Author: Aaron Weber

I first heard the phrase “marketers ruin everything” from marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk, who has since gone on to monetize his brand so hard he’s become just another toxic hustle bro with a podcast. But it’s not really a new insight. Marketing is, after all, how capital appropriates culture. 1940s ads were full of highbrow allusions to the classics because that was where the prestige was at the time. Clumsy appropriation of counterculture and subculture gave us everything from those appalling ads for St. Ides Malt Liquor to the simply embarrassing flop of OK Cola. Less clumsy appropriation slides in unnoticed until J. Balvin is recommending que hagas un beer run antes de la fiesta porque New Year’s Eve es Miller Time. (Balvin himself of course has his own, even more questionable appropriations to answer for).

The confrontational Twitter personas of Steak-Umms and Wendy’s were just the tip of the spear for the market’s advance on internet-meme culture (coincidentally, @Steak-Umm now has a new ad agency notable for letting you have conversations with Moon Pies via your Alexa. Visit Garbage Day for more dirt on that and other aspects of our social media nightmare). Moving beyond those out-of-character brand accounts, Shake Shack and DoorDash are collaborating on a limited-time Valentine’s Day dating app called Eat Cute. There will be prizes! There will be brand synergy! There will be collection of ENORMOUS amounts of personal data about connections, preferences, locations, and spending habits that can be used to maximize sales and also turned into its own monetized stream of ads and database sales to other precision marketers. (Of course, it’s not just dating, those prayer apps are also selling the data of the devout).

Anyway, as the Mekons say, just like prayer and art and personally identifying information, sex is just a commodity to be bought and sold like rock ‘n roll. (“And when I danced and saw you dance, I saw a world where the dead are worshiped – This world belongs to them now they can keep it!)

Mekons aside, today’s song is Australia, by The Shins. It’s a cheerful tune about dread, ennui, and giving up on your dreams, illustrated by a comedic heist in which a semi-competent crew steals decorative balloons from a car dealership.

Happy Friday!

Your nightmares only need a year or two to unfold

• The LA railyard complaining about rampant thefts had previously fired significant portions of its security team. Same as previous screaming about retail theft, it mostly looks like a corporation trying to duck the expense of guarding private property.
• One key to success is being willing to face rejection again and again and again, to more or less learn to love it. What’s the worst that could happen? Rejection?
• A 2018 longread from The Baffler discusses paleoconservativism, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and how the right-wing revolt of 1992 is still hanging over us today.
• Click here, then click the headline “How Miami Became the Most Important City in America” to get around the Financial Times paywall and read a top contender for this year’s hotly contested “most scathing thing written about Florida” award.

You haven’t laughed since January

• Jamelle Bouie on the ever-flawed historiography of slavery.
• How coal manages to hold on in America.
• Vann Newkirk II on the whitewashing of MLK.

Give me your hand and let’s jump out the window

• An AI tries to draw birds based on illustrations of birds.
• Salt ponds.
• February.

So many of America’s problems can be attributed to our twin obsessions with cars and guns, but nothing underscores it quite as thoroughly as recent news about John Kuczwanski, a former chief of staff for a GOP state senator and Florida government official. Five years after being arrested for brandishing a handgun during a road rage incident outside of a Tallahassee Circle K, he got into another fight at the same intersection. This time, after ramming his BMW into a Prius, he pulled his gun and fired. He missed. The other driver, also armed, did not.

Of course America, and in particular the Florida GOP, will not learn from this. We build our environment for cars, and cut funding for transit because it’s for people of color, so we get too many cars. We forgive drivers for outrageous behavior and so cultivate road rage. And of course, we let just about anyone have a handgun even when they’ve demonstrated clearly that they should not. If not for the pathological policies Kuczwanski and his employers advocated and enacted, he might be alive today.

