In early 2015, The New Yorker published a profile of a young man named Emerson Spartz, whom the magazine dubbed both “the virologist” and “the king of clickbait.” Spartz ran a constellation of media sites, the most prominent of which, Dose.com, regularly published image-heavy listicles, the kind that, for a few short years, dominated our Facebook feeds with their hyperbolic, information-gap headlines. I point to this profile because it serves as the perfect time capsule to represent a now-bygone era that was fueled by easy VC money and Facebook-inflated traffic. In the article, Spartz issued rapid-fire axioms and trite bromides…
