TRASHFUTURE - Social Chain Gang ft. Luke Bailey, Eleanor Penny

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Don't disable ad blockers for this one - it's all about the business mindset assholes behind Social Chain, the company that is responsible for the mindless hashtags and campaigns you see for increasingly pointless products. Luke Bailey (@imbadatlife) of the I-Paper comes through with original reporting on this weird company. Eleanor Penny (@eleanorkpenny) and Suze (@suzemarsupial) round out the cast for this first of two episodes from last week's session (both sections ran long so we're splittin' em). Riley (@raaleh) is also there. I recieved a letter in cut out magazine lettering that Hussein is safe and well, and for a bounty of two crypto kitties he will be returned to the show. In fact... I think I hear his music somewhere off in the distance. Getting louder.

It's like that drill tweet of I've never laughed at a piss joke in my life. See how much everyone, how much good feedback everyone is giving me and takes it one step further. In fact, I've never laughed at all. I refuse to participate in a podcast where you just repeat drill tweets of a victim from memory. That was going to be shorter. You thought a drill tweet was going to be shorter than about two sentences.

Yes. Riley is one of the most respected scholars of the Internet because he actually knows all of drills tweets. It's like how when you go for a bar mitzvah, you have to memorize a Torah portion. It's not like that in any conceivable way. It's a lot like that because I memorize. Also, that hasn't been a good drill tweet for like 18 months. You keep like a spicy take.

They actually have a job, but it's like I have a job. She's in Canada. You probably don't know that. What do you do all day? She goes to a different school. I'm not a liberty to talk about that. They're actually good drill tweets every day. They're just not necessarily done by drills.

They're just done by actual politicians. I am drill. I've been drill this entire time. Let's try that again. Welcome to Crash Future, the podcast about how if we do not implement fully automated luxury gay space communism, the future will be trash. Boom, perfect. With us this week is Luke.

Hi, Luke. Tell us about who you are. What's your name and where'd you come from? Nicely done. I'm Luke. I am a reporter, I guess. Follow me on Twitter. I'm bad at life.

Is that a handle or is that just a confession? Yes. That's still the best handle we've had on the show. Eleanor, who I have literally just met, is also here. Hi, Eleanor. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Hello. I'm Eleanor Penny.

I am a writer of sorts. I do things with words on Navarra media and Red Pepper and other places, mostly on the internet. You can find me on Twitter at Eleanor K. Penny. And someone just pointed out to me that the middle phoneme, if you read it wrong, is gnawk. So that's something that I have to live with forever. Gnawk. Gnawk. And with us is Riley, because I'm Riley now.

So tell us a little bit about yourself, Riley. Riley, what do you do for a living? Nothing. No, no, Riley, what do you do for a living? He has a job. She lives in Canada. I am Riley. I was until all recent episodes the host of this year, Mass.

But there's been a coup. There's been a classic, not anymore, you're not. Riley's been sand and easted. Always the problem is what happens after the revolution. We've got a lot of bloody clear up to do. The CIA are now funding a group of contras by Iran to bring down Suze's reign of terror. So that's me. I'm that one.

Tell us about your impronounceable Twitter handle. It's at Rala, R-A-L-E-H. It's because I don't want my name to be easily Googleable. Googleable? Googleable. Don't injure yourself. It's because Riley's really rogue and he wants his Twitter handle to be def-accessible. The last time I published an article in Jacobin, they were like, we're just going to do your name.

And I was like, I am so easily Googleable now. So in case anybody didn't catch that, Riley writes for Jacobin now and he'd like you to know about it. We wrote once. I wrote once for Jacobin, but I'm about to, I mean, unless something goes certainly wrong, you're about to see more of my writing in various other outlets. I'll have you know. I should point out at this stage that Riley pitched me an article to Navara. I ignored it.

He pitched to another editor at Navara who let that shit slip right through. Damn straight. My writing is like a cockroach. It will live. And I'm Suze and I'm extremely overtired. I am not any kind of writer and you can find me online at Suze Marsoufield. Any Milo's in the ball? Yeah, there is. Thanks.

Yeah, it's me. It's me, Milo Edwards. You bought it. You can find me on Twitter at Milo underscore Edwards, where I tweet lots of bad stuff about how like that picture of the South Korean president holding Kim Jong-un's hand as he stepped over the border really just looked like me helping my nan to the car with her shopping. You know, five likes. I thought it was worth more than that. I'm going to go like it now.

You're right. That is bad. I now follow my own Jones. So, you know, suck on that. I lost two followers over a tweet about Isis today, but I gained our own Jones and I really like to think it's because of the Isis-related banter on my feet. What a normal sentence for a normal period in history. That's a regular dive, Milo. Okay.

