Why BoingBoing Sucks

Hi, Coco here. I'll be your guide to avoiding terrible websites. Sure, you shouldn't need a guide for that, but there are some sites everyone seems to love, and every time your inbox is hit with yet another recommendation to "Check this out!", it may drive you closer and closer to believing those sites must actually be good after all. But they're not, and it's my job to remind you of that.

It would be remiss of me to start with any site other than a rival blog, and the most obvious and worthy target of my scorn has to be BoingBoing. It's been around long enough for everyone to at least have heard of it, and despite its geeky nature, seems to be beloved by relatively normal people who simply don't know any better. Next time someone tries to tell you about something REALLY AWESOME on BoingBoing, just link them to this post. Strap yourself in, we've really got some ground to cover here...

1. Cory Fucking Doctorow

My last recollection of BB before today was that its subtitle was something like "A Directory of Wonderful Things", and that was going to be the first thing for me to attack, because if that's its mission statement it's been failing miserably for, well, its entire existence. But that line seems to have disappeared, so we'll move straight on to the ringleader of this mongoloid circus. "But wait!" I hear none of you exclaim. "He didn't found BoingBoing, Mark Frauenfelder did!" Well you'd be right, smartass. But Frauenfelder's only real crime was his choice of co-editors - after all, to this day he still just posts about random shit people made that he thinks is cool or whatever (more on "Makers" later). Doctorow is the number one problem with BB.

I could pick all sorts of things to criticize about this clown. He has an unhealthy obsession with scaremongering over surveillance which is pretty much one of the least important issues his comfortably middle-class readership needs to concern itself with right now. He has taken to writing kids' books to preach about his stupid obsessions - just more preaching to the choir, a smug potshot at the man, signifying nothing (except his appalling lack of taste in calling his latest effort for the little'uns "For The Win". Yeah. I know). Oh, forgot to mention his career as a sci-fi writer, didn't I?

Well since that's his claim to fame, and what got him into the upper echelon of BB in the first place, it's only fair that I pick apart his ability on that front, don't you think? A couple of clicks around Wikipedia got me to a short story of Doctorow's published on Salon.com back in 2002. I'm not sure I can even type the name of this steaming pile of verbal excrement, and I really don't want to link to it, but I sort of have to, so if you're the rubberneck-at-the-trainwreck type, you can find it by clicking on the below graphic which heads the piece, and which I can include here under fair use by critiquing it as a hilariously ugly piece of shit (at least the design suits the story, haw haw!):

Alright, I wasn't going to type it out, but just to hammer this home, I will: the story is unironically called "0wnz0red". I urge you not to click that graphic and actually try reading the story because I can save you the trouble. The concept is simple: Silicon Valley coder's buddy, also a coder, dies of AIDS thanks to IV amphetamine abuse. Following buddy's death, coder loses lust for life. Buddy magically reappears, all alive and everything, 6 months later. He was saved at the 11th hour by a top-secret military implant allowing the recoding of his cells to literally do anything humanly possible on command. He's been on the run from the Feds for months and now has infected our protagonist with transmissible, beneficial virii of his own design, and his own implant. After briefly working together to improve the code, they are tracked down by the Feds and promptly employed for their skills. Protagonist hates undead buddy for being put in this situation, has another breakdown, and is allowed to leave after signing non-disclosure forms. Once free, he gets hold of the tech he needs to recreate the vital code to control his implant and create those beneficial virii. By story's end he is passing through customs in Somalia, presumably to save the whole of Africa from, y'know, stuff.

That's it. That is the whole story right there. I don't need to point out that a plot that stupid will necessarily result in a very, very shitty story. No, I haven't missed out any character development; Doctorow just assumes you share his - and by extension, the protagonist's - mistrust of "the man", and smug white middle-class we-are-the-world attitude towards global ethical dilemmas. But it somehow gets worse. For one thing, the reader is assaulted by more awful cultural references than you'd expect from Irvine Welsh on a week-long bender:

Cognitive Therapy... the name reminded him of Cognitive Dissonance, which was the name of Liam's favorite stupid Orange County garage band.

