Endless Thread - Hail Corporate

Episode Date: May 3, 2018

A man makes a terrible sculpture of his girlfriend...out of Soylent. (Guess what..."they are now separate.") He then makes a flyer to try to give that sculpture away. The flyer goes viral. Why-oh-why did he do it? We find out.

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Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Emery, what is the best, worst science fiction movie you've ever seen? Hmm. I'm going to say Event Horizon. Ooh, good choice. Yeah. What about you? I mean, there's so many choices.

I mean, Logan's Run, you got your Westworld, that 70s movie. One of my favorites is Robocop. Thank you for not smoking. Should we just talk about bad sci-fi movies for the rest of the episode? Yes. No, no. I mean, this is the perfect way to start this episode because a lot of science fiction tries to predict the future, and here is an example of that. Soylent green is made out of people.

Okay, so that's the old movie, but in real life, Soylent is a lot of things. It's a startup that makes this meal replacement powder and drink that are popular in the tech crowd. It's like an efficiency hack for people who don't want to prepare actual food. And some people use it to lose weight. It's made out of a lot of hard-to-pronounce ingredients, but it is not made out of people. Except in this one example, Amory, right? Where this weirdo made a sculpture of his girlfriend out of it, that is almost like making the Soylent Green is made out of People thing come true.

Oh, yes. the notorious sculpture. How would you describe this thing on a scale of one to truly, truly weird? Like, where does it fall? It breaks the whole scale. So the flyer says, free sculpture. And it has a picture of a sculpture. It's a bust of a woman who's got Medusa-like hair and these big old teeth.

Big chompers. I think I can safely say no woman would want something like this made in her honor. But a picture of this flyer went viral on Twitter and on Reddit, where it first showed up in the funny community. It doesn't just end with a Reddit post about a flyer advertising a weird free sculpture, though. That is really just the beginning of today's mystery. Like, who would ever make something like this? And is that person really a soylent nut?

I mean, this guy's Soylent Worship is seemingly off the charts. If he is not an employee or a superfan, he has to be some kind of corporate shell. Which is why we should call this one, Hail Corporate. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and this is Endless Thread, a show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my producer and co-host Amory Siebertson. One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it is made. We're coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR.

So this Soilent flyer and the guy who made it is a little mysterious. And there's a person who went down the internet rabbit hole of finding out just how and why this sculpture of a girlfriend made out of hardened soylent came into existence. That internet detective is Katie Nettopoulos. I could not let this mystery go unsolved. You know, something didn't pass my sniff test. Something stunk. My nose was twitching.

So I was like, I got to look into this. Katie's a senior tech reporter at BuzzFeed who focuses on internet and tech culture. And hardened soilent statues. I only minored in art history, but I feel confident saying this is, this is bad. This is bad art. It also looks like it could be like ancient art, like an ancient piece of folk art or something.

Like it looks like something like the Sumerians made or something. Yeah. And like someone's like, this is an extremely potent fertility figure. Used by the Soylentese. Soilandese. Not real. Get back on track here, Johnson. Okay. Back to the flyer.

And then it has some other. other text, and it says, made sculpture of my girlfriend out of hardened Soylent. Soylent is a complete meal in a bottle. She said it upset her. Soylent is her favorite drink. We are now separate. And then it says more photos, Soylentsculture.net. Soilent is a complete meal in a bottle.

That kind of seems like a tagline or it seems like ad copy, right? Yes. But I would also say that the biggest aspect of this flyer is, is that presumably the person who created this is absolutely deranged, right? Right. What it appears is that some person loved his girlfriend so much that to honor her, because Soylent is her favorite drink, that he somehow hardened some Soylent, which is, you know,

a viscous, milky, chalky liquid, and sculpted her, and then she became enraged by this and broke up with him. Okay, so this is. a wacky story. A guy made a sculpture of his girlfriend out of Soylent, and she broke up with him over this. Definitely not normal, not even the part where he gets rid of the thing. And then this person is unable to unload the sculpture by any other means other than by taping up a flyer offering it for free. Right. Instead of throwing it out like a normal, abnormal person. Right. If you piece those things together, you would say this person has an extremely

strange idea of how to communicate with the world. And the website is even weirder. It has more pictures of the sculpture from like different angles. And it has a really like creepy message. So it says, please, Natasha, I am sorry the sculpture offended you. I did not mean for it to happen. You are my light and shining angel. I will destroy it to pieces if that means you will come back and reignite our flame. You are my first true love. I will never forget our time together. But we can have more memories together if you can forgive me for the sculpture. It was my first shot and if you just let me do another sculpture, I'm sure it would come out better. What are you thinking at this point?