Anyway, having wrenched hosting duties from Riley, I now have no idea how the interview is going to start. So, in my infinite munificence, I'm going to hand back to Riley to ask him some questions. You just weren't ready. Sorry, I just went on Milo's Twitter to give him a pity like for that picture. And the first tweet is another moan about losing two followers from an hour ago. Which means that he's been fuming for at least an hour.

I'm incredibly mad offline. So Milo's two followers, come back. I'm mad offline. Milo's two followers, please come back. We missed you. I lost both my followers who were Riley and Hussain. We're basically going to be talking about a bunch of shit today. The first of which is that there has been a little bit of,

I would say, news recently about a media marketing agency that is different from most of the other media marketing agencies called Social Chain. Yes, because they don't pay their staff in beanie hats. They don't need to, they live in Manchester, so money means a lot more up there. Yes. I'll give you a slight background on Social Chain. I wrote about them a few years ago and I've kind of been following it ever since. They're a very strange company in that a lot of their myth-making about themselves,

which they are very good at, is actually kind of true. They're basically a bunch of 20, 21-year-olds dropped out of university and started a media company, but they did it by essentially saying, well, we all have big Twitter pages and Facebook pages, we should just combine them together. Then they built on that. I believe they now employ about 150 people in Manchester, which is not a small company.

There are major media companies in London that you would know and would actually know the name of, but are significantly bigger. What they've been doing in the last few years is kind of building out what they do. Primarily, the focus is figuring out a way to make stuff work for brands, like actually do advertising for them, but they've also now moved into kind of a content sphere in that they have websites, they have multiple websites. They've linked up with another sort of company,

the guys who run a really popular account called SPORTH. It used to be BBC SPORTH, it's now SPORTH for copyright reasons. Sorry, what is this word that you're saying? SPORTH. Yeah, it looks like SPORTH when you sit. Yeah, exactly. It looks like SPORTH when you sit in a Twitter avatar. Oh, no, I get it, but what is it? It's basically they make jokes about football.

That's the entire thing. But as a result, what they've done is they've built all these pages, they have genuinely hundreds of millions of followers, but it's not hundreds of millions of followers on a single page or a single couple of pages, it's across so many pages that it effectively operates like a network that you can't really tell is there. And is it clear that these like parody accounts have been spawned from this company or is it unclear?

If you look into it, it's clear. Sure, but as a first pass content consumer. Not really, but how often do you really check where your content's coming from? Right, but this is the point, right? Yeah, if you don't check, then how does it appear? It appears like they are pretty much organic, funny pages. So these are the people who are responsible for stuff like very British problems or, you know, you're a Hogwarts when?

So they're not very British problems. That's a separate account. Cut that, Nate. Don't cut that. That's Tim Farron's alt. I mean, don't cut that. Keep that in. I'm proud of my wrongness.

Oh, no, but like telling Nate to cut things that he shouldn't, has now obviously become incredibly funny to me and is just going to become part of the content of the podcast. There is no Nate. There are so many tweets to which I reply, delete this. I don't want them deleted. It's just a feeling in my heart. Regardless, so is this like a kind of buying up startups model?

Someone actually starts like a funny, you know, parody account and it takes off and then this company like buys it up or are they seeding these as authentic looking parody accounts, but they've actually come from the mothership. So they're broadly authentic. But the way that they work is they own some accounts. Some accounts they've made up by actual genuine paid staff. There's some accounts they've bought off people.

Some accounts they've hired people who previously run these accounts, but they've set up a slightly different like model of how it's actually owned. And some are just like they have a link with them and they're actually owned by someone entirely separately. But every now and again, they retweet their stuff or retweet their stuff and share their stuff. So yeah, how it kind of yeah, the basically ends up how it works is that you can say they take on a client like delivery was one that's worked with them quite a lot.

Delivery say we want to go viral online at this time. We want to go viral online at seven o'clock on a Friday. And then all of that accounts sweet at the same time. They retweet each other. It starts going viral. It starts trending. And then suddenly deliver is the number three trending topic in the UK. And everyone thinking about like what I want for dinner tonight.

It looks on Twitter is like, oh, maybe I want delivery. It's kind of quite an effective thing. Which is my favorite cuisine. How does delivery like deliberately go viral at seven p.m. Well, this is how this might look like the guys from Coney 2012. Just like they're just like, OK, send your CEO out into the street to have a wank and we will film it. It's like some people who thought like

it only works a couple of times at three tops. They thought they thought Coney 2012 was like a 24 hour clock thing. So we have this this this media agency that basically just does a lot of like dumb normie pages. And what is what is significant about them recently in the news? So the things that happened recently is they've started figuring out that they need to kind of expand beyond just being able to do straight Twitter trends or whatever. And I should say this one, by the way, they are is a very younger people.

