Stupefy: At-work media - Endgame

Do we work so much that we're seeing a rise in media shaped by and for the workplace? This week, the Financial Times has a story pegged to this year's wave of big tech IPO's arguing that more and more companies whose products failed to take off with consumers are shifting their focus to selling to workers. Dropbox was once one of the hottest consumer internet companies. Not anymore. Shares of its stock haven't moved since it debuted a year ago. So Dropbox pivoted. Its new mission is to be “a leading global collaboration platform that's transforming the way people work together, from the smallest business to the largest enterprise.” Other consumer-facing media and services like Lyft and Pinterest haven't lived up to investor hype while worker-facing Zoom and PagerDuty have surged. Slack emulates the ease of consumer technology so well that it's been valued at $7 billion. Slack, too, is going public this year. And then there's TikTok, TV for and by people at work. TikTok is an insanely popular app for making and sharing videos that features a lot of teens doing regular goofy stuff set to a constant soundtrack of music.

One key difference between TikTok and past social media apps like Instagram is that instead of relying on your social graph - your friends - TikTok relies on its algorthm to guide users through its weird world of crap. You hop through hasthags rather than your feed, which makes it much easier to get lost on TikTok in a good way. It's much more like TV, if instead of the channel guide TV was organized by something close to the Discover page on Instagram. According to John Herrman in the Times, "It’s an app that’s unapologetic about wasting your time." As we put more personal importance on work than ever and burn ourselves out, not only are we less productive but we also siphon away our leisure time. That may be making us bored, unfocussed and desperate for the entertainment we should be getting at home while we're at work. Herrman writes that TikTok is "also, apparently, a good way to waste some time at work." Herrman continues:

Slack has blurred the lines between work and regular life for a generation of burned out office workers who ostensibly love feeling like they're hanging out together while at work as work extends further and further into every crevice of their lives. It's work colonizing leisure time. But TikTok is the opposite: it's leisure time colonizing work.

Endgame in-game

Just how big will a Fortnite tie-in make Avengers: Endgame? Before considering the impact of a just-announced partnership with the game, it's worth noting just how enormous Avengers: Endgame already is. Setting the scene: so far this year domestic box office revenue is at its lowest level since 2013. Despite that, Avengers: Endgame seems to be bigger than any movie ever. It was #1 at the box office two weeks before it came out. AMC Theater stock is up 10% in those two weeks specifically because of Endgame sales, which are up +50% over prior peak Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But maybe the biggest sign of just how huge this movie is going to be: China pre-sales. From Deadline:

And then, just when I thought Endgame couldn't possibly get any bigger, Epic Games announced yesterday another crossover event between the other cultural juggernaut Fortnite and Avengers just in time for the movie. The power of this crossover event to cement Marvel characters into pop culture ubiquity cannot be overstated: last year's in-game crossover event for Infinity War let players play as Thanos and quickly turned the villain into an iconic household name. Fortnite and the Marvel Cinematic universe are the only true mass media venues we have right now besides politics. To put the scope of the audience on Fortnite into perspective, a virtual concert inside the game by the DJ Marshmello attracted 10 million player-viewers. The introduction of Thanos into Fortnite did the rare thing of appeasing fans of both Marvel and Fortnite. Both are built specifically to be platforms for interweaving stories and the constant introduction of new characters and modes of storytelling. It's why both the MCU and Fortnite are not only dominating right now but positioned perfectly to continue in the future.

Marvel is one of the main draws of the streaming service Disney+ to be released later this year and Fortnite's parent company CEO Tim Sweeney has visions for it to become something like a vast social world for much more than just the original game. From Business Insider:

By using Fortnite as an advertising venue and platform to launch its biggest movie ever, is there actually room for Endgame to grow still? How big can it get? Fortnite is where the most people are right now and those people have been primed to expect creative interludes from other players and other creators. Knowing Epic and Marvel, they probably have something even better than last year's Thanos event in mind. It's scary to think just how ubiquitous this movie will be. But prepare for it.

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A long thread about the branding of Pete Buttigieg's campaign. (Twitter)

Until this past weekend, I had never heard of Extinction Rebellion, the climate change movement interrupting daily life in London. (FT)

Lizzo is not happy about her Pitchfork review (Twitter and Pitchfork)