Borkowski Weekly Media Trends 10-09-2021
Trump's Stealth Social Media Return | ABBA's Holo-comeback | NFTs at Sotheby's
Trump is coming back. Will he still rule social media?
It’s easy to imagine that a populist without a platform is like a bull without horns—an aggressive but impotent force in a political landscape as attention-addled as our present one. Thus, some may have concluded that Trump—who has been permanently suspended from Twitter and temporarily banned from Facebook—would lack the mobilising power for a 2024 campaign necessary to oust Biden. However, amid recent reports that Trump’s team is surreptitiously paying teenagers who run meme accounts to support his 2024 bid, it seems all but certain that the ‘Twitter president’ will find a way to saturate the world with doom-and-gloom message even without a personal account.
This is important for a number of reasons. For one, it indicates that Trump is planning to run in 2024. The Republican party can’t or won’t have the ability to field another candidate in his stead. There will be another messy, fraught, apocalypse-boding contest between the Trumpian right and all of liberal America, which will shift a huge amount of power to the hands of social media giants. The question of social media regulation will be even more pressing in 2024. Facebook will face a decision about whether to re-instate Trump, a poisoned chalice if there ever was one. They will have to make a decision potentially drawing the ire of a future presidents and essentially committing themselves politically. In any event, the 2024 election will further dilemmas we only grazed in 2020, dilemmas about the power and role of social media giants, which has already drawn warnings from the likes of Angela Merkel and Alexei Navalny.
(In its early days, there was a running joke within Facebook’s organisation that they could ‘throw an election’ by sending out a few reminders to vote in a few key districts. That doesn’t seem funny anymore.)
Secondly, the nature of the pages that are being paid to support ‘Trump’s legacy’ suggests that the Trump campaign is willing to wage guerilla warfare in the bid for 2024. The payments to these alt-right meme accounts are, as Huffington Post reports, small-scale and very difficult to trace. Any sense that Trump might have ‘learned his lesson’ after the capital invasion is naive to say the least. Hindered but not stymied, Trump will diffuse his message across the dark lairs of the internet, making his presence more diffuse, mythic, and, consequently, even more intriguing for the outraged to champion. If he can’t speak for himself, Trump will create an army of trolls via new platforms that are springing up, such as former senior Trump aide Jason Miller’s GETTR. Bereft of a personal voice, Trump will latch on to the powerful and dark energies of the alt-right horde, playing to ‘culture war’ topics will further deepen the divide that is rivening America.
As one Game of Thrones style meme, paid for by ‘The Donald Trump Election Defense Fund’ puts it, winter is coming.
ABBA Announce Return with Hologram Tour
By now, we’re comfortable with the idea of our digital selves (our social media profiles, our faces on Zoom calls, our avatars in games). We’ve been so sucked into the online world that we seem destined to exist there permanently, living in digital ‘metaverses’. With that in mind, holograms, which project digital objects out onto the physical world, haven’t felt like a natural development.
That is, until last year, when Kanye West made headline for giving his then-wife Kim Kardashian a hologram of her late father as a birthday gift. This week, ABBA have announced a tour that will performed solely by their avatars, to a live audience. This isn’t a gig where both the artist and the audience are virtual (take Ariana Grande or Travis Scott’s Fortnite shows). Rather, this technology allows people to experience a kind of augmented reality, where things or people that aren’t there physically somehow are. The use of AI ensures that the avatars are as lifelike as possible. As one Forbes reporter wrote about ABBA’s avatars: “It isn’t a huge leap to imagine they could use language processing and voice recognition to respond to song requests from the audience and, perhaps one day, even hold a conversation.”
For the entertainment industry, this could be revolutionary. But the same goes for the marketing world: if Kanye can bring back Robert Kardashian from the dead, then the potential for AI holograms to bring the most unexpected objects to the most unexpected places feel unlimited. An elephant walking down Oxford Street? Sure. Celebs projected into the night sky? No problem. We’ll fasten our seatbelts for the stunts to come…
NFTs collide with Sotheby’s to the tune of $26m, for a bunch of Ape and Dog cartoons
The 2021 NFT outbreak that saw sales volume surge to $2.5bn across the first half of the year felt, at the time, like one gigantic bubble. Even the most famous piece by Beeple that sparked international news felt like a bizarre meme after it sold for $69m at Christie’s.
Despite the decline in sales and volume that followed March’s peak, we are now seeing higher numbers than ever before (OpenSea, the largest marketplace for NFTs, has recorded a $3.4 billion transaction volume on Ethereum in August alone). This week, a set of 101 NFTs from the "Bored Ape Yacht Club" collection sold for $24.4 million in an online sale at Sotheby's auction house. Additionally, Sotheby's sold a second lot of NFTs from the Bored Ape Kennel Club collection for $1.8 million.
Whether you have a vague understanding of NFTs or are actively involved in the space, the discourse that surrounds this new industry is fierce. Ultimately, no one really knows where we’ll end up, which is one of the reasons Bored Apes and Cryptopunks are going for such vast sums. Most are hedging their bets, hoping that we are at the early stages of something massive.
But with the likes of Christie’s and Sotheby’s associated, in spectacular fashion, and sporting superstars like Stephen Curry spending $180,000 for a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT—donning it as his Twitter avatar—it does legitimise these pieces of art.
Their cultural significance is etched forever in the NFT conversation, and maybe their prices with double or triple in the next year… who knows?!