The CEO is 25, maybe 26. Everyone in the sun. I'm revolting. But I also think that like all all media companies should be run by people under 30. Like it's insane that you should have media companies not run by old people. So the fact that they've then started effectively media company accidentally almost is Record scratch for a media company should be run by people under 30. You have one old person in the corner to who's a lawyer and then the rest of it is under 30.

That is a hell world. Hell world. Have a lawyer bricked into the wall. 300 years ago. Not more of this, less of this. We end up you have a media company that's run by like an eighth of Rupert Murdoch. I think you just have a media company run by an eight year old. But that's the thing.

You go down from the top. I think that definitely exists. If you go down from the top of like all the largest media companies in terms of like social following, you have like the BBC and the Guardian, but then you also have Unilad, Ladpible, Social Chain and all of these people who are running huge media companies that you don't even really realize are running media companies. And you think this is good? I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying that. You heard you say all media companies should be run by people under 30.

I'd say that what mainstream media companies have done, like particularly BBC, particularly Guardian, particularly like all these other ones have done well online, by effectively ignoring and not developing other outlets that might appeal to people, they have seeded an entire area of the internet to very young people without any supervision. It's like Lord of the Flies. Yeah, pretty much. Rupert Murdoch is like the naval officer who shows up at the end. Rupert Murdoch is like the dead pig on a stick.

If only Rupert Murdoch were a dead pig on a stick. If Rupert Murdoch's head were decaying on a pole, I would consider that as a sign of advancement. But then that's what you end up. You put it on a t-shirt. He is replaced by the head of the social chain. The head of the social chain makes some like he's at the front of a sort of like millennial human centipede. He kind of is. I was going for a conga line, but that's the difference between you and I.

From what I understand of social chain is it's basically just... You know what it is? If anyone's familiar with the concept of primitive accumulation in Marxism, it's like... Sorry, just pause before you say Marxism. I'm going to do it. You might have heard of Marxism. I've never read a book in my life. Can you just do a quick picture on this?

It's like a historical process of like enclosure and capture that happens in like the 1600s. It's a concept that we can transpose from that in order to apply to other stuff. Like the capture of the telephone network or like what Elon Musk is doing with say experimenting with different ways of pushing out driverless cars. He wants to own future infrastructure, right? Primitive accumulation as a concept is not just a concept. It's also like primarily the thing that happened when people decided to close off the land that was previously common and decide to call that capital. That's a lot of what social chain is doing, which is they are basically looking at... It's enfranchising medieval peasants.

Social chain disenfranchising. The land simply experienced class mobility. You're talking about a market share as a material like gain, right? No, I'm talking about... I'm saying they have taken... They're just sort of shutting off large accounts with large followers. It's a very late capitalist form of primitive accumulation where they are just pulling all of this stuff that was just sort of there. And they're sort of just monetizing and privatizing it.

Okay, but here's the thing though, because as the way these accounts work and how all accounts online work is that more people get more followers over time. Everyone is essentially accumulating constantly. What's actually happening is even once they've accumulated, it's then immediately declining in value. Which makes it very, very strange because what they're doing is as things get successful and they're also working in an ecosystem that involves Facebook, occasionally going like, we're going to stop everyone coming to you. We're just going to turn the dial and now your thing is now 40% less valuable. Which means that they're accumulating things that is essentially... I don't know if this is a thing, but...

It's not like grain and shit, is it? It's a lot more unstable and like... Is this all fiat capital? Or it is like grain, but Mark Zuckerberg is like the Emperor Caligula. And he suddenly commandeers the entire grain fleet to build a bridge across the Bay of Naples so he can ride his horse across it. And then suddenly your grain can't be sold to the people because it's stuck in Bethany or whatever. Exactly like that. Exactly like that by the way.

People say, what do you use your classics degree for? Hello guys. Hello. Is anyone there? Ladies, hello. I scream into a conch. One thing we've not properly touched on is we understand what social chain is and how it works. Why is it significant currently?

So it's significant currently because... Why are you here today? Please don't have anywhere else to go. Where will I go? What will I do? Yeah, it's just... It's raining outside, we don't want to ask him to leave. It's significant currently because the tab covered it the other week. Where basically what they're doing is one of their now media platforms with more followers than most of the British media.

They are making essentially fake videos, but you have to accept fake as a given value of fake. This is super interesting to me. Right, so what they did is that they made a video set to Drake's God's plan where they went around Manchester and gave people McDonald's. Which is sure, that's a good thing to do. Everyone likes McDonald's. McDonald's. You guys were asking me what my job is earlier. I got like 500 quid to just mention McDonald's on the podcast. I was going to share with you guys.