Recommended Reading/Listening

In Wired: A Grand Theory of Buying Stuff
A telling anecdote about how we buy things, and buy things for our things, and suddenly we have too many things and we haven’t achieved what we originally set out to do. In the case of author’s anecdote, the extra things are a digital drum pad and all the accessories. “The upshot of all this is that I have absolutely no musical talent… I am not a musician. I am a systems administrator for my digital audio workstation. There will be no SoundCloud for me.” But dialing back the accessories, and listening more carefully, he begins to gain a greater appreciation for drummers and producers, and an understanding of how music is made and heard.
Song pairing: Tonight I’m Gonna Give the Drummer Some, by Amy Rigby. (“He’s cute, if a middle-aged man can be described as cute…”)

In TNR: The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right
The energy in young right-wingers is leaning into less voting, more whiteness, less corporate influence, more Latin Mass, a familiar set of herrenvolk-democracy policies. “The New Right wants to see Republicans abandon their fealty to free-market dogmas, embrace traditional Christianity, and use the levers of state power to wage the culture war for keeps.”
Song pairing: VBS (Vacation Bible School), by Lucy Dacus. (“When I tell you you were born and you are here for a reason / You are not convinced the reason is a good one“)

On Substack: America’s Top Environmental Groups Have Lost the Plot on Climate Change
Bloomberg’s Noah Smith brings in a guest to cover the reasons groups like the Sierra Club, Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement are opposing things like efforts to bring green electricity to cities and efficient mass transit. “Conservation is a conservative impulse, but right now, the climate threat calls for sweeping changes to our physical environment. Our best shot at mitigating the impact of climate change is to electrify every process in our economy as quickly as possible.”
Song Pairing: A punk cover of Little Boxes, because the genre and the song were once critiques of conformity and are now wielded in opposition to everything new and different.

Joy

Bunny x Snowman.
Turn the sound on to hear this kitten learn about gravity (he’s fine).
This cat bopping to New Order.

Good news everyone, the following post has been reviewed by Twitter operations and does not violate the terms of service, so we know that free speech and a robust discourse is alive and well in America:

Other bastions of free speech include Penn Law professor Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, back in the news again for doubling down on her ongoing advocacy for a whiter, more gentile America. The New Yorker profiled her back in 2019, after she was quoted saying that Black or Latino law students are always below average; she’s recently expanded to insult Asians as well.

Not to say that internet pile-ons are good, but there are some things that should be outside the bounds of polite society. I don’t think this is particularly controversial, but here we are.

Good news for people who like bad news

• A pretty good explanation of why the supply chain is so screwed up.
• A rather more critical tribute to Joan Didion.
• The shoplifting epidemic is kind of overblown, with a narrative driven by police and retailers who don’t want to have to pay for their own loss prevention staff.
• America is closer to civil war than we’d like to imagine.
• Georgia Republicans purge Black Democrats from election boards.
• The for-profit cartel of expert testimony that helps cops get away with manslaughter.
• For crying out loud stop buying giant pickup trucks, it’s killing people.

Joy

• Cats plus matching cat slippers.
• My dog.
• This completely bonkers X-Files photoshoot from the 1990s.
• This cat that jumps in a kinda funny way.
• Writers share a sentence or two from their upcoming books.
• It is remarkably difficult to get a hamster drunk.
• A pretty cool deep dive on figs.
• This dog determined to wrest a stick from a snowman.

Let’s check in with the intellectual right over at The American Conservative! This week the special is a super spicy take about how antifascists are the real fascists, but also fascism isn’t bad, actually. It pairs nicely with a short essay by Jeet Heer titled “You Don’t, In Fact, Have to Hand it to Mussolini.”

Meanwhile, in the face of increased public scrutiny, police are shaping up and working more to… oh, sorry, no, I meant a police officer killed a pedestrian with his cruiser, then put the body in his trunk and took it home in a vain attempt keep it a secret. And a pair of officers in Columbus, Ohio just got busted trafficking eight kilos of fentanyl. And this obvious and avoidable shitshow.