I'm thinking there's a few options. So one is that this is actually like a deranged lunatic and it's real. And it's just a really weird person, right? Another is that this is some viral marketing for Soylent. And then another is a third option where maybe it's neither. It's fake, but it's not an ad for Soilent. Like maybe somebody just made this as a really funny person. prank because it's just like a weird comedy art piece, right?

Like Soylent is kind of inherently funny because it's, you know, a meal and a bottle. It's funny. Why is that funny, Katie? Katie also did what a good reporter does. She reached out to Soylent and cut right to the chase. She said, hi, you know, is this real? And they did not respond. So I was sort of, okay, well, that's weird.

Usually, you know, publicists are pretty responsive if you're trying to ask them about, like, like, is this wild thing, you know, an ad for your product? And so, you know, I followed it up. I said, let's the deal with this. And they wrote back with simply just photograph. And the photograph was of a piece of paper taped to, like, a wall. And it was sort of in the style of these other flyers. And it said, this man, he is the CEO of Soylent, does not comment on posters.

He does comment on Soylent. And then he said, Soylent is a complete meal in a bottle. So da-da-da-da-da. So we now have basically a press release with a photo of the real CEO of Soylent, guy named Brian Crowley, and it's been sent without explanation in the style of the flyer by the company like an official communication. Okay, I think maybe we should go back to the place where this all started. Because that's what Katie did. Yep.

And she found some more clues. In the Reddit Soylent subreddit, there were, you know, someone had posted it and was like, ha ha, look at this crazy thing. And I saw that somebody deep down in those comments was like, oh, this is, I know who made this. Mystery solved. Mystery solved by a Redditor who said they knew of the guy who made the flyer? This is this guy named Alan Wagner. I then clicked on this guy's Instagram link.

This is where it gets real weird. Alan Wagner, he has a body of work. Posts upon posts that look familiar. Tons and tons of these fake posters. Tons and tons of fake flyers. So not mystery solved. More like plot thickened, like a bad mix of soylent powder. Speaking of which, Amory, you and I conducted our own investigation, you know, to help Katie Nautopoulos out in her reporting.

We did. To the WBUR deck, a.k.a. the Sculpture Lab. We're using Cafe Vanilla to mix our sculpting materials and also a soylent powdered food. Sorry, I was just going to bring it closer to the mic so it can make the most noise possible. You're good at that. All right. I'm just going to dump some in a bowl.

Yeah, just a little bit more. Just like the whole bottle you're saying? No. The rest of the bottle? No. Okay, okay. All right. All right.

Right. And did we decide what we're making? I think we should make Paul. I think we should sculpt our engineer Paul because he has this majestic beard. This like seems like a natural mouth. It's like already there. There's already a mouth there. You know what new plan. We're each going to make Paul and we're going to let him decide who's is better. So Amory, what do you think? Is it feasible to sculpt? I think what we just did is completely. completely legit. Mixing Soylent powdered food with liquid soilent.

I do not think that the sculpture that was in that post was made out of Soilent Clay. Ooh. Shots fired. Shots fired. Okay. We'll have to think more deeply about that while staring into the dead eyes of these two sculptures. And

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the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, so we have a weird flyer advertising a free Soylent sculpture made of some guy's now ex-girlfriend that went viral on Reddit and Twitter, and it might be a Soylent ad, but it's kind of mysterious. And the reporter trying to figure this all out, Katie Natopoulos, she's found what Redditors say is supposedly the source of the flyer, and it's this guy, Alan Wagner, who's made tons of these flyers. Yep, here's Katie again. There's one where, like, a woman is trying to eat dust, and she's like, would you like to eat dust with me? And they're funny because they look very much like something you might actually see taped to a lamp post.

Right. They're convincing. Yeah. Like they're somewhat convincing but also like completely surreal and absurd and they're really funny. But I still, at this point, I'm like, well, I can't tell if he just did these ones about Soiland because he thinks it's funny to make fun of Soilent the same way. It's funny to like talk about a woman eating dust or whatever. So I reached out to this guy, Alan Weiner. on his Facebook page and I was like, hi, you know, I saw this Soiland poster.

I'm from BuzzFeed. What's the deal with this? You know, I think it's really funny. And he's like, oh, thank you. Thank you. And I was like, were you paid by Soiland to do it? And he's like, I cannot comment on that. Dun, dun, dun.

