Things Right Now 014
Week of 12.09.24
Big Five becomes Big Four or the Omnicom-Interpublic Merger
The most interesting information about the current state of the advertising industry:
Global ad spending is about to top $1 trillion
All the iconic ads cited in the article are from last century: Apple’s “Think Different” (1997), Mastercard’s “Priceless” (1997), L’Oréal’s “Because I’m Worth It” (1971), and the California Milk Processor Board’s “Got Milk” (1993)
Competition is framed as “ad industry consolidates to take on tech giants” still
One thing I’ve been wondering is, will the insertion of advertising lead to a renewed focus on the TV spot? Seems like an opportunity, but I’m not sure I see anyone taking it seriously yet.
The Low Trust Society or the UnitedHealthcare Assassin
Josh Citarella has been pumping out great content on his Substack with his revamped podcast Doomscroll. I highly recommend a follow. His recent take on the Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UHC’s CEO Brian Thompson is the best I’ve seen.
Some highlights:
Earlier calls to abolish the police, during the 2020 summer uprisings, helped to whittle away at Democrats faith in the legitimacy of the existing order. But the Hunter Biden pardon has forced them to concede that ‘the law’ is merely another political tool. Today, law does not stand outside political affiliation as an impartial and objective framework. Its power resides in the hands of whoever wields it at that moment.
Does anyone earnestly believe in the rule of law anymore?
In our Neo Gilded Age of inequality, we will see the popular left realign along divisions of class. As wealth polarization soars, the old culture wars will start to feel increasingly unimportant. We are seeing some important indications of this now.
One thing I’ll note here is I think Americans get class all wrong. If you ask an Englishman whether or not class is a synonym with income, they’ll laugh in your face. We may not have a hereditary monarchy making this face explicit, but in my opinion this doesn’t change things much. When people say being working class is defined by being alienated from capital, they’re using an outdated definition.
Class is a synthesis of financial, social, and cultural capital. A tenured professor at Yale does occupy a higher class position than the owner of five Chick-fil-A franchises in Oklahoma, even if the former thinks of themselves as upper-middle class and the latter is technically a member of the 1% (which by the way only takes around $631,500, a drop in the bucket by US wealth metrics).
Marc Andreesen addresses this in a recent tweet about the myth of fuck you money.
The Dating Dilemma or the Decline of the Apps
Eventbrite’s report outlines the general dissatisfaction Millennials and Zoomers have with online dating culture. The apps suck, but where else can you meet new people to date? (Obviously, Eventbrite has a clear answer to this.) I remember the failed launch of Blendr, a straight dating platform built off the model of Grindr. Modeling heterosexual courtship on homosexual anonymous hook-ups was doomed to fail. It’s not clear that the next generation of apps (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge) did much better though. Regardless, meeting online remains the most common way for couples to meet in America—there are just fewer marriages happening as a result.
No More Stale, Male, and Pale or the Decline of the Literary Male
Some highlights:
According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.
I’m curious if this figure measures total fiction sales or only contemporary fiction sales. Meanwhile men make up 55% of nonfiction sales.
In 2022 the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” The public response to Ms. Oates’s comment was swift and cutting — not entirely without reason, as the book world does remain overwhelmingly white. But the lack of concern about the fate of male writers was striking.
David Morris dances around the issue, but is this just a straightforward case of a lack of representation? I’ll admit I’m a stereotype here. I mostly read nonfiction and when I do read nonfiction it is almost entirely from the 20th century. My contemporary fiction intake averages one to zero per year. (This year I read Honor Levy’s My First Book.)
But people are still buying books. Americans buy over one billion a year.
I think there need to be a lot more novels about the working-class white people of Trump's America - ironically I suspect that they are under-represented in literary fiction. Nico Walker's Cherry was in the right ballpark.
Things like Nathan Hill's Wellness annoyed me - he's got talent, but the characters were too caricature-y. You've got to be REALLY good to write a saga about middle-class media-people. But this is the sort of stuff that a lot of publishing people see themselves in & so feel comfortable with. Or alternatively publishers seem to go for overly-worthy stuff that might win awards for its sanctimoniousness & suffering, at the expense of a good story.
The irony of the last article about the lack of male writers is that the most impactful and compelling writer of our times is Michel Houellebecq.
Any writer worth reading wouldn't let a publishing house impact their ability to put out interesting thoughts, especially in a day and age that you can self-publish and sell directly on Amazon.
It's funny how this article immediately feels like the thoughts of someone part of a bygone era, I would hope in a couple of years we'll all collectively realize that the real reason for reading literature should be for the content and ideas, not what's lying between the author's legs.