, and if you know more than me, I will defer to you immediately. If I know more than you, I will make that very clear. But if you are showing me data, if you say, “I’ve done that before” and you’re saying ABC, but I actually know XYZ, I’ll be like, sure, whatever. Absolutely fine. My goal is to get through life without doing too much work. So the less work that I have to do, the more that I can delegate it to someone who knows better than me, the better for literally everyone. Every good boss I’ve had has been a good delegator, and not been a micromanager. They have allowed people to handle their own business. And I think that would make me a good boss. The other thing about Aftermath specifically is, like, I would trust those motherfuckers with my life. So much money goes into that bank account and I don’t see any of it, and I just trust that they’re not depleting it, you know? I trust them so much that even when they piss me off, I still want to run a business with them, right? So I feel like my internal bullshit calibrator is very, very strong. I considered doing something like this solo and building a team around myself, and I’m just so glad that I didn’t have to do that, because people I’ve already worked with before had a better idea that I could just join in at the last second.
Eric: “My Tipping Point is in something else. I spent 10,000 hours posting, you guys do money. You do the money!”
Gita: Yes. “I’ll do the funny ones and you do all the serious stuff.”
Eric: It’s like, “I don’t want to do the serious stuff. You do it.”
Gita: No, I don’t. I mean, I love reporting, but I’m a critic at heart. I’m a cultural critic. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. I think about the world and why we’re all like this every second of the day. And while I know I could get on the phone and start cold calling, cold emailing, I would so much prefer just thinking my little thoughts and writing them down into a little blog.
Eric: It’s good. Everyone has their strengths.
Gita: Yeah. I know what my strengths are, and I very much know what my weaknesses are.
Eric: That’s just as important.
Gita: Yeah.
Eric: If only someone had told all of those terrible bosses we had in the past what their weaknesses are, maybe we wouldn’t be where we are. But maybe it’s worth it. I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.
Gita: That would be pretty great.
Eric: It would be pretty great. But something you’re good at is talking on a podcast. So thank you so much for being here, Gita.
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Gita: Thank you for having me.
Eric: Yeah.
Gita: It’s been so fun.
Eric: Yeah, you can send this to your mom. Be like, “This was official, I went to their office and everything.”
Gita: Yeah, sure. Mom, don’t look at my Twitter account. Just don’t. You’re not gonna like it, and you won’t understand it.
Eric: It’s just like all Talmud and fighting with Harry Potter guys, like, sorry. Don’t do it. [laughter]
Amanda: Attach Your Resume is created and hosted by Eric Silver and Amanda McLoughlin. It’s produced by Brandon Grugle, edited by Mischa Stanton, and our cover art is by Shae McMullin. We are a production of the Multitude podcast collective and studio. If you like the show and want to learn more about how Multitude helps creators make a living, follow us on social at MultitudeShows, or visit multitudeshows.com.
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