When she signed her lease, it was like a magnet being drawn to metal.
The Fontenoy was the most magical place in Los Angeles.
Way back in 1989 AD, a young man had moved onto the ninth floor of the building.
He was, just, like you know, this guy.
His name was Matt Drudge.
He’d been raised around Washington DC, which was the capital city of the United States of America, and that proximity gave him a fixation on the currents of power.
He bummed around Hollywood for about half a decade. And this was the old Hollywood, the Hollywood of the Yucca Corridor, the Hollywood that existed prior to the infestation of the international capital class’s money laundering.
It was gang territory. It was full of drug dealing. It was full of prostitution.
In 1994 AD, Drudge’s father paid him a visit.
He was appalled by his son’s life.
At the time, Drudge was selling T-shirts at CBS Studios in Century City, which was on the other side of the hills that hold the HOLLYWOOD sign.
The old man bestowed a gift upon his son from Circuit City on Sunset Boulevard: an IBM PC compatible computer.
This was before the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 destroyed the American West Coast, another psychic cataclysm, and oddly, one that’s never been written about in any meaningful detail.
Drudge’s computer had a modem, which was a stupid little device that connected to telephone lines and allowed his computer to call up other computers.
Using his modem, Matt Drudge discovered the Internet. And this was the old Internet, the Internet of Usenet and #hack on EFnet, the Internet that existed prior to the infestation of the international capital class’s money laundering.
Drudge’s first utterance on the Internet, ever, was three days after Christmas 1994 AD at 1:48PM.
It said:
hello from sex drenched hollywood
Drudge replied to himself at 3:31PM. His response said:
we are so sex drenched here in hollywood. 65% of us city dwellers have herpes
And so, on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon, on the ninth floor of the Fontenoy, the Twenty-First Century AD was born.
Ashley Lopez had lived in the Fontenoy for five years, performing ceremonial magick and using all kinds of magickal phrases, and she’d never said anything with as much power as the one phrase which had baptized a century.
She’d never said anything as important, or as ominous, as hello from sex drenched hollywood.
No one could have known that Matt Drudge was the only authentic genius of the Twenty-First Century AD.
He was the only person in the world who understood how the Internet really worked.
And he had found his demon.
Not long after he’d written about 65 per cent of people in Hollywood having herpes, Drudge founded an email newsletter obsessed with the currents of power in American life.
The newsletter was about the entertainment industry and politics, which, by virtue of the Celebrity branch of American governance, were the same thing.
The newsletter was called the Drudge Report.
It offered its readers a very gossip-inflected take on the issues of the day.
Everything broke in 1998 AD.
Newsweek, which was a magazine that offered milquetoast political and cultural reporting, decided not to run a story about an alleged affair between the sitting President, William Jefferson Clinton, and a twenty-two-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
Drudge learned about the spiked story and sent word to his mailing list.
He didn’t know it, but he’d murdered the gentleman’s agreement between news journalists and politicians, which was more or less a tacit acknowledgement that politicians could fuck around in private as long as Washington bureau chiefs were invited to dinner parties in Georgetown.
And Drudge had, accidentally, trashed the American idea of good governance, fostering an environment in which the Republicans would go on to impeach William Jefferson Clinton, and learn that the way to power was through publicity stunts and using the Legislative branch not to govern but rather to obstruct.
After the Lewinsky thing, Drudge’s fame went nuclear, went global.
He got a short-lived TV show. He got a radio show.
His newsletter evolved into a webpage that collated links to articles on other websites, and, on occasion, featured some of Drudge’s own reporting and, in times of emergency, an animated siren GIF.
The links to other websites were written by Drudge himself in an ultra-minimalist headline style. hello from sex drenched hollywood.
The webpage was three columns of black text on a white background.
There was no flash and no glut.
The design never changed.
Not once in two decades.
It was perfect in the way that Steve Jobs, a psychopath who enslaved Chinese children and made them build electronic devices which allowed American liberals to write treatises on human rights, had envisioned perfection: the absolute and seamless melding of form and function.
By the Year of the Froward Worm, Drudge’s website received ten billion visits per year.
In the late 1990s AD, there was an unbelievable amount of bullshit about how the Internet was going to offer new platforms of expression that leveled the playing field, and how computers would produce an enormous flowering of creativity and new opportunities.
What no one admitted, or perhaps even realized, was that while the Internet would indeed create a million opportunities for people to express their ignorant-ass opinions on topics about which they knew nothing, those opinions would not offer any real benefit to the ignorant-ass people who offered them.
The ignorant-ass opinions would only enrich the people who owned the platforms of expression.
And the people who owned the platforms of expression were the same old shits who ruled the world.
Here was the genius of Drudge laid bare: he understood, before anyone else, that the way to make money on the Internet was by monetizing other people’s content.
After Drudge shattered journalism, the international capitalist class gathered up the fragments and ground them into dust.
The noble profession transformed from attempts at a first draft of history into a quest for eyeballs on websites.
In the process, seasoned professionals lost their jobs and were replaced with cocaine-addled children from Brooklyn who worked for spare change.
The international capitalist class didn’t care.
Journalism had always been a pain in their ass.
What they wanted was traffic on the websites that they’d funded.
And Drudge drove that traffic.
Even though Drudge’s website consisted almost entirely of links to other websites, it provided a coherent and linear worldview. The links were like a jigsaw puzzle. If you read Drudge for a week, you could piece together who he was and what he thought.
He made sense of an era in which the world had become incomprehensible, and when the traditional arbiters of American life had given up any hope of explaining the global situation.
His website was the Internet’s unmoved mover, just about the most read news site in English, and his millions of daily readers would deluge any site that he linked.
And even more importantly, he was read by absolutely everyone who was anyone in media. He drove entire cycles with headlines that were no more than fifteen words in length.
He was literally the most powerful voice in America.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration, consider this: for all of the explanations floated as to why Donald J. Trump won the Presidency with his impossible victory, no one has ever suggested the most obvious.