So they go around Manchester giving McDonald's to people to tune in as a parody of Drake's God's plan. Who's accepting random food from 22 year olds in the middle of Manchester? That is the question. Who would accept random food? It turns out the other people accepting food are other employees of social chain. So yeah, so you've got these people accepting the food and they're also employees, so it's staged. It seems like it's partially staged in that they found some people and they were absolutely true. McDonald's is real. That was Burger King.

Nothing is more real than McDonald's. McDonald's. So yeah, what they do is they go out and they film this video and they're talking to some people who are absolutely 100% like public people. One people who are social chain, people who are maybe just friends of theirs, but it's certainly a little bit fake. And then they put it out on their own channel with the kind of the gist of this is a found footage thing. It's this guy did an amazing parody of God's plan.

Oh wait, so it's not just that they were claiming that the people handing out the food were their employees, but the people to whom the food was being handed were just members of the public. The whole thing was packaged as though. But they basically they package it as a parody. So it's like, oh, it's a parody. So we've made a video. So the idea of like, if you make a parody of a video, should everyone in it be organic? Like, well, kind of no, because like not everyone in a music video.

Like the other people in Drake's God's plan video weren't organic people. So you can make a video of it and say like, well, they're technically employees, but like we were doing it for a parody purpose. But then they presented it as they put it on their YouTube channel on their site as it is a random bit of found footage that we have. I just love the idea of the social chain getting found out that this video was all staged because some guys like, wait, I recognize the guy handing out the McDonald's from the video. Nine things only guys who are dating an Essex girl will understand cry emoji. So this comes right off.

So what's really interesting about it is they don't make much original video. This was maybe their sixth or seventh video and he hadn't been in anything before. But what the tab were kind of concerned about is that the video is made for a website called Student Problems, which for the tab, which is a student focus website. I was going to say, we should say for our international listeners of who there are many. Hi guys. So the tab are interested in the fact that their market, which is students that also looks at student problems, is consuming this content.

Someone else has appeared in the similar markets and they're looking at their content and saying like, hey, you guys are kind of faking things. But their question is like, how much of that is fake? Right. Particularly because like a lot of the content producers are themselves, students engaged in this kind of like, like quasi authentic self-promotion. They have some freelancers students, but they definitely are full-time people of students and their full-time people are just people who are recently students. Right. But like my point being that like part of this like generation of like full coincidence is also part of student culture.

So there is something authentic in being able to reproduce that, right? Like it's not not part of student life. It's just the authenticity comes from a different place. There are students like who are just faking videos for a joke on their own personal Twitters. We are so old. She's like, well, why is that? So why is that? Is that different? Is that worse? She used to write for the tab when I was a student and I got fired from them for taking the piss out of them.

So I can confirm that everyone who works there or most of the people have a brain that's made of wallpaper paste. Well, also the tab again, if you're listening internationally is the same company as Babe.net, who obviously are bad in different but complicated ways. I'd like to cycle back to the differences between lies and fiction in content, especially online, which I think is a super interesting distinction that I feel is what you're like. Have you considered the differences between lies and fiction, my friend? I mean, it weirdly is a scale. So there is a thing of like, I work on a lot of new sites and like, well, two new sites, but I've worked with them for a while.

But like a thing what we think about with, for example, thumbnails is that it is better to have a kind of organically shot photo, like a random person in the street shoot a photo of a thing than it is to have a nice, associate pressed, getty photo that looks beautiful. Because like people look at that and one of them is they see it's real and being like, oh, this is a good version of the story. Whereas you see a stock photo, a news agency photo, like, oh, this is just normal news. This is news. This is like a discrete category of news. You see a woman smiling at a salad and you're like, no, this is just regular news. So I have to, I have to sound the Riley does postmodernism alarm. Good. Let me go stick my head out.

I haven't had any attention for like three minutes. No, it's that what this, this point is one that's like, I think super interesting in a lot of like postmodernist discourse, which is you talk about this idea between, well, what's the difference between a thing and a completely perfect simulation of that thing? What's the difference between a bunch of people going out and, you know, distributing McDonald's to people? And the difference between what's the difference between that and a bunch of people going out and distributing McDonald's to people but being filmed, you know, I didn't realize we had Elon Musk on the podcast. I didn't realize we had Lacan on the podcast. Oh, there you are.

You have to sit outside. Jesus fucking Christ. No, but that's really interesting because What is there egg on your face? Fuck, there was a reason that was interesting. No, it's interesting to me because the way that we interact with lies is that we interact with lies as though they were truth and act accordingly. But the way we interact with fiction is as though it is fiction. It is at a remove.

