Suck: Worst-Case Scenarios in Media, Culture, Advertising, and the Internet

By: Anuff, Joey

As the longest-running and most-often-imitated daily column on the Internet, "Suck" has generated plenty of buzz on and off the net. Here, cofounder Joey Anuff collects the column's most provocative... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1888869275
• ISBN13: 9781888869279
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Wired Books, Incorporated
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

the last puff of smoke from a dying breed

Since the Sucksters took their eternal summer vacation in June 2001 and the Web site at last fulfilled the e-zine's running joke by changing ownership to an adult-entertainment portal in December 2005, this is all that's left of the smartest, shrewdest and funniest site to emerge amidst the hot air of the Dot-Com Rise and Fall of the 1990s. Where else can you find an acerbic, pseudonymmed writer dismiss The Fugees as "reconstituted adult rock masquerading as hip-hop"? Or the pinpoint assertion that if you drop your kid off at any mall, "he'll quickly learn that community and commodity are not easily discernible from each other"? Or: "The only thing that kept Burning Man out of Business Week was that no one would admit to making -- or seeking -- a profit"? And really, you can find as good or better a bon mot on any of the pages of this book. Even from the mid-1990s, this book is a breath a fresh air from today's world of multimedia mergers, where reporters chase each others' tales in conflating and inflating pre-conceived notions and prepackaged soundbytes. Who today proclaims as forcefully -- or anywhere near as literately -- that the emperor has no clothes even as the mainstream media sources compete for more vivid adjectives to describe the non-existent garments? While the book has its faults and there were certainly better essays than some of the selections, it more than holds its own with any contemporary commentary. A full decade before VH1 announced its sure-to-be-craptacular series "Web Junk 20" as the latest lowest-common-denomination demon spawn of TV and Internet, Suck explained why attempts at merging the two media only seem to cull the worst of each and draw into sharp detail the differences -- not the similarities -- between technology's long-lost kin. With today's breathless tech reporters and hypesters trying to convince you that watching a movie on an iPod is somehow as good as enjoying it in widescreen, and a supplicant media (owned by those releasing those movies) coo their approval, the absence of sarcastic outsider wisdom by the likes of Suck is more missed than ever. While this book will not cure what ails society, consider it a drinking binge from the fountain of knowledge that won't leave you with a hangover in a stranger's apartment. If the drink is bittersweet given Suck's fate, at least it proves satisfying.

suck redefines media hotdog roasts.

while they do make a good read once a day, once in the paper medium, it loses some of its immediacy, but its critique of the american-canadian cross border bacon warfare is something to behold. if one was to say utilize their opinion of *3D House Of Beef* to its logical conclusion, then you would still will yourself, and your spouse, to come out of the trailer, shut off the battery powered television screaming springer re-runs, and come out to the cookout of the spirit. while they dont believe in metal, idiot savant, and the relevance of stream of conciousness, their eau-de-moilette is genuinely appreciated by that shrinking demographic: the hunted, slighted, pseudo-intellectual. i'm still sore at the books portrayal of 3D HOUSE OF BEEF.

hypocritical

I haven't even read this book and I'm not going to bother. I'm just here to re-iterate their point that anonymity is the best policy. thank you.

Ulysses, The Illiad, Hamlet and the Bible rolled into one!

The Suck book changed my life! I was skeptical at first, but the Suck method is the most effective self-improvement system out there. Bar none! I no longer feel less than fresh when I wake up in the morning, I've lost 50 pounds, and I've just bought my third house, using the technologies Anuff and Co. offer in these pages. Although you'll have to "sponsor" ten other readers to buy the book, and it'll be 2-5 years before you really start making profits, once you're in the network, the Suck system really pays off!

The perfect bathroom reader.

An extremely funny book, that demands a level of media-cultural-computer sophistication most do not posess. 'Spy' Magazine died (the old 'Spy, when it was funny) and came back to life as this. Buy ! Buy! Buy! (Not actually three individual copies, but, well, you get the idea.)