The Train Finally Slips off the Rails; "The Baffler" Paywalls Itself to Death

I've been following The Baffler since the Clinton years, though the magazine itself started off as a college hobby of Thomas Frank and Keith White in 1988. Issues started off sporadic and then went yearly by the early 1990s (after Frank had burned through grad school and graduated in 1990) and it chugged along as a yearly or bi-annual until a fire ravaged their Chicago offices in early May, 2001. Their archives were partially destroyed, and they started a literal "fire sale" of semi-smoke-damaged books and issues (I have some stuff from that). For the rest of the Aughts it mostly because a yearly again. In 2010 they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for a period were involved with the MIT Press, then became a non-profit foundation and are publishing as a bi-monthly. Since that MIT period, the website has been open for viewing....until late September this year, when the site got the "three views for a month" disease you see with the New York Times. So it's now, "pays ya money, sees our crap" when they don't even have the greatest series of stories they ever published, "I, Faker" by Paul Maliszewski. It only exists on archive.org, and I don't want to lose the blog copypasting it here.

Can we just admit that the Internet in the 2020s just sucks ass?

Above: David Graeber debates literal gay vampire Peter Thiel on technofutures and technofailure in 2014.

This was presented by The Baffler. Graeber is now deceased, and Peter Thiel is still bitter about college.