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T O D A Y

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
How AOL won a round of the quarterly-report numbers game

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Any attempt to flog Suck for such blatant venality is immediately arrested by the Sucksters' own scars and stripes: At Suck, self-flagellation is habitual vice and high art. No publishing venture has so thoroughly inoculated itself in advance against charges of "sell-out" -- from the manifesto with which it launched in August 1995 ("... Somebody will always position himself or herself to systematically harvest anything of value for the sake of money, power, and/or ego-fulfillment. We aim to be that somebody.") to frequent self-descriptions along the lines of "self-indulgent hipsters in dire need of a spanking (and cash)" to the freshly minted introduction to this book, which concludes, "We're making the world safe for hypocrisy. Ours." Why throw one more dart at people who toss bull's-eyes at themselves with such alacrity and accuracy?

Because the game is itself a kind of dodge, that's why -- a clever wave of the hands to distract us from looking too closely at the trick being performed. Suck's Maginot Line of self-mockery recalls the critic Mark Crispin Miller's analysis of television's "preemptive, prophylactic irony": "TV preempts derision by itself evincing endless irony ... TV protects its ads from mockery by doing all the mocking, thereby posing as an ally to the incredulous spectator." Miller called this "the hipness unto death"; at Suck, where the self-derision is overt and self-conscious, this kind of hipness is well past rigor mortis, heading toward decomposition.

One way or another, most of Suck deploys this classic strategy of youth. Smart adolescents desperate to prove to the world that they're in-the-know -- nobody's pulling the wool over their eyes -- have always preferred the comfort of sarcasm to the self-exposure of choosing a belief and risking being proven wrong or feeling left out. This kind of insecure bravado has nonetheless regularly generated amusing tropes and critical insights in Suck's columns -- a sign that adolescence is a passing phase, whereas smarts have some staying power.

The book's selections from the Suck back catalog neglect the earliest days of the Web site, before Wired bought it out and added it to the Wired Digital stable, back when it was mostly just Steadman and Anuff riffing away under pseudonyms ("Webster" and "The Duke of URL"). That's too bad. There was a more casual wackiness to this ur-Suck -- a loose commentary on the fad of body piercing would wander amusingly into a strange digression on the revival of the codpiece, complete with link (still functional!) to the Codpiece Resurrection Society: "This fashion trend (chiefly popular amongst the sons of wealthy aristocrats -- people just like you) was the rage for no less than 200 years !!"

Suck got more formulaic over time, but there's still good, memorable stuff in the 32 essays collected between these covers. Suck's inventiveness often takes the form of a single twist of phrase jumping out from the dense, elusive syntax -- as with Steadman's conclusion about the launch of MSNBC: "It's no longer a matter of whether or not the revolution will be televised -- though there's some question as to its ability to make it past a V-chip. What remains most salient is that the television will not be revolutionized." Or Anuff's observation about Bob Dole's garbled attempt to recite a Web address during the '96 presidential debates: "At some moment between Dole's muttering of www and his failure to include the dot between dolekemp and org, the Web became conclusively, incontrovertibly lame."

Suck's creativity generally takes the form of intricate micro-handiwork; the essays are full of convoluted aphorisms and amusing neologisms (like the self-descriptive "parannoying" or the delightful "Eudoraphoria"). But it's when the writers gather their courage and sustain a conceit for the length of an essay that they really cook -- as in Paulina Borsook's meditation on Silicon Valley dating "dos" and "don'ts"; Michael Sippey's "Astral Theory of Rock," applying astrophysics to our mundane stars; the pseudonymous POP's genuinely outraged screed against start-up company exploitation, "Dining With Cannibals"; or Heather Havrilesky's taxonomy of personal e-mail.

There are some glaring omissions -- like no example of "Filler," the consistently amusing weekly collaboration between Havrilesky and Suck's artist, Terry Colon. "Filler" -- along with most of Colon's wonderfully goofy sketches and caricatures of his colleagues as hapless, no-neck monster-tots -- often reaches beyond Suck's pop-culture staples into more archetypal territory, giving the material more staying power. But much of what Suck trains its satire upon is ephemeral; it's difficult to get excited today about critiques of OK Cola and The Site, no matter how witty they are.

Suck has always resisted the notion that it is primarily a site for Web criticism, even though that's how it first achieved notoriety. Over time its editors have cut back on the Net commentary (though Anuff now writes a good, Suckish Net Surf column for Hotwired) in favor of jargon-laden, deconstructive assaults upon ad campaigns. No doubt they feel that, given the sheer volume of punditry out there, when it comes to the Internet, everything's been said already. And yet "it's all been said before" applies with even more definitive jadedness to the other targets -- the vacuity of TV, the machinations of Madison Avenue -- Suck now prefers. The Net, at least, is old scams in new bottles; with the more venerable media, everything turned to vinegar ages ago.

By putting its prime content on its home page and changing it every weekday, Suck taught the nascent Web industry a lesson in the values of simplicity and immediacy. (Then it forgot those lessons itself with Suck 2.0, an ill-thought-out effort to add a bunch of new departments to the site, most of which quickly disappeared.) Suck's founders inspired a legion of colleagues to launch their own sites (like Rewired, Stating the Obvious and Soundbitten); each has its own personality, but all owe their architecture to Suck.

For all the cynicism on the Sucksters' sleeves, their original "if you write it, they will come" approach was fundamentally idealistic -- that's what attracted the imitators and won them a following (otherwise, as everyone knows, "satire is what closes Saturday night"). On the other hand, their eagerness to sell out fast -- motivated by an understandable mix of greed and exhaustion -- won them press coverage but lost them some credibility. Sure, writers should get rewarded for their work, but it's a little unseemly to start an exciting new venture and then bail before it has fulfilled its promise (Steadman's been out of the picture for a long time now, and Anuff isn't involved in Suck's daily operations any more, either).The Web already has too many people looking for "exit strategies" and not enough committed to sites for the long haul.

Suck's buyout plainly wasn't a perfect getaway, anyway -- or we wouldn't be seeing such strange recrudescences of the Suck brand as this new book. It's hard to tell whether Wired sees the book as a way to drive traffic to the Web site or hopes the book's sales will help underwrite the Web site. Either way, somebody made a big miscalculation: Suck's viscous writing can only be downed by the sip, not guzzled by the six-pack.

Normally, I keep a book by my computer to help pass the time between Web-page downloads. Suck's book somehow managed to invert this relationship: Waiting for these writers' points to congeal, I found myself turning to the screen for relief, browsing CNet, The New York Times, Slate -- anything for a breath of forthrightness and clarity. Reading Suck once a day is a pleasure for many on the Web. But 32 Suck columns in one volume is just too many dead fish in one barrel.
SALON | Nov. 13, 1997