It is perhaps a level of irony and a level of myth lies are, you know, just straightforwardly something that they are not, but they want you to interact with them as though they aren't. But fiction is something much, much, much more complex. And these videos, I'm not saying this is a moral judgment that it's better or it's worse, but they seem a lot more like fiction than they seem like lies. But then you come at another issue, which is that many people don't think of the Internet as true. Right, exactly. A lot of people respond to the Internet as like, well, sorry, the Internet is probably true, but you know, like the Internet is a lie. Yeah, they believe the Internet as being a roughly 70% true. So sometimes they'll say things, see things, respond to things and be like, well, this is broadly true, but maybe not.

So I don't actually that bother. The thing that the concept that occurs to me as sort of most useful for encapsulating that is not necessarily fiction, although I think that is like a really interesting way of getting at the heart of like, I was just trying to strike back against all this sort of like weird, like 60 year olds being scared of the Internet thing of like fake news. Like this is just like what humans have been doing since the beginning of human civilization is like producing culture in a memetic way with a really uncertain relationship to truth. Right. But like that's what the what's the sort of useful concept for me is not fiction, but bullshit, which someone has actually. That's a better concept. Has actually like gotten around to philosophically theorizing and like the point of bullshit in philosophical sense is not.

It's a kind of mirror image of fiction. Like, like it is powerful, but like it's powerful. Like it's power resists people calling it out as false. Right. Yeah. Hashtag the resistance. Bullshit is the resistance, right? This is what it leads to, isn't it?

Yeah. What matters is not the fact that it's true or false, but that it can telegraph a particular emotion that can then be used to attach to facts which are then decided as true or false. And when you have something like Facebook, which is where most of this stuff goes, it is a platform built on emotion. So the actual idea can telegraph an emotion effectively, even if it is bullshit means that it spreads effectively. So it kind of builds a thing that is based on everything is bullshit to a lesser degree. But that's kind of, I think, something I've really want to and have been wanting to for a while. A point drawing out of social media marketing in general is that sort of the reason people sort of click and share and that it's effective is nothing to do ever with the product itself. It's always to do with the fact that people identify with the messaging around the product.

But that's always been the case for advertising though. That's not necessarily new. That's the only reason I buy by Agribus. If you look at the... That's the reason I buy McDonald's. McDonald's. If you look at the advertising... When I have a McDonald's, my cock stays hard for four hours.

If you have McDonald's, your penis stays hard for more than four hours. Nice. That's what I call a happy meal. Consult your sexy doctor. What I was saying is... What I was saying is that it's not saying that all advertising is new. But if you look at a history of advertising over the last, I don't know, several decades, you'll see that advertising has gotten to be less to do with the specifics of a particular product.

It has this size engine. It goes this fast. It has this safety rating. Like social media advertising, what makes it sort of most unique is that the product is the most sort of marginal, irrelevant thing. When you're advertising on social media, it's all the associations. It's all what you feel like you can become if you consume the product, right? I don't quite agree with that because I think that the way it works is that there are two layers to this in that. They are trying to get you to buy a thing, but they're also trying to get you to essentially advertise for them.

And those two instincts are a very, very different thing. Part of it is like, if you get a bunch of cool people to advertise a thing, then people buy it. You actually don't need to cool people to buy it. I think what you're saying, Ronnie, isn't necessarily incorrect. It's that very Adam Curtis mushroom cloud stock footage, Margaret Thatcher sort of point. And it's not necessarily wrong, but it's as true. I love Adam Curtis. You know this about me.

I know. It's adorable. But it's as cute. I love him so much. It's as true of like 30 years ago as it is now. But I don't necessarily disagree with you on any particular point, Eleanor, about bullshit. The reason that I choose fiction rather than bullshit is that I think that the relationship between things that are, you know, just kind of marketing and maybe we'd call them, you know, cynical in that regard or whatever. And authenticity that actually has meaning and that we create for ourselves, especially online where like online is this huge place, but we exist in such small spaces on it and it's all stacked up together.

There are all sorts of fictions online that are positive and that we need and that we make for ourselves because they have meaning. And I think a big part of how we begin to, like you say, you know, almost advertise to each other, right? How it becomes self replicating is that, you know, it is meaningful to me in all sorts of ways when I don't know, I buy something new and I put a picture on Instagram. And I'm sharing that for like all sorts of reasons that are personal to me. And it is also unavoidably functionally marketing, which is why I think it's interesting. Everybody talks about 1984 all the time online to the point. Mostly liberals. To the point of tedium and, you know, talk about fake news and, you know, new speak and fake news.

