Well, if you thought that content was KING on the World Wide Squirrel, baby, you need to think again. Colossal failures like the alt.culture Web site show that you can't make the big bucks gar-gar-garring about bogus hipster stuff till the cows come home.

First, let me cut to the chase: alt.culture is dead, and I am gloating. The site is completely torpid, all the feedback forums have been eviscerated, and repeated mail to the contact address goes unanswered. Bwahahahaha!

What, you may ask, is alt.culture? Well, the whole idea comes from a couple of doomed and dated books from the horrendous wasteland of the mid-90s. The books tried to catalog all the crazy and weird shit that happened in the strange time that was the late 80s/early 90s -- the techno revolution, rave culture, culture jamming, consumer-item-as-cultural-touchstone, media overload, blargh blargh blargh. It was a weird mid-90s view of a dead early-90s time.

Altculture.com, the Web site, started out in '95 as a gimmicky New Media promotional device for the books, but then kind of took off on its own. The whole idea was that the Net Generation could comment on itself in that weird self-referential way that post-modern theorists get all juicy for. Or WHATEVER. It was SUPPOSED to be updated every week or so, but they ran out of steam some time in 97 and pretty much have been limping along ever since. The most current stuff I can find is related to Todd Bridges' arrest in '97. Woo, those were the days!

I think they made some kind of evil pact with Time-Warner's doomed Pathfinder service that dragged the whole enterprise down into the deep end of the shit pool. Good to know, eh? Know who you're selling out to BEFORE you sell out! Anybody with a lick of sense woulda known that Pathfinder shit was a big lead career anchor.

So, alt.culture has been pretty much a well-preserved corpse all these years. There was some scurrilous talk in the New York Times last year ("ZINE SITES LINKING TO GET MORE $") about the site joining together with other culture-decree sites like suck.com, word.com, feed magazine, and The Smoking Gun to get lots of dollars and re-sell out again. Well, FAT CHANCE on that one, eh? Bwahaha! Idiots!

See, the thing is, if you have a ZINE, you love it. You make it LIVE. Watching it crawl along like a re-animated Mondo 2000 zombie, dropping chunks of flesh all over the Web like a disgusting leper, is just too much. You don't leave your zine out in the cold, is what I'm saying. Zinesters don't do that.

My advice to those regretful alt.culture leftovers is the same advice I give to any cheeseball ex-zinesters and wanky writer wannabes:

"hey, FAT BOYS! Ha ha ha! You need to get HUNGRY again. Lean and cruel, with one ear to the ground at all times, like a Real Pigdog Journalist. Try rubbing down with gasoline and doing 200 pushups and 200 pullups twice a day. Get ANGRY! Drink straight Everclear! Learn a little something about JOURNALISM and maybe someday we'll let you be our COPY BOYS. Muahahahaha!"

For now, the whole mess makes for an interesting study in hubris and bad attitude. There's just something pathetic and sad about people who bray that they sit on the border of a Brave New World, when you know and I know that that world never has materialized and never will. Who knows what'll happen to this dead site? I'm keeping an eye on the whois data -- hopefully I can swoop in and snatch up this domain. Maybe PDJ can move our Pooniedog stuff over there. Hell, culture doesn't get more alt than that.

Check it out yourself

paco@pigdog.org