I know. So Katie doesn't really get an answer, but it's enough of a non-answer to further raise suspicion. And then she notices something. In the meantime, I was looking through. some of his other ads, and there was one that was about a dog, like a Soylent-loving dog. Yeah. So it was taped to a lamphouse, and it said, does anyone want this dog? And that's like a picture of this white, fluffy dog. And it says, good dog. He will only eat or drink Soilent. Soilent is a meal substitute with all the nutrients to keep a human being alive. This dog is a freak who only eats Soilet. Hate this dog. Dog's name is Sparky. And then a phone number. Did we call about the dog? Oh, we called about the dog. Hello, Tristan family.

We're not in right now, but please leave a message. But please do not leave a message about our dog. We're not starting our dog, Sparky. My wife does not know what she's talking about. Thank you. Okay, dead end probably there. And we can't really tell whether that voicemail is real or fake. But Sparky does seem to have a real owner, who's not Alan Wagner, and that owner seems to have their own Instagram account. Katie check that lead out. So I went to this other guys, the dog owners. I went to his Instagram, and I sent him a message on Instagram, and I said, you know, hi, is that your dog that's in this Soylent picture?

And he's like, oh, yeah, that's my dog. And I was this an ad? And if so, did the dog get any sort of fee from Soilent? And so the dog owner goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, my buddy, Allen, yeah, he got paid by Soilent, and he gave, you know, my dog a little old, he kicked him a little over. The dog owner spilled the beans. The dog owner spilled the beans. That dog is practically a paid actor in these weird flyers are paid ads.

This is effed up. It's an ad. It's a freaking soylent ad, which almost makes us talking about it another soulent ad. But wait, there's more. Oh, great. Now it's an infomercial. No, I mean that there's more to talk about. Like, this is kind of BS, but we're in this time right now of trying to figure out what is real and what is fake on the internet.

Fake news, election, internet. We kind of encounter this feeling all the time now, right? Especially online. Like you find this thing, maybe it's something that is really unique and odd and you're actually kind of excited about it because it's just so out there. And then it's not real. I asked Katie about this disappointment, like if she felt after all of her reporting betrayed by the outcome of this.

I think it was a little bit sad to realize that the thing that someone made that was clearly, really funny and really creative was actually done as an advertisement. Something being an ad doesn't have to make it like evil or bad. But I think that like it's kind of bad to like deceive people and to like not admit it if a reporter asks you. If you're like a company and someone says, is this an advertisement meant to influence people? And they're like, we will not answer that question. I think they have a ethical responsibility, if not legal responsibility to admit. when directly asked if something is a piece of advertising?

Wait, do they, though? Do companies have a responsibility to tell us if something's an ad or not? I'll be honest, I had no idea, but Steve Tapia does. I am Steve Tapia. My title is Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Seattle University Law School, which essentially means that I'm old. And they hired me after 30-some years of practice, including working in Hollywood, at Microsoft, DirecTV, HBO along the way.

I teach internet law, and I also teach advertising law. Holy crap, we got like the perfect guy. Our producer, homie Josh, did. High five for Josh. Can you just give me your impressions of this story and what it makes you think about when it comes to advertising? It's really fascinating because, as even the Supreme Court

has recognized, advertising is art, and it's entitled to first. Amendment protection. And obviously in my lifetime, and I'm assuming for a lot of your listeners' lifetime, too, we've seen things that look like ads that really are art. I mean, Andy Warhol comes to mine right front and center, but certainly Norman Rockwell's, some of his more famous paintings, for example, started off as Saturday Evening Post covers and in every sense of the word are advertising for the magazine. So it kind of raises the sort of the same issue that I think Marcel Duchamp was trying to pose when you put urinals and snow shovels in museums.

If you put something in a museum and people contemplate it that way, it becomes art. If you put ad in a context where people are usually dealing with speech, it becomes speech. And when it has an analog component to it, when it's coming from the outside world and then you put it online, then there's a whole other overlay of stuff that happens. So context matters, basically, is what you're saying here. Yeah. Not to mention the fact that an ad is going to be considered an ad if a reasonable person, assuming that we still know what a reasonable person is in this day and age, considers it an ad. Can a company legally advertise a product without admitting it's an advertisement?