No one talks about the book pattern recognition, which I've been banging on to these guys about for like a while now. When we talked about this on DMs, I just thought you meant lowercase p lowercase our pattern recognition. The concept phenomenon. I didn't think you meant the literary phenomenon. But the main, the main thing is that in this podcast, we don't believe in a strict dichotomy between bullshit and fiction, which is the space in which Steven Seagal's Wikipedia page exists. Yes, absolutely, which brings me neatly back to the book I was going to talk about. But recognition is a 2010 I want to say novel by William Gibson that is basically about it's about marketing online and it's about virality just before virality really existed, which is cool because it's kind of prescient. But I don't think that that is its only value.

What it talks about, which I think makes it a really useful lens for thinking about online now is that it didn't take the line that I think a lot of liberal discourse takes, which is like, oh, people are stupid and you tell them a lie and they'll share it because they want to believe it and they're not rational enough and they're emotional and they'll share lies and it's fake news. It talks about virality as something that is organic and something that is self replicating and something where the lines between what is made for us to share and what we make to share ourselves are incredibly blurred. It talks about advertising as something that has to be started by someone, but can then essentially live forever recreated memetically and changed and evolving through everybody that encounters it. And I think that's way, way, way more useful as a lens on social chain and this kind of stuff than, you know, as we were talking about like, oh yeah, this is this a lie or is it the truth because that is kind of trivial to what's happening. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And also I think that people when they, for example, share something don't necessarily share it as a one or a zero. This is true or false. Like how often do you see people share things that like, it's probably bullshit, but it's quite funny or this is probably not quite there, but it's still good or something. It's a story and the idea that telling stories is bad and cold hard logical reasonable rational facts are good is, you know, it's.

Yeah, it comes down to the whole like mythos logo, like differentiation between like different ways of understanding the truth, right? If I knew what that meant, I am sure I would agree with you. So like, it's like, oh God, I'm like, I'm gunning for Riley's crown as like resident wacker. You will, you come out the king, you best not miss this. In his apartment. No, you're not going to take his crown for wanking off in his own apartment. Welcome to the bust closet ladies and gentlemen. One of the university in Utah has installed a cry closet. I'm suggesting the better thing would have been to have installed a bust closet.

Ladies and gentlemen, anyway, back to people smile. What you just said is part of this problem because that was an arts installation in tentico viral online. It's a cry closet, but actually it's not installation based on parodying the concept of people. Exactly what I want to do with this point. One of this is true. What part of this is true? I'm not sure that like the that when we're talking about like the fact that this is fiction, the fact that like questioning the relationship of this to truth. We're kind of forgetting the fact that like all like forgetting to question like the why people make this go viral. Like this is actually like really neglected as like a moment of cult group production in which like literally millions of people participate.

And I think it's really interesting that people who are like stuck in there, like maybe boring jobs, like procrastinating on Twitter. Use these kinds of interactions to as a kind of to unleash the kind of creativity that they probably don't get to exercise in their daily lives. And like there is something irreducible about the fact that like, okay, if you have like Christ hashtag like like hashtag very British problems or like hashtag things that are more likely to happen than Brazil winning the World Cup. Like people being genuinely like funny and innovative on that shit. Like like shockingly and like that using that sort of creativity as a motor for your marketing strategy kind of sounds a little bit dystopian. But also we shouldn't neglect the fact that it is being really innovative with which friends I'm deciding to tag in the gift of a woman drinking from a glass of wine that's the size of a barrel. That Friday feeling. There's that barrel feeling.

There's obviously loads and loads of incredibly like toxic things about about the phrase virtue signaling one, which is not the only one, but one that I say the phrase that Friday feeling. Particularly unhelpful is that it's like the existence of that phrase and what it means now means that we seldom talk about how every single element of human communication, whether online or off has a pragmatic element, it can't help but have it like everything is signaling beyond the content of its message. That is not something that we choose to do. And that if we want to be rational actors, we can like switch off like there is there is always a pragmatics on top of the semantics in any communication and yeah you share something or you like something or whatever. That is a communicative act in itself, both to other people but to yourself as well about who you are and a lot of that isn't conscious but it's incredibly it's incredibly real. And I think if we discount that both as an engine for viability and like yeah the kind of self perpetuating evolution of things like that art installation that then loads of people share, then we really miss a trick in understanding it. And that's why I go to McDonald's. Story that shit.

But surely I think I think one of the things you can't possibly miss when talking about this right is that all of this is true, but I think it's important. That's very defensive. He's rocking back and forward. No, I'm just like slightly drunk. Well, all of this may be true. I think like the fact that a lot of it exists to sell widgets is still relatively sinister. Widgets, hello 2007. I didn't know what that is.