At least we’ve started cracking down on prosecutorial misconduct. I mean, sure, it just took a murder, a viral video of said murder, and a national outcry to get justice, but that’s cool. We’ve got a total panopticon and lots of time on our hands, so we just have to watch endless murder videos and start letter writing campaigns every time we want justice for anything. Besides, everyone enjoys watching murder videos.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta:

To understand the current fight over housing in Atlanta, you have to go back almost 100 years. Before 1929, Atlanta was divided into two residential zones: “R-1 white district” and “R-2 colored district.” After a U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibited such explicit segregation, “R-1” became a “dwelling house” zone and “R-2” became an “apartment house” district. To this day, much of Atlanta is still organized this way, leading to a lack of affordable housing — and housing in general — as the city expands.

This_is_fine.gif

Meanwhile, in crime: A man stealing a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff from Walgreens gets widespread news coverage, and the thief lands in jail. But Walgreens itself recently admitted to stealing more than $4.5 million from its employees. Nobody will go to jail, although the company will be required to pay back some of the stolen money. (Also worth reading: Darrell Owens’ take on the Bay Area crimewave, which addresses  whataboutism and root causes and economic precarity).

Plus:

• Eater on the newest Bourdain biography.
• Actual good news: bike lanes draw angry comments and complaints, but once in place, they’re popular and successful at increasing safety and decreasing pollution.
• Pairs of dogs/pairs of celebrities thread.
• What happens online in one minute.
• Teaching a dog to carry your sled for you.
• This deer.
• Cat squeezing its fuzzy little head into a glass to drink.

This week, Representative Paul Gosar (Q-AZ) posted a cartoon depicting him as a hero fighting against monsters including the president and Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Violent rhetoric and death threats are nothing new on the right, and Jared Yates Sexton has a good concise explainer about it:

This isn’t by accident. The political environment we inhabit has been systematically and relentlessly prepared for violence as an option, creating a base prepared for eventual bloodshed or overthrow by force, but also necessitating that meaningless and principle-less politicians like Gosar embrace ever-increasingly dangerous rhetoric as a means of gesturing to that radicalized base.

But it’s not confined to the right. These sorts of nasty jokes are plenty common on the left:

I would pay a reasonable amount of money to watch a 10-week series where 12 contestants take turns beating the living shit out of JD Vance in a tent while the original GBBO hosts announce how much time they have left and make quips, if netflix is listening. — Mass for Shut-ins (Podcast) (@edburmila) November 10, 2021

The one that made me truly concerned, though, was a recent post on Gawker titled “The Joe Manchin Trolley Problem:”

A trolley problem is usually just a thought experiment, but in this case it happens to be a remarkably robust analogy with regard to Manchin and the doomsday blanket situation. On one track we have the millions of people living and bound to be born in coastal areas who will find their homes and lives literally underwater in 20 years, plus the various social and political implications of displacing them at roughly the same moment we radically diminish nature’s capacity to support life. And on the other track we have Joe Manchin. The normal person who feels some obligation to the future and comes face-to-face with this seemingly total failure of our usual systems must ask him-/her-/themself: Would it help if I killed somebody?

The author immediately clarifies that this is a thought experiment, please don’t literally kill a senator. But it’s not a great rhetorical trend, and who knows how close it brings us to “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest” territory – especially given the remarkably strong power of of parasocial influencer relationships.

Extended Metaphors

I’ve been watching my motorsports and I’ve been reading my political theory, and I can’t stop noticing how success feeds on success, how each team or person or family wants to keep the best for themselves, how an external rule-making body has to step in to level the playing field or it’s a pointless experience for everyone. In MotoGP, there was a period when Michelin would make special tires the Saturday before each race and ship them overnight to their top sponsored riders, giving them a key advantage of tires tuned perfectly for their riding style and the day’s predicted track conditions. This was wildly expensive for Michelin and a major setback for everyone who didn’t get their special tires. It made the sport worse to participate in and worse to watch, and that’s why the sport changed the rules to put everyone on the same tires. Today, the field is somewhat more even, although competition + money continues to produce weird expensive advantages for some teams (don’t ask me how ride-height and launch control systems work, but apparently they were very expensive to develop, and lack of them was a key reason Suzuki had such a terrible season this year).

