Few events quite carried the magnitude and breadth of online backlash as the Verge PC build. Were it not for its petty nature, what ensued after the much-famed ill-fated upload could only be described as happenings in a far-fetched work of fiction–a poorly-edited piece of video content gets dropped before it’s ready for prime time, a wave of negativity — some of it with distinct racialized characteristics — washes over its host for years after release, legal entanglements courtesy of Vox Media that only further cranked up the temperature of the backlash, and a later send-off of the host who bore no responsibility for a botched piece of editorial if only he’d been given the proper guidance and time to polish it off before it became the butt of the joke in the online tech space for years to come.
To recount the history of this event in a more granular fashion, first it’s important to know who the victim of such vitriol was. Stefan Etienne, a young journalist based in NYC having previously written for his own blog LaptopMemo on tech gadgets, he was undoubtedly delighted by the opportunity to work for an outlet of the Verge’s stature. Like the rest of the site’s staff, the work they do is predominantly in written form, but appearances on videos aren’t an unexpected occurrence, and Etienne’s most notable one to date would be the aforementioned PC Build: Released initially in early September 2018, it was supposed to be the opener for the Verge’s second season of a YouTube show dubbed “Workflow”, but after an inordinate mass of critics decried the lack of care given to the video, going as far as to claim it is actively misinforming those building fresh new rigs, the outlet caved and pulled the piece and now only bootleg versions of it are still up on YouTube.
I remember vividly having watched the video and not thinking much of it besides the profuse application of thermal paste, the ungrounded antistatic wrist strap, and a few incorrect references here and there, and to the best of my recollection, it didn’t even crack the 200k views mark, which was custom for Verge videos that addressed a niche audience. The highest-viewed bootleg version of it however has 12 million…
