Opinion: Olde Reed Is Dying and its Blood Is on Fizz’s Hands
At this point, jaded seniors and bright-eyed freshmen alike are all too familiar with Fizz. It’s hard not to be, considering its hard-earned infamy as a less moderated, more degenerate, and more corporate knockoff of Reed’s time-honored Missed Connections. Throughout the entirety of my time at Reed, I’ve perceived Fizz as an object of disdain, as I’m sure many other students have. Above that, however, Fizz has always left me somewhat puzzled. Ever since I first heard about Reed, this college seemed inseparable from a spirit of opposition—to authority, to corporatism, and to everything else that seems to blight our society. Reed, with all its outrageous rituals, like the trademark impassioned “small school” monologue of Noize Parade, appeared to me like a symbol of protest against the establishment. So why is it that Fizz, with its flood of inauthentic AI-generated posts about varsity athletes being dicks or frat boys also being, well, dicks, was so swiftly accepted as a part of Reed culture?
I can’t help but feel like Fizz represents everything Reed’s student body should oppose, yet it becomes increasingly central to the nebulous entity we call “The Discourse” with every year. As Fizz continues to gain notoriety, and thus legitimacy, it chips away at the vestiges of Olde Reed, which, like all Reedies, I have come to love like the fading scent of an old partner. Fizz symbolizes the very antithesis of the carefully-manufactured reputation of Reed seen by the world outside its bubble: a festering wound that the woes of the corporate “big school” we all came here to avoid might seep into and infect.
Every year I’ve been at Reed, I’ve watched admin make another decision that further isolates them from the peasantry they call the student body, disregarding what the school (theoretically) stands for by not only failing to divest from Israel, but accepting a wildly controversial resolution with the ADL that equates Judaism to Zionism and does more to defend Zionists than Jewish students at Reed. Furthermore, the administration does this while repeatedly showcasing an impressive ability to engage in complete nonaction while bastardizing any meaning of “community” at this school. To quote Vincent Tanforan ’27’s opinion on community, published in the February 13 edition this spring, “neutral administrative silence would be more understandable than [the PCCC’s] half-hearted, even condescending attempts at publicly acknowledging the horrific events currently taking place while making no tangible effect on the greater community.”
As admin makes it clear time and time again that they cannot and will not defend the interests of the student body, I ask one thing: how can we, with good conscience, abandon the foundations of campus culture that make Reed a school we wanted to attend, despite the eye-watering cost of tuition? By embracing Fizz as a part of Reed’s culture, rather than rejecting it as the invasive disease it is, we accept responsibility for erasing the very cultural touchstones we claim to value at this school.
Much like it could be said that surrendering your thoughts to AI is an embrace of fascist anti-intellectualism, surrendering your voice to Fizz in place of the MCs is an equally fascist act of revisionist history. When the MCs, an independent (and genuinely anonymous!) outlet for campus discourse exist and have existed for years, why are we as a community instead reaching for the lab experiment engineered from the worst aspects of Twitter and Reddit? Are our brains so rotted by short-form content that we need immediate access to ragebait, instead of being able to accept a healthy twice-a-week output? Is that instant access so significant to us that we’re really willing to be an accomplice to Fizz’s attempt to murder the MCs once and for all, burying a piece of this student body’s history with it?
As I’ve spent more time at Reed, I’ve felt consistently rising animosity towards Fizz, which I’ve heard described by some as a platform with little more appeal than hearing freshmen complain about their sex lives. However, with the third MCs of the year having a mere four posts, I worry we may be reaching a tipping point. As we do, I find myself frighteningly positioned as an upperclassman, closer to leaving Reed once and for all than I am to my arrival here. The war between Fizz and the MCs began at the beginning of my freshman year and has raged on unceasingly since; to lose the MCs to the unmoderated corporate cesspool of AI slop and sold data would be a spiritual admission to the defeat of the spirit of Reed College, at what may be the most important time for it to remain steadfast.
If you, dear reader, find yourself at all amused by the MCs, please contribute something, no matter how small or stupid you think it is. All MCs are good MCs, after all. If we Reedies came here in search of a safe haven from the corporate whims seemingly unavoidable everywhere else, then we must recognize that Fizz is the harbinger of that very corporate bogeyman. We must not Fizz. Fizz is the mind-killer.