Volume 5: Making Mischief

As Americans take up the tools of modern (and not so modern) communications infrastructure to advocate for preferred political candidates and the Senate considers how a prospective Justice might interpret the Constitution, the mind wanders to the nature of free speech.

James Madison could not have contemplated what strange activities would one day find protection in the First Amendment he drafted. Corporate training curricula developed from a comedy troupe's model of extemporization. The spread of conspiracy theories across networked stationary bicycles. The social justice entreaties of a group of Black men, amplified by the fame and fortune bestowed upon them for playing a game.

Our media economy is, for better and worse, built on the principle of free speech and its manifold applications. It shapes our culture – and it also enables our most essential cultural criticism.

News Feed

MSCHF + Anti Advertising Advertising Club (link)

For the past year the Brooklyn collective known as MSCHF has been engineering fortnightly viral "drops" that consistently set the internet ablaze. Sometimes they’re physical products, like Jesus Shoes, a collection of Nike Air Max 97s whose soles were sprinkled with holy water from the River Jordan; or Medical Bill Art, which turned three exorbitant invoices into oil paintings and auctioned them off to cover the $73,360.36 in real healthcare debt they represented. Sometimes they’re digital products, like Boomer Email, a newsletter that forwards subscribers the craziest email chains from baby boomers; or Netflix Hangouts, a Chrome extension that lets you watch Netflix at work (pre-COVID, alas) by turning the video into a tile in a video conference. Monday's drop was a contest: Anti Advertising Advertising Club, which is paying TikTok creators to post videos attacking nine brands MSCHF deems “unethical.”

The irony runs deep here – a former ad agency leverages a trendy new marketing tactic and the reach of a platform subsidized by advertising to rail against advertising – which is of course part of the joke (TikTok itself is one of the targeted brands). The prank further cemented MSCHF’s status as a kind of enfant terrible of late capitalism, yet I can’t help but wonder whether MSCHF and advertising may inevitably find common cause. Although the company disavowed client work last year, it has raised at least $11.5 million in venture capital and will surely feel the attendant pressure to monetize quickly. (I think of VC as an upstream cousin of advertising: institutions matching supply and demand with a ruthless focus on ROI.)

MSCHF has referred to itself as “Banksy of the internet,” but in this way, it’s a bit like a latter-day Buzzfeed, whose founder Jonah Peretti first gained fame for propagating a viral email thread with Nike customer service over why it wouldn’t print “sweatshop” on his custom shoes. MSCHF’s founder, Gabriel Whaley, is a former Buzzfeed employee, and, as his above oeuvre demonstrates, he shares a fascination with viral emails and Nike sneakers (sweatshops, too; Fashion Nova is among the brands targeted by Anti Advertising Advertising Club). For Peretti, it’s been a swift transformation from internet iconoclast to CEO of a venture-backed media company overseeing layoffs and bargaining with a unionized newsroom. Whaley’s arc is just beginning. "Our perspective is everything is funny in a nihilistic sort of way," the MSCHF founder told Business Insider in January. You can only wonder how long his investors will share that sentiment.

NBA + The 2020 Election (link)

LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Miami Heat Sunday to claim the championship of the prolonged 2019-20 NBA season that began 11 months earlier. One of the most interesting subplots of this COVID-delayed postseason in the Disney World bubble has been the intensifying political activism among NBA players. The decision to resume play may have been principally a matter of economics and public health, but it could have far-reaching implications for the upcoming election. Not only did players raise awareness for key social justice issues with league-sanctioned messages on jerseys and a strike after the police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin; they also achieved tangible impact, like a commitment from the NBA to turn many arenas into polling locations. What's more: all this played out not from April to June, when the playoffs typically occur, but over a summer-fall stretch that concluded just 23 days before election day.

Peloton + Content Moderation (link)

Peloton likes to think of itself as a streaming media platform. It produces video classes for its members and reports metrics like digital subscriptions and “Average Net Monthly Connected Fitness Churn” in its financials. It is also something of a social media platform, in that it lets riders in virtual classes connect with each other and post hashtags. In 2020 that designation comes with a downside: having to play content moderator to remove conspiracy theories. Last week Peloton was alerted to the presence on its platform of hashtags associated with QAnon. The company swiftly removed them, but the incident, even as Facebook announced its own ban on QAnon, is a reminder that the war on misinformation will need to be fought on multiple fronts.

The Second City + ? (link)

The Second City, the cherished Chicago comedy institution that has served as a feeder for Saturday Night Live for decades, is for sale. This is a fascinating asset. Known as the improv theater that launched the careers of John Belushi, Tina Fey, Steve Carell and countless others, the pre-COVID iteration of the company combined improv performances in Chicago, Hollywood and Toronto with a burgeoning education business – both in-person classes for adults and programs for corporate partners. The disruption of in-person events due to the pandemic was no doubt a disaster for the company, but its market, brand and alumni network position it well for the long-term. Unlike certain other brick-and-mortar businesses like department stores and movie theaters, there is far less reason to fear the current demand shock to the improv events sector is part of a long-term trend toward digital substitution. Beyond that, there is significant untapped opportunity to leverage the brand and its talent network as a media production entity akin to Lorne Michaels’s Broadway Video or Will Ferrell, Chris Henchy and Adam McKay’s Funny or Die. To accelerate the latter ambition, a logical buyer could be one or more of its star alumni teaming with a financial investor. 

Content Recommendation Algorithm

I’m skipping the Watch recommendation this time but making up for it with an extra item to read. Appreciate you bearing with me – we’re all running out of shows to watch at this point!

• Read: The Conquest of Cool. The questions raised by MSCHF – namely, the braided interplay between capitalism, advertising and counterculture – reminded me of Thomas Frank’s polemical history of advertising in the 1960s, which discusses how the trappings of hippiedom were often co-opted by corporate interests to serve an emerging mass consumer culture. (Frank’s bestselling What’s the Matter with Kansas? is another work that still very much resonates, but I’ll spare you the political analysis.)
• Read: Matt Levine profile in the New York Times. The unfortunate paradox of financial news is that few subject matter experts write well, and few writers are subject matter experts. Bloomberg's Matt Levine occupies a sub-category of one within the center of that Venn diagram: a former elite practitioner who revels in both picking apart the complexities of high finance and skewering its absurdities with existentialist wit. It’s great to see him receive wider acclaim (you can subscribe to his newsletter here).
• Listen: A Media Operator interview with Jarrod Dicker. Washington Post executive Jarrod Dicker has been writing persuasively on the independent creator revolution happening in digital publishing (think the wave of prominent writers pivoting to Substack, or what Matt Levine could easily do if he chose to leave Bloomberg). This is a great chance to hear his vision for how media companies can evolve to participate in this trend.

Note: This is the fifth edition of the Strange Bedfellows newsletter. You can find the others here: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4.