🎰✨The Nexialist #0077

Bored Ape Nazi Club | Poe’s Law | The Evolution of Pop Culture | Where Did the Long Tail Go? | The Kate Bush Push | Don’t Hug Me .I’m Scared

Jul 07, 2022

Welcome back everyone to another week of links that caught my eyes and neurons, The Nexialist!

I’m so glad I skipped last week’s issue, not only because I could finally take some deserved rest from everything, but also because of the caballistic moment of The Nexialist #0077 coming out on 07/07, 07:07am (CET) 🤯 Please, send this Nexialist to 7 friends/colleagues/loved ones and you’ll have 7 blessings happen to you, your braincells and your loved ones. If you don’t… well, nothing will happen. Well… grab your coffee and enjoy your reading 🫀

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🐒Bored Ape Nazi Club

This Ryder Ripps and Phillion video is making waves as it shows us that the Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the most famous and successful NFT collections in the world, seems to be pulling off a huge troll not only on the internet, including celebrities and influencers. “Hidden within BAYC there is a series of 4Chan trolling racist imagery and white supremacist dog whistles.” The use of Nazi symbology in their avatars as well as on other brand assets. The sensationalistic tone might push some people away (and I understand), but it is still mind-blowing that something like this is happening. So many questions come to mind: were they doing this to teach a lesson about hypes/fads, that maybe people buy into them without understanding them, or were they doing this just for the laughs (terrible taste though).

🎭Poe’s Law

One of the new things I learned watching the Ryder Ripps’ video is about Poe’s Law:

Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied. (Wikipedia)

Now, a citation from Phillion’s video, which brings it to the BAYC context:

This is an internet troll’s wet dream. Post-ironic racism on the world’s stage. This means that this is a meme but it doesn’t look like one, because there is nothing to indicate otherwise. This can also be described as Poe’s Law: it’s impossible to know if someone is joking unless they add an LOL at the end of a message to indicate how it’s supposed to be peceived.

In 2017 Poe’s Law was called The Most Important Internet Phenomenon by Wired, and I think it might be coming back as this story develops.

📺33 Problems With Media

Some of these have made their appearance here on The Nexialist, such as The Overton Window (on #0002) and Fake News (#0013) so you can imagine my brain becoming fireworks as I read this list.

One of the hallmarks of democratic society is a healthy, free-flowing media ecosystem.
In times past, that media ecosystem would include various mass media outlets, from newspapers to cable TV networks. Today, the internet and social media platforms have greatly expanded the scope and reach of communication within society.
Of course, journalism plays a key role within that ecosystem. High quality journalism and the unprecedented transparency of social media keeps power structures in check—and sometimes, these forces can drive genuine societal change. Reporters bring us news from the front lines of conflict, and uncover hard truths through investigative journalism.
That said, these positive impacts are sometimes overshadowed by harmful practices and negative externalities occurring in the media ecosystem.
The graphic above is an attempt to catalog problems within the media ecosystem as a basis for discussion. Many of the problems are easy to understand once they’re identified. However, in some cases, there is an interplay between these issues that is worth digging into.

📈The Evolution of Pop Culture

YouTube Culture & Trends Report 2022 came is such a lovely vertical format this year, with quite interesting insights about how pop culture is changing and becoming more personal and fragmented. They bring three vectors of where creativity is going: community creativity, multi-format creativity and responsive creativity. SPOILER ALERT: “In short, the ways to forge meaningful relationships with Gen Z (and with anyone else) are through their community, formats and moods. I recommend taking a look at the document, as it is fun and has more data and concrete examples.

Download: YouTube Culture & Trends Report 2022

🌀Where Did the Long Tail Go?

Source: Reddit with source data coming from BoxOfficeMojo

One of the must-reads during my university time was Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The book showed us this economic law that companies could make more money by having more variety of products, claiming the death of the blockbuster and using examples like Netflix, iTunes and Amazon. Now, Ted Gioia makes his case that the idea is beautiful on paper, but it was all a fairy tale. It is worth the read:

…the Long Tail is a cruel joke. It’s a fairy tale we’re told to make us feel good about all those marginalized creative endeavors. Their happily-ever-after day will come—or so we are promised—because the Long Tail will rescue them.
But it won’t. We live in a Short Tail society. And it’s getting shorter all the time.
There is always more money to be made from the heavy users and the bestsellers than from fringe products. This is true not just in business, but also culture and the arts. People in the music or publishing business who want to make the most money the fastest will always ignore niche categories.

Read: Where Did the Long Tail Go? - by Ted Gioia

⛰The Kate Bush Push

Since the 4th Season of Stranger Things came out, the internet is obsessing over Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill as it rose to #1 in the charts and Gen Z discovered her. Recently I saw the term “the Kate Bush Push” to name songs from other decades that rise to the top and I love it. My algorithm (and many creators) also got obsessed with her and started showing me more Kate Bush and the video above video from Trash Theory appeared in my feed.

Read: The "Stranger Things" season 4 finale gives Metallica's "Master of Puppets" the Kate Bush push

🪰Don’t Hug Me .I’m Scared

I cannot believe they are finally releasing a TV series! Just needed to add this here. If you haven’t seen their videos, I envy you for seeing it for the first time now. Get ready for some random, unsettling and deep content.

The TV version of the iconic YouTube web series has long been in the works. Ever since the first two episodes hit the platform in 2011, both epitomising and revolutionising early internet culture and humour, its creators Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling have been working on bringing more episodes to the world.

Read: This is not a drill. The Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared TV series trailer is (finally) here - It’s Nice That

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