But wouldn’t you want the very best, if you could make it happen? If you knew the super-rich were buying university admission with seven-figure donations, wouldn’t you be tempted to spend hundreds of thousands bribing a coach? Or tens of thousands for actual sports and international volunteering and tutors and coaches? Maybe a bigger mortgage to move to a better-ranked school district? Or if you don’t have the money to buy your way into a good elementary school, what about enrolling your child in the better school district a relative lives in, even if you don’t live there?

This isn’t just an American problem. China’s recent crackdown on cram schools is a bid for equality (and also increased state control over education, and a possibly counterproductive impetus to the creation of illegal underground tutoring rings, while South Korean regulators spend a great deal of time trying to limit hagwon hours.

(Illegal underground tutoring rings. Illicit math smugglers. A rough crowd, you know. Maybe the spice of the forbidden will make homework more appealing?)

Meanwhile

I had a much-delayed annual physical recently, and the NP asked me if I was in therapy. I said no, are there any therapists available? She laughed and said of course not, have you considered an app instead?

Reading

• Toronto Life profiles an international drug lord
• Climate trauma
• How to plan for your first few weeks as a ghost

Joy

• Zen cat
• Cat contemplates leaf 
• Dog friends 
• Cat takes the big bed

Here’s what I’ve been reading.

Books

• Evicted, by Matthew Desmond. Engaging, readable, and heartbreaking profile of families on the edge and the landlords who exploit them. I don’t usually cry at nonfiction.
• High-Risers: Cabrini Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, by Ben Austen. Similarly engaging history of public housing in Chicago. Profiles people who lived there, people who administered the program, and the reasons it all fell apart. I’m only about halfway through this one.
• Race for Profit, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Scholarly analysis of the failures of housing policy post-redlining. Studiously, almost stolidly analytical and yet still leaves me simmering with rage. Also only about halfway done with this.
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. A short, sweet novella about what it means to find purpose, and what it means to be a person.

Articles

• The Squamish nation has reclaimed ten acres of downtown Vancouver that were stolen from them in the early 20th century. As a tribal nation they’re exempt from municipal zoning laws, which means they can build six thousand new homes in an incredible sort of indigenous-art-informed solarpunk style. Their official project site is here and it’s beautiful.
• Related to the novella, a lovely profile of Becky Chambers in Wired. Chambers is one of my favorite writers of speculative fiction, and has a distinctly non-bleak take on fiction, humanity, and the future. She drinks a lot of herbal tea.
• The Guardian on American households without plumbing: “…a studio apartment without a working bathroom in San Francisco’s Mission District… The sink spewed yellow colored water, and the toilet wasn’t properly connected to the building’s plumbing system… rent was $2,300 a month.”
• Robert Kagan on the constitutional crisis: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
• Climate refugees in Chico, California: “About a quarter of Chico’s unsheltered residents lost their homes in the 2018 Camp Fire which burned the neighboring town of Paradise to the ground… Chico’s war on the unhoused may be providing a grim glimpse into an eco-authoritarian future, in which the poor victims of climate change-fueled disasters are treated like human refuse by those whose wealth has protected them, at least in the short term, from the worst impacts of planetary warming.”
• This headline alone: “New Florida Surgeon General Appeared at Demon-Sperm COVID Conspiracy Summit With Future Capitol Rioter.”
• This incredibly touching portrait of Kurt Cobain, in The New Yorker, by his biographer and friend.
• When Dasani Left Home: An update to a 2013 profile of a homeless child from the New York Times Magazine. This story made me very uncomfortable and I’m not sure how to address that aside to sit with it for a while. It’s borderline poverty porn.

Fwd: Good Newsletters

• Darrell Owens on gentrification. One of the best voices you’ll find today about cities, housing and racial justice.
• Noah Smith on the US/China cold war. It’s not just the guns and butter, it’s the culture.
• Charlie Warzel on “all this rage.”: “The main question occupying my mind is: Where does all that rage go? Eventually, the pandemic will subside. Health care workers will have a slight reprieve from this hell. But the immense grief and PTSD will stick around. I imagine the anger and resentment will, too. What happens then?”
• Will Wilkinson on Beverley Hills: “An amazing case study in NIMBY entitlement that merits our close attention and withering scorn.”
• Voudou Economics: How did 30,000 Haitians get to Texas? (Well, first they went to Brazil to build stadiums for the Olympics & World Cup…)
• Ann Helen Peterson on the Worst of Both Work Worlds: Includes analysis of the failures of the Academy as an institution, the nature of office work, the suckage of commutes, and more.

