The King of Side Projects

Chris Baker you may have been a troll of the highest order - and you said the type of shit that would get you canceled six different ways in roughly 38 states - but there was never a time I wasn’t in awe of you. You were one of my favorite internet wizards, a true creative genius.? “We actually met on the internet”, I loved telling everyone after that cold email you sent in 2011 asking if I could get one of your projects on Boing Boing, which, unbelievably, was the only blog back then to have not yet posted your work. While you were quick to remind people of the press you received that we only dreamed to gain for ourselves, you did so without a hint of arrogance.?

You were a concept cobbler and culture was your sandbox. Your style was snark, wit, topicality, and activism. Your work had something to say. You always had the most successful and beautifully maintained internet portfolio, and listing those projects you were proud of was just as important as linking out the work of other creators at the bottom of it. Your full time job was side-projects, and you dabbled in the ad agency world. I barely knew of anything you made for hire because your best and most successful ideas were made the right way: for fun, by you and your friends, on your own terms, with your own time. You were the first person I ever knew who invested his own money into random projects that most certainly would never generate a penny in return. This of course was a practice subsidized by your penchant for “triple dipping” (for those who don't know, booking three $2k/day concurrent copywriting gigs.) Man, you had that figured out.

You leaving us hits harder if we think about the internet that left us a long time ago—the days when we’d eagerly spend an extra 50 hours on a strange project, driven by the thrill of knowing that the same 50 gatekeeping bloggers and news outlets would deem it worthy of sparking virality. Sorry, I mean “finning”, as you called it (because the typical clicks-against-time chart of internet virality represents the shape of a shark fin). If you were lucky, certain projects would “fin” more than others, delivering a rush of attention that propelled you onto the next. Back then a successful project made us feel like we ruled the internet for a week or more. But as time went on, it felt like that less and less. So much that one day a few years ago you said “This isn’t as fun anymore”. Bloggers and standalone websites replaced by algorithms. Single-serving websites and apps eviscerated by memes and TikTok takes. And fins turned into skyscrapers; what goes viral now has such steep drop-off that its barely relevant by the evening. But the changing ecosystem didn’t stop your code-cracking ingenuity: “LinkedIn is the new place to fin,” you gushed in that funny laugh, long before anyone else figured (or dared?) to post things there half as dumb and clever as you did. You lived to create things. And the things you created especially with Jeff Greenspan , Brian Moore and Mike Lacher made the rest of us feel envious - How was it possible to make art that matched the speed of culture? Through such an effortless kinship, achieved as a team??

I made videos. You made websites, games and apps. We studied each other from our respective corners of the internet, bound by our mutual love for conceptual experimentation. You understood me creatively like few people did. You adopted and added to our “Slot Theory” of viral internet culture. In you I found a generative flood of ideas. You hired me for ideas. I hired you for ideas. By our powers combined, each idea became 2x better or 2x stupider. In the rare times we weren’t poring over ideas, we talked about life. And I tried to lift you up when you seemed down. To remind you of how unique, kind-hearted and special you were. But the dark side of you was stubborn and unyielding. This is typical of artists so talented that their gift comes with a sensitivity so unmanageable it begins to wreak real havoc. You took better care of your art projects than yourself, and I couldn’t fix the bugs your operating system.?

The last text you ever sent me was at the end of August this past year.? It was a video supercut idea where we take every movie that has 9/11 in its plot line, and place key scenes in a real-time chronological order, akin to Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”. (Typical of us to have talked about this idea for 13 years and to never get it done). But it didn’t stop you from believing in it. So in a frantic array of texts, before I could have a chance to respond, you wrote:?

I downloaded 98% of movies that have a scene with a 9/11 in it.?

Should we try to bang it out??

I might layout an easy pass in after effects tomorrow, less obscure titles.?

Zero dark thirty minute 1 is like united 93 minute 85, Etc.?

I think you end up with like a 4-6 hour "film”.?

If you had any thoughts, hmu.?

I can do all the work, I'm just slightly torn on aspect ratio and how they're stacked

I guess it's just aspect ratios. (2.35:1 vs 16:9). Keeping it clean

Sorry for blowing u up. Gn

You came into my life full of ideas, you left still pitching them. And you vanished from this world in the same spirit as the project you were most proud to have created, “Lightyear.fm”: blasting off towards the universe’s great beyond, leaving in your wake a trail of artifacts screaming to be treasured.

I’ll think of you a lot, Chris. Thank you for 13 years of friendship and inspiration. And you better not be embarrassed I wrote all of this about you on LinkedIn.

[For those who may not be familiar with Chris’s work, please check out his website @ https://ilovechrisbaker.com/]