Polygone and Our Endangered Media Ecosystem

Over a month ago, I posted that I was going to be stepping away for the month of May. I knew that I was going to be busy, but I’d also hoped that stepping away would give me time to draft some pieces, think about the direction I’d like to take this newsletter, and catch up on some of the various projects that I’d started falling behind on in other places. None of that happened.

On May 1st, the website Polygon died and I’ve been ruminating on its demise since. Sure, you can still go to Polygon dot com and see content being churned out, but this zombie site will never have the spirit or charm that Polygon brought about for 14 years. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For those of you not locked into the video game ecosystem, Polygon has been the second biggest gaming website on the internet for roughly the past 10 years. Founded in 2012 by (in part) the McElroy brothers, it’s also the website that made Brian David Gilbert (internet) famous. It was one of my favorite websites, one of the few remaining bastions of quality games coverage (both tabletop and video), and was widely seen as one of the few remaining safe places for people in the games media industry to be working. Then on May 1, the website was sold with no warning by Vox to a content farm run by one of pornhub’s founders.

Almost all of the staff at the website were laid off, including all unionized staff. I’m sure the new overlords will keep puppeting the corpse of what once was, but for all intents and purposes, the website is now dead.

In 2013, early webcomic pioneers Penny Arcade created a webseries called Strip Search (i know, i know) to highlight up and coming webcomic artists, with the winner getting a boost, some cash, and would be featured on their site. The winner was the incredibly talented Katie Rice and her webcomic, Camp Weedonwantcha. The comic ran from 2014-2018, when Katie announced the series was going on hiatus after she got a really great animation opportunity. Except it didn’t come back, and in 2023, the site went offline. The only way to read it now is through an incomplete, altered version on the Internet Archive.

I have so many stories of different creators I’ve followed online who’ve left creating behind, sometimes where I can still find the work, sometimes not. I remember being told how everything on the internet lives forever, and how laughably wrong I now know that concept is. I think a lot about lost media, both in literal terms but also on a spiritual level. Polygon’s not lost, it archives are still up, but it’s effectively lost to me now.

Where am I going with any of this, and why? Another thing I’ve been thinking a lot about this past month is the gigification of art and media, what it means for the industries I care so much about, and how it ties into what I’m trying to do here, in ways good and bad.

In almost every creative field there have been mass layoffs. And granted, this isn’t unique to creative fields, but given the topics I obsess over, and the focus of this newsletter, that’s the area I want to focus on, and hopefully you’ll see why I think it’s valuable to focus on.

I find most things I love through osmosis. Looking at acknowledgments, author interviews, guest hosts, shoutouts, crossovers, show notes, etc. has continually led me from one thing to another throughout most of my media journeys. So when I see how fractured the media landscape is, how little time most people have to devote to creative projects, the shrinking support for the arts from the government and corporate America, how so many projects and pieces I know I would love just fall through the cracks never to be seen…; well, it all drives me a little insane.

I loved the democratizing effect of the internet. But increasingly, I think the internet is causing the gigification of media. “Media” a term I use all the time but it is so broad as to be essentially meaningless. Lumping together a tiktok with a movie, or a poster like Dril with a journalist is just silly, it’s absurd. But I lumping together all forms of expression and curiosity as “media” or “content” is the goal of this framing. This is part of the push to make us distrust experts and professionals, and has the added benefit of cheapening art and turning it into “content”. The goal is to create massive societal problems and then to sell us the solutions. Bread and circus.

Journalism is dying. The Studio System is dying. The Games Industry is dying. The Arts are dying. We live in a time where people are posting, commenting, and creating at rates never before seen, and for what? Anyone can create, and no one can succeed at it. There’s so much incentive to have people play the content creation lottery, to turn creative endeavors into a side hustle, because it’s so impossible to succeed. Did you know that the top 1% of podcasts have 5,000 listeners per episode? Or that of the 66 million YouTube channels, only about 60,000 have over 1 million subscribers, which is roughly the amount needed to make a living from YouTube payouts. And it’s not just independent or novice creators struggling. I’ve talked before about how even successful actors are struggling to make ends meet.

I personally support a handful of independent media companies and creators: Dropout, 404 Media, Aftermath, Remap, and NeverPost. But there are so many more that I wish that I could support. Give me another hundred words, and I could link another hundred creators, but the point is that it is exhausting to think that the one way to create healthy, sustainable systems for the arts and creators is to place the burden back on average people. And “sustainability” is itself a frustrating concept. Whenever I see a site like Polygon die, I see a couple workers who are able to spin off their own successful, independent ventures, I see a couple who are able to land on their feet at a different site, and I see about 80% who are forced to stop working in the field. The independent media sector has its limits, and this can’t be seen as the solution whenever an org has layoffs.

I started this project because I care about media, I care quite a bit. I care about creatives, their process, and the way these works help to expand hearts and minds. I want to share and talk about what I care about with others, and maybe others will also care about some of these things as much as I do, or even care more. But even though I don’t have any particularly lofty aspirations for this project, even though this doesn’t require a high level of focus and polish, I often feel too burnt out and tired to even work on this. Often, I find myself too tired to even engage with art, and just let a podcast, video, or tv show roll over me. It’s frustrating. This is something that I care about enough to want to get better at, and I know that the only way to get better is through time and practice. Yet I also don’t want it to become yet another thing that weighs on me, a way of turning the things I love into work, and just falling into the same traps of gigification that I despise.

I don’t know what the answer is. I know at the very least I won’t always be as busy with work as I am right now, but finding the time, energy, and focus for this project can be extremely difficult. It’s made worse when I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders to support (either through money or promotion) every piece of art I care about or risk it falling into oblivion (don’t @ me, I know this is unrealistic). And selfishly, it’s hard to devote my free time on this when I could be spending that time taking in more art.

There are so many things pressing for our attention these days. There are so many bigger problems to worry about, and there is so much to be overwhelmed by. But I also know that art matters. I know that creation matters. And I know that it is important to give credit to all the people who work at making us feel, at making us human, whether it be through their profession, something they do in their free time, something they do for the public, or something that they just do for themselves. We’re living in a time where the act of creation is increasingly devalued, and in doing so the powerful are stripping away bits of our humanity one day at a time.

There’s only so much I can do about this situation, but the one thing I can do and do well is care. I can care a lot. I care probably too much. But care., passion, and love are the only things that can keep us going, so I’m not going to stop. I didn’t have the creative epiphany or the ability to create a buffer that I was hoping for over the past month. But week in and week out, I’m going to do my best to sit at this keyboard, tell you all the things that I’ve been caring about, and maybe some of those newsletters will get you caring about those things too.

Thank you all for indulging me on a fairly rambling piece. I hate to come back on a downer, but as I’m sure you all can tell, these are ideas that have been weighing on me. All those thoughts I had in the last piece about not knowing the direction I want to take this in and what style I want to go for still hold true, but those are just going to have to be questions I address as I keep working on this. I’ll still try to have a roundup for April and May to you guys over the next couple of weeks. After that, I have no idea what I’ll talk about. If any of you have come across or seen something that you think I’d enjoy, please reach out. I’m always down.

Until next week, take care of yourselves.

Soma