Joy

This bearded dog.
Spooky szn.
Puppy’s first visit to the beach.
Emo dog.
CATLOAF.
Dog suspicious of beach water.

Has it been a whole month? It’s been a whole month.

Here are some good things to read:

From The Verge: An absolutely incredible account of New York City delivery workers uniting to defend themselves from theft and violence in the face of absolute indifference from police and city government.

From Substack: A letter from a photographer and military veteran who took portraits of other veterans on a retreat that used psychedelic therapy to treat PTSD.

From the New Yorker: The always-informative Atul Gawande on Costa Rica’s public health success. My econ 101 class taught me that GDP and lifespan are generally correlated, but the US and Costa Rica are the counter-examples. US lifespan is down despite all our wealth because we have such enormous inequality and such terrible public health systems. Costa Rican lifespan is up despite being a middle-income country because it has less inequality and excellent public health systems.

From Stereogum: Revisiting the 20th anniversary of Prefuse 73’s debut album Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives. I picked up a copy at Other Music back when it came out (record stores were a thing, I’d never have found it without the clerk recommending it), and loved it. I’ve been listening to it all week on repeat and it’s still incredible.

Twitter

I have taken
the medicine
that was in
the stables

and which
you were probably
saving
for your horses

Forgive me
I am a fucking
whackjob

alex halpern (@HalpernAlex) September 1, 2021

I’m so fucking old, I remember when the weather was small talk

Rachel McCartney (@RachelMComedy) September 2, 2021

Bad News

• Police are like a box of chocolates: they’ll kill your dog.
• Minnesota state police data purged data right after protests.
• Predictably depressing report about Aurora, Colorado police.
• School authorities are concerned students will get “addicted” to eating lunch.
• Texas legislature watched Mad Max and doesn’t want workers addicted to water.

Joy

Cabinetful of labrador puppies. Filing the lab results if you will.
A cockatoo having a croissant. Like you do.

“Snowclones” are a templates for cliché, and therefore discouraged by, for example, official journalism style guides. I love them. My current favorite, “the existence of X implies the existence of Y,” has been spinning around as a series of Twitter jokes for quite some time now:

• The existence of an oubliette implies the existence of a larger, scarier oobly.
• The existence of biscuits and Triscuits implies the existence of the elusive moniscuit.
• The existence of casual sex implies the existence of ranked competitive sex.

Buzzfeed’s got a pretty good roundup that includes more of those, and also one about “deleting my dating apps because I want to meet someone the old fashioned way” (he throws giant parties for me in hopes I’ll show up and stares at a green light on a far away dock)/(feigning madness and accidentally stabbing her father while avenging the death of my father, the King of Denmark)/etc.

Long and/or Thoughtful

• Donald Antrim on suicidal ideation, hospitalization and ECT – Movingly written description of a journey out of darkness
• Cicadas, loss, and caring for your estranged sister’s children after her sudden death – Not actually a super long essay but you may need to sit with it for a minute after you read it
• NYT deep dive on history, power and civil liberties in Taiwan and Hong Kong – A lot of things I did not know about Taiwan, colonialism, and the fault lines that may define the next couple decades of geopolitics
• A Society of Holiday Inn Express Guests – On the nature of overconfidence online and the need for everyone to shut up and listen for once
• The Transhuman Olympics – A blog called “Applied Divinity Studies” on why we should stop worrying and learn to love doping (see also: snowclones)
• The Parallel Parking Job that Ignited the Internet – A great exploration of vitriol and context collapse

Never Tweet

There are two wolves inside of you. Look at their cute little noses and paws 🥺

sleepy jo (@jojipaints) August 8, 2021

• Robert Frost x Dunkies:

Joy

• Now put on your thinking cat
• Dog not very good at obstacle course
• Death-metal-loving baron rewilds his Irish estate (not cute but definitely fun)