Widget is like super web 2.0. No, it's pre-web 2.0. No, widgets like an early 20th century term to describe just a thing that a company is selling that could be a good or service or anything. Okay, that theory about how Riley's actually been alive for 2,000 years is starting to become life. I fucking told you. You know how I got these scars pulling one of my child laborers out of the knitting machine. Yeah, I was really good Victorian boss. They call me spinning Jenny.

The thing you can't forget is that all of this stuff is still being kind of put in the instrumental service of selling widgets. No matter how much the fiction feels fulfilling to share, no matter how much it might resonate, it is still kind of created with the purpose of selling a super dry hoe. The interesting thing is that it is reproduced by just people, by us for other purposes. So then where do you say like the original point of this was that it was a marketing ploy and it was to sell things. And then within these kind of self-reproducing structures that we have now, I say, yeah, well, I am making a copy of this with my imprint on it. But I'm doing it for different reasons. It feels so stifling to be stuck in almost like a moralistic position and say, well, if this was the origin, then that is like it's not how it works. That's the thing. It's not a moralistic position.

This is, if anything, this is regular listeners of the show. Well, no, this is essentially the point that we talked about in Kami Book Club number one, Psychopolitics, which is that the entire... You've been following the reading so far. The entire point... For everybody reading along at home. I mean, statistically, many of them will have. The entire point, two or three, the entire point of extremely contemporary capitalism is not to kind of trick you or make you against your will promote its interests. It's that you're it.

You said you don't even realize you're promoting its interests. You want to promote its interests. You are promoting its interests and fully aware of the fact that you're promoting its interests and that doesn't damage the value. What else are you going to do? Because it's like an all consuming thing. It's like, you know, it's like, yeah, excuse yourself from the divine right of kings. You know, it's a paraphrase horribly from someone much smarter than me. We're also in a situation here where like, there is no value to anything and obviously everything is awful.

Thank you for saying the obvious. Without saying. But the very small of a value you can get is like connection with other people. So for example, if you happen to see a thing that's produced by a brand that references an important thing that you haven't thought of in 10 years and it makes you think of a friend you haven't seen in 10 years. And that is your impetus to get back in touch with that friend that has value. The problem is that that's mediated by a brand. Right. That's how I recently got back in touch with my old friend.

McDonald's. No, but this is why I think about pattern recognition a lot while I'm online. And like, please, William Gibson at me. But it's the whole, the whole, please Riley, this is a family podcast. No, it's not as explicit right now. It's specifically not. The whole, the whole like sci-fi, like the seat of it is that the main character, she's, she's allergic to brands. So she is, she is hired by advertising companies to see whether something is an effective brand because then she will have an allergic reaction.

But that's easy. No, it's like fun, but it's like a sci-fi. I can see it. But I thought you said she was allergic to bats. What a bizarre analogy that almost would never affect you in your day to day life. The whole thing is that they are, they aren't just creating self-perpetuating marketing. They're creating brandless marketing. And that's like the whole social chain thing, right?

Social chain, obviously it's like a company and it has maybe a brand in like a B2B sense, but it has infinite imprints without like a recognizable mothership. That's like the point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So there is value there in a brandless public existence for that company. And it should be pointed out also, it's not, it's not the only one. But this is exactly what, like what Cease was talking about in terms of like this becoming myth-making because like it's impossible to write an original myth. You rewrite a myth and like you participate in the myth by that process of rewriting.

Absolutely. And it's by no coincidence that that like slow aggregate process of like becoming essentially public domain is part and parcel. Or like goes alongside the fact that these things like rapidly lose value because they rapidly lose, you know, they like escape the control of the original marketers, right? Can I say one great thing that I think, I think, I think that will be the final thing of this. They are very, very good at myth-making in that terms of like they have talked to a lot of people that explained how they will drop out. So it's been held the young people and that's all great. However, what they did about six months ago was released a series of YouTube videos because they're quite big on YouTube and like making sure that they are really feeding into like entrepreneur, YouTube, entrepreneur, Twitter, all that sort of stuff. One of the parts of this video was that they talked about their toughest moment and they went back to a couple of them and at the time there are only six or seven of them and they talked to all of them.

And they explained that their toughest moment six or seven months in was that having like got the company off the ground, start the company, they were making money, they had money coming in the door, they had got a higher staff. They discovered that they had to pay tax, which they weren't aware of. Oh, bless. That's almost adorable. But better than that, they put that on YouTube as a promotional tool. That's not that's not like someone else making documentary. They made a documentary about how when they started, they didn't know how they had to pay tax. That's every single tweet that's like lol just watching nine hours of Netflix and ordering a pizza at 2pm. Love my life as a marketing technique. Like it's that it's that like it's it's it's mess authenticity. And it's it's something that they did that as like a dark and they did like a everyone slowed down.

