I published 55 articles last year, and like my children, I’m disappointed in most of them. The typical perfectionist in me is always annoyed I didn’t have enough time/energy to do one more pass or do more research. It’s our first year, a year whose success has absolutely floored me, and I wanted to look back at some of my personally favorite stuff I’ve published and what it meant to me.
This article was important to me because of its scope: an investigative project that involved a nosedive into the toilet of conservative media, showing the spread of a single story across the blogosphere. It was about the machinery of conservative media’s bitter bile at trans people. The absurd amount of straight hate speech prevalent on these sites, especially in the comments section, is striking when you’re in involved in a political movement that embraces and champions the LGBTQ+ community. It’s difficult to demonstrate simply how hateful these comments can be.
Leo Soell simply demanded their basic dignity and the right to be visibly accepted. Had this happened to any group the right promotes (Christians, gun owners, businessmen), their attitude would suddenly invert, showing their values only correlate to their political agenda. A tough one to write, but happy it validates the experience of so many trans people in similar situations.
Ah yes, the brands. The brands gaining online sentience on social media is a curse that requires an immune system response. They’re people pretending to be brands pretending to be people, and the people they’ve chosen to emulate are alienated, disaffected zoomers. I mean, I hate capitalism in general, but I really hate this. It’s a visceral disgust unmatched in how cloying and cynical this exercise is.
“LOL want 2 die on twitter dot com” is an ironic expression of sincere despair, and to co-opt this into selling cereal and hamburgers is another level of shit we don’t need right now. The whole therapeutic tone this takes is also gross, because Tony the Tiger can’t be your therapist. We need a hell of a lot less artificial sincerity.
This was probably the toughest thing I wrote this year. I read a mass murderer’s white supremacist manifesto. I watched Tucker Carlson and OANN. I browsed more 4chan and 8chan than I care to admit. I legitimately lost sleep over this one. This one was hard because I had to look into the black hole of an abhorrent cycle that doesn’t seem to have an end. The radicalization cycle is very real and is happening right now all across the world. This cycle makes certain people wealthy and powerful, and since most media operates on the same economic principles, it is not rewarded for stopping it.
I also found the triangular nature of the radicalization cycle unique and compelling, how each of these three groups reinforces each other. It’s an extrapolation of analysis others have done, but connected together into a cyclical, two-way loops. Researching this and writing this out was a withering experience. In all, it’s the most self-damaging thing I’ve written for this site, and I have no desire to repeat it.
One of the greatest lies that we’ve been sold on recently is the “gig” or “sharing economy”, where all the means of production have been outsourced to us. I wanted to write a piece on how hollow this type of economy feels, how wasteful and destructive it is not just to us economically, but spiritually. The Uberconomy is a type of final boss of late stage capitalism, where there’s literally nothing left to sell except the basics of human interaction. We’re all being turned into the products they need to sell.
I really wanted people to feel how futureless this system was, how fragile it really is. The next recession will most likely involve the implosion of these companies when Wall Street VC funding decides to bank on something more tangible. These types of companies are practically the only new large companies that exist these days, and it’s indicative of a larger trend of empty capitalism. I like this piece because I felt it encompassed a wide-reaching system that’s been tackled from the left in terms of its economic problems, but little of its emotional or spiritual decay.
I watched every Dave Chappelle standup special in preparation to write this piece, just to be sure I was looking at his work fairly with a fresh perspective. For how bold and natural he takes to the stage, Dave Chappelle is really just a hack when it comes to gender identity politics. He banked his entire career on talking about race in an unpretentious, accessible way that tried to use humor to playfully rib each other into getting along better.
Chappelle’s return to standup comedy on Netflix brought out an entire legion of conservative defenders of comedy as the last bastion of free speech or whatever. Many of these same commentators would probably bristle at Chappelle’s Islamic faith or quite incisive takes on police brutality. It got extremely annoying to see such bad faith praise of someone who just happened to overlap with their transphobic agenda. This piece was special to me because it expressed a lot of my reactions to transphobic humor in general. Being a cis writer, I’m grateful that I had so many trans friends provide their feedback on the specials.
This one was probably the most fun I had writing this year, other than our installments of Stupid, Evil, Horny. Ohio Guy is near and dear to my heart, having been raised in Mayonnaise, Ohio for most of my life. Often, I feel like I’m the Suburbs Whisperer and I need to translate its strange monoculture for you proper city folk so you understand why they openly put fascist bumper stickers on pickup trucks they don’t use. Why they punch drywall. Why they bottle up their anger until they shoot up a Denny’s. If anything, the suburbs is about giving up and succumbing to the vortex’s pull of convenience and isolation and letting it evacuate your spirit like a flushing toilet.
I heard the term “Ohio Guy” thrown about as overactive white male anger, and it’s accurate in a general sense, but the actual Ohio Guy is a far more specific brand of Midwestern oaf. He’s everyone’s dad I knew growing up, an army of redfaced white guys in cargo shorts always on the verge of screaming at the top of their lungs. Ohio Guy is a state of mind. It’s an article I needed to do absolutely no research on, none whatsoever. If anything, the topic of suburban insanity is one I am fully confident in.
And there we go: the objectively best list of my content for this year. Disagreements are not allowed.
A big thank to everyone who has supported this site with your Satanic magicks and Russian bot networks, just a huge thank you. Also a shoutout to our CIA handlers, being a psyop is sometimes a thankless job. We’re eager in 2020 to fully sell out, go back on our “no ads” promise, emerge as full neolib, and then get bought by Conde Nast. Happy 2020 everyone!
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.