EP 32: FUSION SO GOOD
Now That's What I Call Discourse: 90s Edition
Big Pharma’s latest spokesperson: it’s real.
What do you do when your pop culture idol posts about a new migraine drug? Celebrity endorsements are a truly complex thing in a way. Something that is so eye-rollingly like obvious (like, of course celebs are using their likeness to sell things, like that’s the idea right?) but there’s also this sadness to it, especially in cases like the one above. As a fan (or just casual consumer of culture) you feel a kind of sadness when a celeb shills for a company, a kind of loss—like, what happened to Lady Gaga? Like, you worry about her a little. Does she have debts that she needs help with? Is her life chaotic in a way I have never really perceived? Am I a bad fan? When someone whose sheer life essence inspires you to be a better you is also saying, “take these name-brand drugs to live a migraine-free life” those signals can get crossed in a melancholy/dystopian way.
Side note: Other celebs who’ve gone down the big pharma rabbit hole include Christina Hendricks for Latisse (the name-brand lash enhancer), Bon Jovi for Advil, and lest we forget, Larry the Cable Guy for Prilosec.
Money so good. Gang gang.
We also delved ever so slightly into the conversation around Pinkydoll, the NPC streamer who absolutely bodied the internet recently. Something floating around a lot of the Pinkydoll discourse is this kind of general disdain and dislike for people perceived as being “low agency” or, are perceived to be real life NPCs. This is such a stupid, psuedo-edgy Elon-Musk-level edge-troll framing/concept that we deign not to even touch it. Fuck that whole mindset. Who do you think is more autonomous, you dummy? You, doing whatever the fuck, or this badass lady slurping virtual icecream and popping popcorn in a hair straightener (and making thousands of dollars a day at this point for it)?
This is maybe connected to AI’s rise in the last few months (the idea of true human wholeness being connected to being a full autonomous character, capable of innovation, as opposed to being stuck in an NPC loop). A lot of people getting very Donna Haraway with all these virtual companions and NPC streamers lately. A lot of very Infinite Jest vibes in all this content.
Though, honestly this whole thing could be the other way around, and the prevalence of this mindset in our culture is what is ushering in the obsession with AI. Honestly, that feels more right, right?
THE BLO: Barbie Liberation Organization
This whole NPC thing is also sort of what the Barbie Movie was about. Barbie’s conflict comes in part from feeling like she is being played with, that she is the receptacle of meaning, but is not generating meaning herself, that she is not autonomous. So she breaks the veil of her reality to leave the NPC world and become “real.” Big fantasies all around.
We saw Barbie last week, which led us to take a look at the places where the movie, in all its cheeky self-awareness did not touch. One of those was an incident involving “The Barbie Liberation Organization” a self-proclaimed group of “creative activists,” who reverse shoplifted Barbies and GI Joes in the early 90s and caused a kind of fun moral panic. The BLO has an amazing website up of the work they do to “challenge malign systems.” Give ‘em a visit.
Michael Ian Black at the Sock Puppet Cemetery
One of our favourite things to do on this podcast is dig into the lore of the early dot-com boom. Pets.com was one such player in the field of optimistic pre-Y2K Silicon Valley. A Chewy predecessor, it had maybe a super-stellar marketing strategy, and a not-so-stellar e-comm business model. But it makes us miss when sites were mostly a long list of hyperlinked text.
**woof** is anyone else hot under their collar for this???
Ok, but did we actually talk about Glassdoor’s rebrand and the drama around the other brand (Career Puck) who claimed GD stole their brand, and then the subsequent drama that was like all of this is stolen from 100 other brands who are already doing this style to death???
We did!! Haha!! Does it make us hurt in the tum-tum due to absolute banalness? Yeah, admittedly it did. (But also, look at that screenshot, I mean, come on!)
[insert Marge Simpson sigh here]
Okay, that’s it. enjoy the SUMMERTIME!! Ciao!! also:
XO,
Helen + Justin