There was sad music. It went on the screen. They're like kind of the filter. It's like gray and they were just like, yeah, it's my tax. So good. It's it's it's almost as though we live in a kind of society where lots of people have to do stuff together because the free market is terrible. And if only if only there was some kind of agency that literally proved that by saying that actually most production just takes place and that we have to create the desire to consume it by saying, hey, if you buy this fucking, I don't know, doing buggy, then you're going to be a lot like Jar rule or whatever. I could just like regular listeners. Riley is just extremely mad all the time now is like entered to unforeseen levels of being mad online. But if there's one thing people will always need it's delicious nuggets made of 100% chicken breast right really hard then to come across as someone who lives in 2018 and came up with jar rule and a dune buggy.

It is exactly what somebody born in 1029. Here's the issue. Number one, Elvis and a hovercraft before we transition before we transition to the next segment. Yes, I have to admit the reason I came up with that is because I am and I've been trying to hide this from online. I am increasingly obsessed with like early to mid 2000s trash culture. I sometimes have a breakdown. The razor pink flip phone and Justin and Kelly just kind of merged in my head and I had a small aneurysm. It's just a wee little aneurysm.

No, it's the I have I have spoken about Britney Spears. I'm saying I spent a while I spent like a fully a while like watching like early 2000s jackass spin offs. I was going to I was going to unsober up for the serious segment before we do that. I had I had one more thing to say about the social media marketing thing, which is that this is a thing I want to talk about genuinely because I don't understand it. Okay. I'm going to pause our recording. You say the thing. Okay.

Okay. So recently I've been getting all these like video ads on Facebook with a bit stuff being shared into my timeline, but which is sort of marketing material for like products that are so dumb. They honestly can't think anyone would ever buy this. And it's almost as though this whole product has been created for the sake of the viral marketing campaign. Like there was like a thing where like it's like a mask that you wear so you can sing at full volume and not annoy your housemate. Shoes, shoes where there's like you buy the base of the shoe and then loads of tops that like zip on and off in different styles. And they're like, it's so convenient for the gym or for a business into it. It's like it's still fundamentally the same shoe.

It just looks different, but it's not like more versatile. It's the same sole. And it obviously looks horrendous at all times. And I'm like, no one would ever buy this shoe that we just had about that concept of truth. It's legal guys. I swear to God, if you don't keep me farting into the podcast, I will kill you. Is that is that wish? Is that the advertiser?

This was, I think the shoes were being advertised was like a thing I'm posted by Mashable. Like the video was like Mashable watermarked. I don't know who made the shoes because it's worth keeping an eye out for the retailer wish because they inadvertently set their entire insane catalog up with like 500,000 items onto Facebook. And then Facebook randomly advertised all of them to severe which we wouldn't do best. And it turns out the ones that do best are the ones that look completely insane. We wish ended up, ended up advertising like a load of things that were like, oh yeah, this is a squirt gun to shooting your eye and like just insane shit. Because they were the ones people clicked on because they were like, wait, that's absurd. Why does that exist?

Rather than the ones that they actually wanted. This isn't even Facebook ads. This is like literally stuff coming up on my timeline that's being shared by people or tagging people. Oh yeah, that'll be Mashable. Oh lol, we need this. That'll be Mashable in Insider. So in the interest of just going to grab some more beer and going to our next segment, I'm going to quickly pause here and then we're going to see all of you guys after this brief interlude of Jin Sang's Here We Go which is available on Spotify. Hi listeners, this is Nate, the producer of Trash Future.

You may remember me from the episode where we talked about bad military technologies and from hearing my name which gets shouted and told to cut things on a regular basis. It's my sad note to report to you that Pucci died on the way back to his home planet. Similarly, we had some file delivery issues that prevented us from being able to complete the second half of the show. And as you can probably tell from the conversation, enough alcohol was consumed that it's going to take a long time to edit it. So I appreciate your patience. You can follow the show on Twitter at TrashFuturePod. You can follow Riley at R-A-A-L-E-H which embarrasses the hell out of him every time he has to say it. So it's probably good.

We make him say it more. You can follow Milo at Milo underscore Edwards. And for our lovely guests, you can follow Suze at Suze Marsupial and you can follow Luke at I'm Bad at Life. You can also commodify your descent by purchasing a Trash Future shirt at littlecomrad.com. Make sure to pick the most arcane Twitter in-joke to place as your custom text. Thanks so much again for listening. Thank you for your support. See you next week.