It's been a while, but we're back. Read on for the future of posting, the most impressive meme of the year so far and Netflix's ambitions to conquer all of your time. Plus, links to aliens, chickens and the inside of Americans' homes.
- Posts so good they’re worth paying for
Sounds impossible. But with the rise of Patreon - a direct-to-creator payment platform typically used to support your favorite podcasts - posters so good they can charge are doing it right now. Michael Hudson’s posts were so good he had to put them behind a paywall. Michael, known originally on Twitter as @EminemObama and then @BarackShady and currently @EminemMoBamba after a series of ejections, finds and reposts the strangely mundane of the internet’s vast middle - mesmerizing, hilarious and fascinating selfies and videos and bios and screen names and posts from regular internet users all over the world. Here is on Instagram (not behind a paywall). We're all turning into part-time or full-time content creators. As the race to become better at sharing valuable content continues, it's only natural that some people will get so good at it that it becomes something to pay the bills. He works in patient care in real life. It doesn’t pay a lot. But his free-time digging through the best and worst of average people’s social media detritus turned up so much wildly compelling treasure that he’s turned his accounts private and put them behind a paywall. Check out his Patreon and subscribe.
- AirPod Money
Of the three genius ideas of 2019, not one is started by the brand itself:
Netflix's Bird Box memeFacebook's 10-Year Challenge memeApple's "AirPods are for rich people" meme
And no, I’m not including the Instagram egg. The AirPod Money meme is the most impressive, though. Products are symbols. We use them to signal things like sex appeal or intelligence or fitness. And it's a brand's dream to make a product loaded with the symbolism of wealth. In the case of AirPods, the wealth symbolism embedded in the tiny product came up from the communal ether, not from Apple. Apple never positioned the product as luxury. Never communicated status. AirPods are just so conspicuous a product - impossible to mistake for any other headphone competitor let alone competing consumer electronics brand - that they’ve been interpreted as flagrant signifiers of status. Small headphones, huge statement. And that it’s now briefly crystallized in the form of a meme - a democratic swarm of cultural consensus - it's the crowning achievement for Apple: proof the product's conspicuousness worked.
- Netflix's war on your time
Netflix is not a content company. It’s a time company. And its war for your time is no longer unspoken but explicit and overt. This month, Netflix made three statements to shareholders and to Hollywood talent that prove this war is not a secret anymore and will only ramp up:
Individual title viewership numbers: For the first time, Netflix giving stars and talent something akin to ratings, for instance Bird Box growing its audience to 80 million householdsTotal percentage of US screen time: Netflix estimates that it now accounts for 10 percent of TV screen time in the USCompetition: In a letter to shareholders, Reed Hastings said Netflix loses more minutes to Fortnite and YouTube than HBO or Hulu
Whereas Bob Bakish, the CEO of Viacom, implausibly claims driverless cars will add to the total minutes people commit to streaming, Netflix is determined to extract more minutes of each day from the subscribers it already has around the world. Content for Netflix is a means to increase the 10% of total screen time only. And as that percentage goes up, Netflix’s ability to raise prices gets stronger.
Links
LaborWave—Laborwave is an inter-sectional art style reconciling nostalgia for a Soviet past with a nostalgia for the visual motifs of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. Researchers suggest broiler chicken is the hallmark of the Anthropocene—The group outlines their reasons for choosing the chicken as a signal of human biosphere reconfiguration.I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.—A glimpse of the suburban grotesque, featuring Russian mobsters, Fox News rage addicts, a caged man in a sex dungeon, and Dick Cheney.REPEATED RADIO SIGNALS COMING FROM GALAXY 1.5 BILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY, SCIENTISTS ANNOUNCE—Scientists pick up large number of blasts over a few weeksIf True, This Could Be One of the Greatest Discoveries in Human History—The head of Harvard's astronomy department says what others are afraid to say about a peculiar object that entered the solar system