Deadspin to Facebook to California

The freelancer maelstrom over California’s recently passed AB5 labor law was touched off by the 35-assignment limit between individual freelancers and paying outlets, part of a larger and laudable attempt to grant employee protections to gig workers. Here’s a good thread about the underlying law, and here’s a longer explainer regarding the previous law that sparked AB5’s attempt to clarify things.

The freelancer carveout, while well-intentioned, is predicated on a bizarrely optimistic view of the media business. Namely, that publishers will be incentivized to hire full-time employees rather than use larger armies of freelancers for recurring assignments. In fact, almost all media companies of any scale are only too happy to use larger armies of freelancers rather than hiring employees. Giving publishers a reason not to rely overmuch on particular freelancers creates a built-in competitive dynamic to further increase downward pressure on freelance rates.

I certainly don’t pretend to have a perfect solution that helps integrate freelancers into California’s drive to establish better worker protections, while not closing off certain avenues of work. But restrictions in one labor market should be not be hastily modified and applied to another just for legislative convenience. Freelance income is tenuous enough without getting drowned in a tidal wave of action and law meant to restrain Uber-like labor abuse.

Speaking of abuse, how about that Facebook News!

This revolutionary approach of trying to understand something before building a product around it flies in the face of everything technology has taught us over the last three decades. Predictably there will be the usual star chamber of premier publications recruited/paid to lend their gravitas to the launch of yet another Facebook news thing. Which, okay, fine, iteration and such. No shame in getting that money, though it would be much more useful to, say, pay the bottom 90% of independent news organizations rather than the top 2% for the umpteenth time. And naturally there was the usual outcry of Facebook’s (i.e. Mark Zuckerberg’s) inability to distinguish between anything that is not in a bit state of 0 or 1 when it comes to media operations, since all Things may be classified as Left or Right, and thus opposite but equal, and thus you must balance out the lefty stank of the Washington Post with the septic lies of the Daily Caller.

Facebook’s obsessive insistence on building itself around how it wishes the world was, rather than how the world is, explains why they are continually befuddled by negative reactions to these initiatives, as well as why these initiatives are so easy to pervert and game for the benefit of bad-faith actors. To its credit, Facebook News looks like the best version of this type of thing that Facebook has yet attempted. But my suspicion is it will succeed in almost direct proportion to how much it breaks out of Facebook’s smothering unitarian orthodoxy, and I don’t think Zuckerberg will tolerate that for any level of success.

As for destruction of Deadspin, what more can I say that hasn’t been said more eloquently already, by worthier and more knowledgeable people than I? The history of Deadspin ran through several companies and dozens of writers, among the best writing on any subject. I don’t care that much about sports generally, but I could read lots of sports on Deadspin from those writers, and the writers they inspired. The fact that the site evoked such engaged loyalty from its creators and audience, while also turning a profit, is an extremely rare alchemy that Jim Spanfeller and Great Hill Partners poured down the gutter because they didn’t like the color of the brew.

I’m assuming Spanfeller and his longtime catspaw Paul Maidment will suffer no repercussions for annihilating a successful business unit in, what, 10 days? Not to mention losing a $1 million deal for G/O Media in the process. They are, after all, creatures of cronyism at home in their element of dead-end rot, where a debatable success in the distant past transformed them into a sort of free-floating executive cancer, metastasizing through organization after organization and reproducing endless nonviable copies of themselves and their opinions.

In fact, one can easily imagine the meetings and calls where this is all being viewed as a great relief. Some churl cracks that it was in fact great they drove an entire staff to quit en masse, because they won’t have to pay severance. Even now, Zombie Deadspin creaks to life in what looks like a series of bot-created posts topped with video off the wire and no troublesome human byline. Never forget that the Spanfellers of the world are positioned as they are to provide a temporarily human facade on the parasitism of their private equity/venture masters—practices which are always predatory and always ultimately fatal to the host.