The Honorable Computing initiative was your basic Bond-villain world-domination horseshit, of course,

He brought up the MP3 player and scrolled through Murray's library, adding tracks to a mix, cranking up the opening crash of an old, old, old punk Beastie Boys song.

"Ghost, huh? I'm meat, dude, same as you. Not back from the dead, just back from the mostly dead." He did the last like Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in "The Princess Bride," one of their faves.

The computer is a brain in a bottle, it's in the Matrix,

When you want to download Police Academy n,

...Alright, that is more than enough. Then there is the fact that the completely unnecessary 1337 H4X0R jargon exemplified by the title is strewn throughout the entire story, often outside of dialog where it would at least vaguely make sense:

Even the number-two chair in Tomas Vanya's office kicked major ergonomic azz.

G0nz0red. Fi0red. Sh17canned. Thinking in leet-hacker crap made it all seem more distant. (NB: Yes, that link is in the original.)

 "You run it and while you're watching a movie, Hollywood 0wnz your box." Murray heard the zero and the zee in 0wnz. Hacker-speak for having total control. No one wants to be 0wnz0red by some teenaged script-kiddie who's found some fresh exploit and turned it loose on your computer.

Fuck this. I am not quoting any more of this shit. I could point out the typos and grammar fuckups, the fact that Doctorow's idea of evoking a sense of this being in the future extends no further than making up smashed-together place names and referring to "Canadian pesos" and "the Senator from Disney"(?!)... Look, I've made my point. This is fucking awful even by the generally low standards of sci-fi writing. But wait, there's a punchline: the year before this hideous mess hit the web, Doctorow published a book called The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Depending on how you read that, it's a startlingly honest title.

2. Xeni Fucking Jardin

How do you spell "token chick"? With an X, apparently. Seriously, she brings nothing of interest to the table except a vagina. Every fucking post she makes is just a summary of someone else's blog post or news article. Think I'm exaggerating? See for yourself. Oh, sorry - at the time of writing there is one post there that doesn't fit that mold. It consists simply of a BP logo that someone has oh-so-cleverly Goatsefied. A picture someone sent in. Fucking hell. I'm not going to reproduce it here out of respect for the almighty goatman. Anything else to say? Oh yeah, she once threw a hissy fit and deleted every post that even mentioned the name of her ex-lover and once self-proclaimed "fifth BoingBoinger" Violet Blue. That's not the sad part though. The truly pathetic thing is that the incident got (online) mainstream media coverage. Because the policy of a blog regarding deletion of old posts is somehow a big issue. Not because the old-school media boys' club were salivating over the mere hint of some sort of lesbian scandal. Of course not.

3. Makers

As far as the regular content of the blog goes, this has to be the most outrageously insulting thing of all. BoingBoing is obsessed with the concept of Making. Yeah, you better capitalize that shit, because this is a brand new concept for the 21st century! Somehow, in a society which has long been saturated with prefab consumer goods, building stuff yourself is suddenly such a noteworthy and noble practice that doing so confers upon you the status of Maker. As a Maker, you may even wish to join other Makers at the Maker's Faire, and if you Make something really awesome, like an Arduino-controlled toaster-slash-ebook-reader-for-the-functionally-retarded, you might even get featured in a BoingBoing post! I hate to break it to you, BoingBoing, but making things is not a sign of brilliance, nor of individualism, nor of anti-consumerism. It is a hobby for people who have a bunch of free time and money which they have decided to piss away on meaningless personal projects which do absolutely nothing to better mankind. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what should qualify someone for a specially-invented honorific title. Makers do not exist in the real world. They are more accurately referred to as "hobbyists", "tinkerers", or if particularly gifted, "selfish bastards who should be doing something worthwhile". Oh, and by the way - capitalization does not a new term make. Pun honestly not intended, and I feel sad that one accidentally worked its way in there, because I quite like puns and BoingBoing isn't worthy of them.


So, there you go. Three simple reasons why BoingBoing sucks: its two most prominent posters, and its favorite subject matter. If that is not enough to convince you the site is a horrid waste of time, I'm not sure what to tell you. Maybe this: BoingBoing is very popular for a reason. So is Kanye West. So is Two And A Half Men.

Author's Note: I'm sorry that first section about Cory Doctorow was so long, but I had to stick the boot in hard. He really is a cunt.