Only one of our very few shared stories has the balls to make the subtext the actual text of the story. Politics, our one last true monoculture, would never. Marvel wouldn't. Netflix wouldn't. Sports wouldn't. Neither would YouTube, Game of Thrones or the Instagram/Twitter/TikTok meme universe. They each claim a slice of our attention pie that belongs to different demographic groups. None of them would, to their respective mega-audiences, show a literal depiction of mass attention being sucked into a single point. Because that is really the story those super-stories are telling. Only Fortnite has come out and said it. And it was...not subtle. If the mergers don't prove it, then nothing will: attention is a zero-sum game. Vice had to merge with Refinery29 and New York Media had to merge with Vox because they could not suck in enough attention to compete with the few super-suckers of attention. Disney had to merge with Fox to solidify themselves at the very top of that game.
The text of the stories they tell, whether about a million different unrelated protagonists or one team of intertwined protagonists, matters much less than the desperate and complicated and expensive grab for the minutes left over from the time you spend sleeping. The goal is to become a literal black hole of attention, a single point into which we all cannot help but be drawn. The individual season of Netflix shows are just tiny plot points within a much bigger story of global time. Of those handful of shared stories we're telling ourselves, Fortnite is, I think, the most impressive because of what it says about the future of our stories. For background:
Fortnite has big events inside the game called seasonsWhen a season changes, a loose game narrative moves forward a little bitThere have been 10 seasons so farEvery season has taken place on the same famous mapIt has been widely speculated that at the end of season 10, there would be a major update, like a brand new map
This weekend, season 10 ended in spectacular fashion: the entire world of Fortnite got sucked into a black hole, leaving millions of people staring into it for two days. How many? Eight million people. Staring into not a game being played but just a black hole. So many people tuned into this moment in the game that Fortnite crashed and Twitch crashed. There are a lot of angles to this story, but the most interesting one to me is the social angle. If this event is a new generation's "Who shot J.R.?", then this generation's social ties are being formed not through a shared experience but through a shared hallucination, because Fortnite takes place in a virtual universe. Unlike a TV show like "Dallas" or a video game like GTA, Fortnite isn't a story people are told. It's a place where people socialize, buy, sell, create, express, and basically live. We could just move schools and election polling stations there if we really wanted to. This is why Facebook is creating Horizon, which is, if the marketing is to be taken literally, Fortnite for moms. Because the next zone of attention is not on the internet or on a screen.
The internet and screens are in this reality and in this reality all the attention is spoken for. Fortnite invented a new reality in which they get all your attention. It won't be the last attempt.
The shorter stuff
Extinction Rebellion, the UK-based climate change protest group that counts Radiohead, Emma Thompson and artist Joseph Corré among its donors, looks like they're trying to turn back the clock a few centuries. (Twitter)
In Graydon Carter's AirMail, Cazzie David mourns the death of the Instagram feature I mourned last week. Same thing, except her essay is long and self-indulgent and boring and my bullet point was short and self-indulgent and boring. (AirMail)
Before it bombed, the Will Smith action movie Gemini Man ran an imaginary quote from an imaginary reviewer as a promoted trending topic. The quote does not exist. (Imgur)
Cool yoga studio Sky Ting is launching Sky Ting TV. (Instagram)
Do we really need to revisit Breaking Bad already? Feels like these nostalgia cycles are getting shorter and shorter. (The Ringer)
After Banksy's absurd painting about the not-at-all cliché idea that Congress is funny sold for an absurd sum, Kenny Schacter attributes the dizzying art market partly to "infantilism (the persistence of babyish traits in adulthood)." (ArtNet)
Is China enforcing a values tariff on companies like the NBA and Blizzard who want to do business there? (Twitter)
Felix Salmon points out the impossible-to-take-seriously mission statement of maligned media company G/O Media: “The heartbeat of next.” (Twitter)
Speaking of G/O Media. The subject line of the email announcing the shutdown of G/O Media web site Splinter included a typo, calling the site Spllinter instead of Splinter. Not good. (Variety)
Apple really went for it with the TV deals this week: Alfonso Cuarón, Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. (TubeFilter)
Cardi B's rapping competition show for Netflix is getting good reviews. (The Guardian)
There was a big story in the Times on Bill Gates' ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Read this Evgeny Morozov piece on the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites, too. (The Guardian)
Facebook gets a laughably insignificant slap on the wrist for faking out the entire media industry. (THR)
I loved every single detail in this insanely blue blooded obituary. (NYT)
I think comparing the founder of a meditation app to Mick Jagger is taking founder fetishism a little too far. (LAT)
This sucks. "New Sounds" on WNYC is one of the best radio shows I'e ever heard and how I've discovered some of my favorite music, including Ryuichi Sakamoto. Thank you, John Schaefer. (NYT)