The Futility Infielder

I've often traced my yen to write about baseball back to a pair of dog-eared secondhand books -- Roger Angell's The Summer Game and Jim Bouton's Ball Four -- rescued from a flea market by my grandfather, and by the marvelous yet unrecorded swath of the game's history he himself witnessed in his 91 years of life. I've paid homage to the rants of Hunter S. Thompson. I've tipped my cap to the discussions at Baseball Primer, and the small handful of blogs that were online when I began publishing mine four years ago.

But never have I written about a more contemporary influence, one which showed the world the vast possibilities of a new type of writing for the new medium of the World Wide Web. One which combined bleeding-edge savvy with a jaded ennui, all shot through with a snarky punk attitude and a laugh-out-loud sense of humor. One which delivered the goods on a daily basis, making itself a mandatory lunchtime read for anybody with an Internet connection. One which dead-perfectly illustrated the zeitgeist. Suck.com.

An outgrowth of Wired magazine's online offering, HotWired, Suck was the brainchild of Carl Steadman and Joey Anuff. It debuted on August 28, 1995, just over 10 years ago, with the following manifesto of sorts:

Shit makes great fertilizer, but it takes a farmer to turn it into a meal. With that thought in mind, we present Suck, an experiment in provocation, mordant deconstructionism, and buzz-saw journalism. Cathode-addled netsurfers flock to shallow waters—Suck is the dirty syringe, hidden in the sand. You wanted feedback? Cover your ears and watch your back … it wants you too. But Suck is more than a media prank. Much more. At Suck, we abide by the principle which dictates that somebody will always position himself or herself to systematically harvest anything of value in this world for the sake of money, power and/or ego-fulfillment. We aim to be that somebody.

Its first column, about the Courtney Love Murder Conspiracy Theory captured the thrill of the Web's capacity for breaking news:

There's something exciting about
the breaking of news on the Web
that can make an otherwise
bullshit-quality story smell
sweeter than Glade
Potpourri-in-a-Spray. Whether
it's two zillion critiques of a
handicapped Time cover feature
or early scene reports
following an aging hippie's
demise, I tend to find myself
lapping it right up, like a
thirsty dog at an open toilet.

The short, haiku-like lines centered on the page made for an easy read. The cleanliness of the design ensured quick load times in an age when a palpable tension existed between the content providers who pushed bandwith-hogging bells and whistles and the readers who connected to that content via turtle-like 28K or 56K dial-up modems. But even more revolutionary and influential was the style of hyperlinking to make references that were often obscure. As this lengthy history of Suck.com at Keepgoing.org recounts:

In the absence of HotWired strictures, they turned "tertiary links" into signature stylistic components. "It’s important to understand that up until then, to the best of my knowledge, people had just used hyperlinks in a strictly informational sense, simply as online footnotes," says Mark Dery, author of Escape Velocity. "With Suck, you wouldn’t get the joke until you punched through on the link. Then you found out that it set the keyword to which this new source was linked in an ironic light." Writing for Suck, Steadman and Anuff were free to link "suffocating infants" to Dave Winer’s column, or "wet dream" or "negative energy". "Whereas every other Web site conceived hypertext as a way of augmenting the reading experience," wrote Steven Johnson in Interface Culture, "Suck saw it as an opportunity to withhold information, to keep the reader at bay."

Similarly revolutionary was Suck's commitment to daily content, its use of pseudonyms (Steadman was Webster, Anuff the Duke of URL) and its underdog viewpoint of the still-nascent dot-com industry.

While the trade magazines flattered executives with softball portraits and blind utopianism, Suck spoke to the grunts on the front lines, those like Steadman and Anuff, who saw the mistakes being made at the top but lacked the power to do anything about it. It was snarky and sarcastic about topics that were too square to be snarky and sarcastic about anywhere else. For the ground-level tech drone stuck at a computer, it provided the perfect daily respite. It was quickly located, easily digestible, and if you could suppress your laughter, it looked just like working.

In essence, Suck was the first important blog, as Mena Trott, co-founder of the company which makes the Movable Type blogware, recounts:

"It’s everything that blogs are right now: the chronology, frequently updated, simple, easy to read, linking playing a huge role in playing the story. This is what exposed us to what had the potential to become what we’re doing today. It was hugely influential in the format. I don’t think you can even talk about weblogs now without talking about that. I think that was the big exposure for so many people. That played a great deal in what we did."

The site took off and was soon sold -- to Wired; the irony was that its founder and publisher, a regular reader of the site, didn't even realize it was being produced right under his nose by a pair of employees in their (cough) after-hours. Soon, staff was added, including Heather Havrilesky (a.k.a Polly Esther), Ana Marie Cox (Ann O'Tate), and illustrator Terry Colon, who gave Suck 2.0 (as it was called) its distinctive visual identity.

The site grew in fame and influence, its best work compiled into a book, Suck: Worst-Case Scenarios in Media, Culture, Advertising, and the Internet . But egos eventually took over, the dot-com bubble burst, the money ran dry, and the Sucksters began departing for greener pastures. Suck ceased publishing on June 8, 2001.

This blog's first entry was published exactly one day earlier. Freaky, that.

Anyway, I could go on for days about the impact of Suck. During its heyday, I worked for Wolff New Media, the brainchildfart of author Michael Wolff, a company which haphazardly published guides to the Internet at a breakneck pace that nonetheless turned them into better doorstops than directories by the time they hit the shelves, and one which turned into a cautionary tale of dot-com greed in Wolff's own Burn Rate. Via a website called Your Personal Net, our publishing pace was so frantic I coined a slogan, "We shit live copy in our sleep."

Like every other underling in the dot-com industry, we were exploited to the hilt, a concept the Sucksters understood completely:

Never before in history have
nerds, as a class, become
economically viable. It was
never worthwhile to exploit
astronomers. But computer
programmers can actually
make something people want,
something people will pay for.
And they over-focus anyway!
Convince them that The Product
is somehow important to their
lives, more important than their
lives, and hang a turd from a
stick and call it a carrot.

Suck was the envy of our website and everyone else's, its hipness and street cred unrivaled, its slogans ("A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun." "Now more than ever.") legendary. It was, as Keepgoing claims, the First Great Website.

Cox has gone onto greater fame as Wonkette, a political blog. Havrilesky writes for Salon among others. Anuff co-authored Dumb Money, a book about day trading. Steadman runs the website Plastic.com, which maintains the Suck archive, the site's oeuvre. It's well worth your time to check out if you've never seen it (a fistful of favorites: one, two, three, four), or even if you have. Ten years after its founding, its history is worth celebrating, its demise worth lamenting, and its genius worth revisiting. Spend an hour or two of company time screwing off as you read it. Happy birthday, Suck, and rest in peace.

Labels: non-baseball