Deadspin and the Power of Quitting

Deadspin is no longer. Rather than assent to the stupid priorities of their new corporate overlords, the staff and editors quit the site en masse, effectively destroying it. The name their owners bought will still be there, but that will be meaningless because Deadspin's readers came for their writers, not the site itself.

I am sad to see Deadspin go, since it was one of the last vestiges of that great moment in internet history after universal broadband and before social media dominated it. Back then (when I first started blogging) I had my daily rotation of favorite websites and blogs and Deadspon was one of them. It still was until this week, the lone survivor of my old internet routine.

However, I am taking heart in how Deadpsin went down. American workers are under the thumbs of their greedy, stupid bosses. Just about every frontline worker has experience being good at their job and knowing back to front before some clueless higher up comes in to tell you what to do. Deadspin's new bosses said "stick to sports" without understanding that the site had distinguished itself by doing the opposite. Those of us (like myself) in education have innumerable instances of some administrator implementing a bad, asinine program so they can put it on their resume and leave for a better job before their lackluster initiative is exposed as bullshit.

Union membership is as low as it was in the dark times of the 1920s. Wages are stagnant and employers keep turning the screws to squeeze more profit from their businesses and more labor from their workers. In this hellscape American workers have only one weapon at their disposal: quitting. Like going on strike, it deprives your boss of your labor.

We have all worked in dysfunctional workplaces and dreamed of everyone quitting at once, the boss left with a problem they can't solve. When I quit being a professor two of my colleagues left that same week, and it felt like for the first time the higher ups in my department and college actually paid attention to the problems they were ignoring or actively causing.

Good on the Deadspin writers for pulling off the fantasy that so many of us have. And let that be a lesson to the rest of us that in depriving our bosses of labor we can have real power. I fervently hope workers in this country can start using that tool as a more effective weapon.