How We All Wish We Could Leave Our Jobs

Nick Denton, head of Gawker Media (the internet co. that owns blergs like Gawker, Valleywag, Deadspin, Lifehacker, and Jezebel) announced last Fri. that he'd be canning 19 employees—a lot for a company this size—and beefing up the operations of the most financially successful/promising sites.

Among those to get the boot was Moe Tkacik, who came over to the head site (if you can call it that anymore) about a month ago from Jezebel, a site that she helped launch. And, wow. How did Moe respond? Why, she wrote a 1400-word missive titled "The Downsized Employee" explaining, ostensibly, what fucking sucks about her boss. And she posted it on Gawker.

And I quote:

"The Downsized Employee's Boss had downsized some 18 employees along with her, some of whom had been re-hired in different capacities. Did the fact that Downsized Employee received no such opportunity have to do with the fact that "The" Downsized Employee had been an unusually vociferous voice of dissent? It was possible. When the Downsized Employee had started at the company to co-launch a new website her boss decreed should position itself to compete with a supremely inane website for celebrity photos and gossip overseen by a dogmatically shallow celebrity tabloid reporter, the Downsized Employee filled with righteous indignation and said she would rather quit or hell, die than do any such thing. The Downsized Employee proceeded to co-produce a website she saw as being the precise opposite of that and co-usher said new website to prominence and widespread popularity by offering to the public what she saw as an antidote to the easy, sloppy superficial bullshit. Oh sure, it was easy for the Downsized Employee's Boss to say, "Come on, it is not like you are offering the Paris Review," but it was far harder, she felt, to actually show up every day and bother trying to reconcile the dumbed-down, image-based internet habits of the American public with what she knew—okay, she did not know, but for sanity's sake she had to believe—to be a deeper, harder-to-satisfy longer-term hunger for content that would be more challenging, more nourishing, more unique or in any case actually funny."

And:

"The Downsized Employee does not want to give her old customers the sense she thinks she is so important. The Downsized Employee just wanted one final chance to remind them that she thinks some things are important, and it is much more than "what sells right now," but that she blames the "What Sells Right Now" mentality for her Downsizing, because the Downsized Employee would have gladly taken a pay cut, but she does not believe the Boss who Downsized her realized that, and she could no more expect the Boss who downsized her to realize that than she could herself start a multimillion dollar 150-employee media company."

Now, don't get me wrong, the whole thing is too writerly and inflated, but the essence of it is brilliant. Chick's job (er, old job) is to be critical of the "media machines" and all that business, and turns out she's working for one of the shittiest machines of all.