Choire Sicha, who today works as a journalist for new York magazine, is one of these former owners and takes responsibility for losing control of the domain. “When an independent media company goes bankrupt, estate and estate planning is usually not handled well, and I think that was very true for us,” Sicha says. “We certainly weren’t as careful as we could have or should have been.”
Going forward, struggling media properties will need to prioritize estate planning, as this type of domain squatting is likely to become more common. “The ease with which anyone can simply create a site of a hundred AI-written blog posts based on the corpus of their choice must be a real game-changer for expired domain recoverers,” says John Mahoney, who memorably wrote about the dynamics of spammy digital media companies for The Awl. “As usual, the conversation about “AI is revolutionizing [insert-industry-of-choice]”overlooks the true pioneers of the Web: spammers and SEO scammers.”
Hairpin’s first human employees are understandably disturbed when I ask them about the fate of the site. “If we have the expression death by a thousand paper cuts so we’re definitely missing a phrase that fits that experience,” says former editor-in-chief Haley Mlotek. “Zombified by a thousand robots, maybe, although I don’t know if it sounds the same.
Former editor Emma Carmichael recently told former colleagues: “Isn’t it amazing that all the work we did in our twenties is unreadable because of the proliferation of adverts and buddy boxes in glorified zombie content farms, or that it was republished under AI-generated male bylines? .” Carmichael also edited Gawker and Jezebel, two other digital media properties from the 2010s that were shuttered and resurrected. (Full disclosure: She and Mlotek, as well as some of The Hairpin’s other former editors and contributors, are friends of mine. Media is a small world.)
Some of The Hairpin’s older articles are currently available to read on Medium, but this is an incomplete library. “I’m frustrated with writers and freelancers (many of whom are probably looking for work given all the recent layoffs) who rely on the site’s archives and their clips to find other work,” Carmichael says. There is a chance that the archives can be restored. Vujo says he plans to give it a try.
The Hairpin surely won’t be the last respected outlet to suffer the death of a thousand robots. People working in the AI world agree that this type of click farm is probably on the rise.
“It’s a shame that a site as notable as The Hairpin is being used to regurgitate AI-generated sludge (especially about the White Town group), but with experts predicting the web will be 90 percent filled with noise generated, this is unfortunately normal and something we will see a lot more of throughout the year,” says Ben Colman, CEO of deepfake detection startup Reality Defender.
