“Everything is the internet now,” the New Yorker reporter Andrew Marantz told a colleague in 2016, in a conversation he recounts in Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. From inside the content-making machinery of 2014, perched on the ledge of the ring at the Twitter arena, it was possible to feel a new future coming, shapeless and terrible, yet it all seemed too dumb to be real. The punchline to decades of jokes about the worst imaginable president would become president. Self-referential publicity stunts and stupid, fleetingly apocalyptic online conflict-the Internet counterpart of Westboro’s pointless brawls-would become the substance of politics, shaping the application of real power in the real world. Gawker Media would be bankrupted, not for provoking the wrath of the Topekans’ angry God, but for having published rude things about the vindictive and very secular billionaire Peter Thiel. Many things would happen in the five and a half years after that. I snapped a picture, juxtaposing a Westboro picket sign reading “ THANK GOD 4 9/11” with a lamppost flier reading “Beautiful Nolita 1 BR Mott Prince $3200 for 10/1” and posted it to Gawker with no headline. A man in skivvies proudly made noise.Īll of this was what Westboro wanted, although in truth it was a little sparse and desultory up close. The Westboro people brandished offensive signs and yelled, and counterprotesters tried to countershock them. We might have kept working at our desks, but some sense that reporting or life required the witnessing of things led a few colleagues and me down the stairs and out to the street. Its founder, Fred Phelps, had died that spring, and the shock value of its mission-waving “ GOD HATES FAGS” signs or taunting mourners at military funerals-had long since worn off. They had stopped there to protest my then employer, Gawker, as part of a swing through New York City designed to antagonize the media so that the media would pay attention to Westboro.Įveryone understood how the manipulation worked. It was a sunny day in 2014, just before the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and protesters from the church had come all the way from Topeka, Kansas, to demonstrate on a street corner near my office in Manhattan. We all could have ignored the Westboro Baptist Church, theoretically, but the opportunity to be party to a morality play seemed unusual and interesting, back then.
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