More Gawking

Once my initial sputtering at the audacious vapidness of another Slate article died down, I gave my memory a brisk shake in hope of dislodging some stray crumb of meaning that I had missed before. I was rewarded by a stale, but otherwise edible morsel along these lines: the Gawker story is one about the urbanism of New York. What's-her-face who wrote the thing attributes the vitriol of the Gawking-class to just that: a special type of class rage developed by the well-educated young aspirants of the publishing industry running up hard against the economic reality of the city's finance and real estate industries. She locates the source of their rage in their understanding that Manhattan has been stolen from them.

So this is a problem of physical displacement? Are we watching the rear-guard action of the world's best educated refugees? In a way that I kind of like, this elaboration--perhaps embroidery?--of her idea explains the strange pointlessness of the Gawker enterprise. These displaced masses are not trying to take back the homeland, they are trying to poison the well. This was certainly the sense I got from the now-defunct Gutter, Gawker's architecture gossip blog. The tone was not so much 'Nothing is sacred,' the quality our Authoress seems to locate, but 'Nothing is good enough.'. It is so exhausting for the audience precisely because this attitude has no endgame. It isn't played on a field of relative values; it is an endless rehearsal of the same attitude in postures. It is a reaction, not a strategy or even a tactic. And it's a lousy lens for watching our city.