Dear Vice Australia, thank fuck you’re dead.

This week bombshell news rocked the country. A number of tech and culture news websites including Vice, Gizmodo, Refinery29, Kotaku and Lifehacker will no longer publish in Australia as Pedestrian Group undergoes a restructure.

I’m here to talk about the death of Vice Australia. Frankly, I’ve never even fucking heard of the others.

Vice Australia is a media outlet that brought the country together. The one factor unifying Australians under the age of 40, the one factor that crosses the political divide and touches all our hearts, is our hatred for Vice Australia. The one factor unifying Australians over the age of 40 is also their hatred for Vice Australia, which begs the question: who the fuck was their target audience?

Yes, I concede it wasn’t always underwhelming. There were moments of brilliance. The old Vice Australia in particular, before the Nine-owned Pedestrian Group became the exclusive publishing and commercial partner, did help kick-start the careers of some talented journalists. One notable example is Mahmood Fazal, a former sergeant-at-arms for the Mongols Motorcycle Club. It’s a former profession that would have turned away most media outlets. But not Vice Australia.

Fazal is now a Walkley Award-winning journalist working for Four Corners.

These anomalies weren’t enough to save or redeem the masthead though. You could spot the death of Vice Australia from years away. There was an avalanche of giveaway signs. You could literally hear it in the voices of the publication’s reporters as they spoke into handheld mics in their own dingy bedrooms, delivering rehashed news in comically low-budget fashion. You could see the defeatism in their tired eyes. In the cutthroat world of modern media, Vice Australia had about the same prospects as a tone deaf Australian idol contestant.

From that middle (upper?) class girl uploading cooking videos in a thong to that white dude in chinos and loafers strutting around “Australia’s shittest rentals”, as if he’s ever had to rent once in his life, Vice Australia suffocated itself to death with irony. The masthead made doing and documenting drugs uncool – a feat no state or national police force has ever managed. The comment sections – 90% bile-laden roasts of the Vice brand and 10% bots promising penis enlargement pills or MDMA pills – usually made for better reading than the articles themselves. The world will quickly forget masterpieces such as ‘How to get free coke’.

An honourable mention for clickbait journalism must go to the Night Out Receipts series, which was a weekly post of some hipster’s bank statement after a weekend bender. It almost always involved a Melbournian scabbing free drugs left, right and centre, presumably because they refuse to work, not because their family is actually poor.

Then there was the fashion photography… While the original ’90s magazine from which Vice spawned, Voice of Montreal, was filled with HD photos of outlandish scenes, fashion photography for Vice Australia got about as adventurous as event photography from queer club nights. There was no styling, no creative direction, no scene-setting. Just turn up to an event with a camera and click away. Challenging work!

But what rankles most – for me anyway – is the feeling that I was watching privileged kids, who’ve never had to resort to sex work to pay bills, glorify sex work simply because it’s slay to be a stripper these days.

In many ways, Vice Australia represented the epitome of everything shit about Australian media. The veneer of radicalness was so paper thin that the talon-like nails of the fashion girlies employed there practically tore the concept to shreds by virtue of their hypocrisy. The publication rarely covered anything remotely countercultural. There was never any inkling of substantive cultural criticism. The media brand simply regurgitated normie perspectives, hilariously considered as hot takes, and meekly bowed down to the utterly crap parts of digital media, becoming, in the process, the latest in a long line of youth media outlets to hedge their bets against print media and face the consequences (insolvency).

There’s a clear lesson learned here: your publication will die when you consider the Melbourne club Miscellania to be the heart of underground counterculture in Australia.

This is no joke. In the last months of its pitiful existence, Vice Australia was churning out articles like this: ‘The Best DJs in Australia are Shes and Theys’. On almost the exact same day, Baffler put out a thought-provoking longform essay on the shallowness of diversity discourse within dance music, the vapid faux-sincerity of modern music reviews and the subservience of rave music to corporate cultures. The angle of the former – that raves are somehow inherently liberating and utopian – prompted an outburst of online platitudes from local scene kids. The latter sparked nuanced conversation among music critics.

Sure, Vice Australia was woke. But the sharpest edge of the politics it platformed was little more than (small l) liberal identity politics.

It was a shitshow that left me unable to turn away. As a journalist, it was a masochistic addiction and I undoubtedly kept their click count ticking over, which is precisely the problem: the whole business model was predicated on readers and viewers despising the digital media company.

It doesn’t help that the Vice brand is renowned for ripping off freelancers, underpaying and mistreating staff, spewing out Saudi Arabian propaganda, selling out to Rupert Murdoch and exhibiting non-stop corporate greed in its death throes. The incel reek of Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys, the neo-Nazi terrorist group, in his post-Vice days, is hard to remove.

The rise and fall of the Vice media empire is well documented by Vice insiders and investigative journalists. What began as a countercultural print magazine in ’90s Montreal quickly descended into farce. But there’s a common theme in all this commentary. It wasn’t the lowly editorial staff or production employees sexually harassing co-workers. They didn’t demand sensationalist content. They didn’t create a workplace culture akin to a children’s playground. They didn’t splurge on extravagant parties and executive bonuses while simultaneously laying off workers. It was upper management.

So this article isn’t a potshot at Vice Australia staff herded into a rapidly-closing animal trap. But it is a potshot at what the digital media outlet stood for. 

It would be easy to dismiss the disappearance of the Vice brand in Australia as irrelevant, as unworthy of comment. But this is an international media company built on a giant sham, on fudging web traffic numbers via spam websites and channelling hatred. So it deserves a send-off, and I’m not talking about a eulogy.  

In the spirit of Vice therefore, this article is clickbait bullshit. In the spirit of Vice, there’s no hot take here. In the spirit of Vice, I’m too overworked right now to turn this into an in-depth article.

I just want to say: fuck you Vice. Nobody will miss you. 

You had the potential to be so much better.

Yours truly,

Australia.