You know, one of the biggest controversies actually yesterday that I was reading in the newspaper was the fact that so many of the ads in Amazon that our user reviews are essentially paid ads because they, They get spiffed with the thing that they're reviewing, and they don't necessarily mention that. Even if you ask the company directly, like, the company basically has no responsibility to admit whether a thing is a guerrilla marketing campaign or not. Much like speeding down the highway, whether you have the responsibility and whether you do it are two different things. And I think we live in a culture of especially with Internet companies and social media companies, where we ask for forgiveness, not permission. You go until somebody tells you to stop. Doesn't this make you feel very pessimistic

about society as it is and where it's headed? It makes me lament the fact that we have become so able to be led by the nose without realizing that it's happening. Google is ultimately an advertiser. Facebook is ultimately an advertiser in all of us that go to those places to use, them are essentially the product that is being sold, it becomes extremely difficult for us to be able to say that we're not being fed information by just a very small handful of people. But does it make me pessimistic?

No. I think most of the people that work on my side of this, that sort of energizes us that the adventure has sort of just begun, the really interesting parts of it anyway. Steve says this is an important part of navigating this moment we're in, and it impacts us in real ways as users. How do you do regulation in a way that we're protecting consumers, but at the same time, you don't kill what has been probably one of the biggest growth industries we've ever seen in Western society, which is technology and the innovation curves that come with disruptive technology? So it's a real hard place to find that sweet spot between regulating too much and complete unfettered freedom. Who protects us in the end? Who protects this sort of undiscerning consumer? Well, I think we all owe it to ourselves to be a lot more savvy about what we're actually encountering when we get on the Internet.

Okay, so it might be up to us as users to be better at identifying this stuff. So you have to give props to the people in the original Soylent thread on Reddit who were like definitely an ad. But also, Amory, sometimes the assumption that something is an ad is wrong. Show is. Let's talk about R-slash-Hale Corporate real quick. Okay, so the Hale corporate community on Reddit is. is a place where people call out things that they think are advertisements in disguise, but also to quote, document times when people act as unwitting advertisers for a product.

Take, for example, a post like this. You should know that if you are a student with a GPA above a 3.0 and have a Discover credit card, you can get $20 cashback bonus. This guy is known as Ultimate Whale on Reddit, and he is an actual college student with a GPA above a 3.0. So I was just going to pay my credit card bill, and it was just like a small ad or maybe just something on the side of the screen. It was like $20 cashback bonus if you have good standing GPA. So you're, you know, you kind of did this as a news you can use, kind of pass along the useful info sort of a thing.

Yeah. But as you can probably guess, someone commented almost immediately, this guy is just an ad for Discover. An Ultimate Whale was accused of being paid by Discover to make the post. So was he? According to him, no. And after looking through his Reddit post history, I got to say, he seems like just a college kid who accidentally wrote a very corporate-sounding post. I am definitely going to approach and probably analyze and just think about things more when I use,

or maybe promote certain brands. Like, oh, do they want me to post about this? And then if they do, I'm like, am I okay with agreeing to, what I think this company is trying to make me do. Think before you post, my friends. Emery, I have to say fake advertising and the mistrust it's created among

enough people so that every freaking photo that has a product in it is suspected to have been paid for by a company, isn't that just as problematic as companies actually making sneaky ads? It does seem like extremes on both ends of the spectrum here is not what you want.

So maybe the moral of the story is don't assume that every time someone posts on line about a company that they've been paid to do it. Right, but also skepticism is good. So don't believe everything you see on the internet. Is that what we've landed on here? Yeah, but also, like, our internet and advertising law expert, Steve says, be your own detective, right?

Like, if I say to you, Amory, that I have made a sculpture of my cat out of orange, crunchy, puffy snack food that gets orange powder on your fingertips... Look for the bag of Cheetos. Jokes on you. I made my cat sculpture out of Dirk. Doritos, and nobody even paid me to do it. Well, if that's the case, the joke's on you, I think. Damn it.

Toritos, call me. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she says, W-T-F. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of... Mildly Interesting. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vival. Like us, who whenever we go to record in the field with them, they remind us...

Nature is f***. Lit. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and goes... Aw. Our intern is Chris Eulian, who when we put him on a task, he politely says... Hold my beer. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we're hanging out, we're just... Animals being bros.

Our theme music is by Squelcher. Thanks to Zankt Mao, the moderator of R-slash-legal advice for hooking us up with Steve, our legal expert this week. Also, this week's episode art is the flyer advertising that soil and sculpture that will now live in infamy. It was posted on Reddit by user bracket, deleted, bracket. And check out the sculptures we made of our technical director, Paul. There is a picture on our website, wbUR.org slash endless thread. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip, you can hit us up there. This show was produced by Josh Swartz, also my producer and co-host, Amory Sieverts.

I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.