Borkowski Weekly Media Trends 16-07-21
Borkowski Weekly Media Trends 16-07-21
Billionaire Space Race | Damien Hirst NFT | Daily Mail Fat Suit Stunt | GB News
From Marvel superheroes to Bond villains
Since the release of James Bond’s screen debut Dr. No, private space travel has, in the public consciousness anyway, been the preserve of superheroes, superspies and supervillains. Robert Downey Jr.’s depiction of Tony Stark/Iron Man gave aspiring high-tech, intergalactic ultra-capitalists a fantasy role model for the 21st century, but the possibility of this kind of adventure penetrating the real world still seemed remote.
Not anymore, with ambitious astronautical endeavours by Virgin founder Richard Branson (who was the first to ‘reach space’ but not before banging on about it for a few decades) and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, adding to Elon Musk’s well documented space obsession, billionaires are entering the space race in earnest.
The thrill of experiencing zero-gravity certainly isn't cheap. Tickets on SpaceX's Crew Dragon to the International Space Centre have gone for $55 million each. Despite this, companies offering space travel continue to incur massive losses due to their exorbitant research and development costs.
For the likes of Branson, those losses are a small price to pay for the investor excitement around his company – and the millions of eyeballs that eagerly watched his 90-minute trip to the end of earth and back last week. Virgin Galactic's shares, for instance, have doubled over the course of the past year, lifting their value to about $11.8 billion.
Yet, if Branson and Musk had expected the level of public excitement around their space junkets to rival the phenomenon of Apollo 11, they were in for a rude awakening. Not only have their adventures fizzled out of the news cycle within a matter of days, but also the profitability, desirability (and morality) of space travel itself has come under serious scrutiny.
Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX have been called out for being tone-deaf in the middle of a pandemic. Spending billions of dollars to explore the galaxy with our clear aim or benefit, at a time when the planet most of us peasants are stuck on is fighting for its life, with billions of its inhabitants wrestling a pandemic in addition to eye-watering inequality, doesn't exactly make for great headlines.
While the future of space travel remains uncharted territory, there are hints around that those who started off trying to be superheroes might just end up becoming Bond villains.
Damien Hirst Gets Creative with NFTs
Damien Hirst has officially stepped into the NFT game, which he teased back in March, with a project called The Currency – an ingenious spin on some of the more blatant attempts to make money during this epic NFT bubble that's seen billions flow through this new market.
Hirst stressed that this idea came to him well before the NFT bubble formed (👀) as the concept calls into questions notions of worth and value, whilst giving buyers a choice between the NFT and the physical art.
In short, he has created 10,000 identical spot paintings each watermarked with a hologram corresponding to a non-fungible token – making them all unique. Once the art has been issued the buyers must make a tough choice: keep the NFT or exchange it for the physical artwork; you can't keep both.
It's a clever twist and refreshing to see a mainstream artist play with this concept instead of digitally shilling their IP for a quick buck. It's a powerful statement on art and tech's relationship, that has potential for success.
Ultimately, NFTs have a future in the art world - it's simply not fully realised; and it's up to artists to subvert, even revolutionise it. Forcing buyers to make a tough decision on their investment is an interesting concept, which, in turn, will force artists themselves to think outside the box if they want a life beyond this NFT craze.
Pyrrhic Victory for Liz Jones’ Daily Mail Fat Suit Stunt?
The most offensive thing the Mail Online published this week, ‘The hell of being 20st for one day’ by Liz Jones - in which the nation’s most effective whinger wore a fat suit for a day and found it hard- was a less a ‘feature’ and more a shameless publicity stunt.
It’s no coincidence that it was so insulting to so many people: its outrageousness is what made it such effective clickbait. The piece garnered 300+ direct shares and 800+ comments on the site, and thousands more retweets and comments on Twitter.
There’s an irony that the premise of Jones’ piece was her dressing up in a fat suit, pretending to be obese for the day. As many commentators were quick to point out, the reactions that Liz Jones documents during her day in costume (raised eyebrows, stares, tuts) are everything to do with the fact that she is clearly wearing a body suit, and nothing to do with public opinion on obesity. Only a few lines into the article and you can see that her argument is as fake as her costume. The piece, really, is to promote Jones’ debut novel. The ‘heroine’ of the story, she says, is a size 18 woman named Pam. Jones is donning the fat suit (‘bariatric empathy suit’, she calls it), to better relate to her character’s lived experience.
If Jones’ goal is to drive sales of her novel, this stunt will surely be effective. Many will be curious to read the book out of sheer disdain. But if she cares about public opinion enough to share many of her colleagues’ fear of ‘cancel culture’, the move is risky. Jones feigns empathy for fat people at some points in her piece, but her (well-known) antipathy towards anyone overweight is thinly veiled. Much of the article is about Jones’ history of disordered eating, and so her outrage at the fact that people might choose to be fat AND be happy, after a life spent miserably avoiding it, is palpable.
For the simplicity of the idea and the amount of traffic generated, we could easily applaud this stunt. Dig a little deeper and it may not be worth it. The piece glorifies eating disorders and peddles shame and hate at every turn. What Jones might gain in publicity; she could attract in ire from the well-organised, powerful and increasingly ruthless ‘woke brigade’, who have already consigned the likes of her former colleague Katie Hopkins to the scrap heap.
GB News begins inevitable implosion
An office straw poll gave GB News around a year before the shifting media landscape, viewer apathy or OFCOM took it down. But four and a half weeks from its launch, both that life-expectancy and the mundanity of possible cause of death are looking increasingly generous.
In a series of plot lines seemingly fished out of the ‘too farfetched’ bin of the Succession writers room, GB News – in a virtual tailspin since take-off- has started to implode.
From day one there were on-air conspiracy theories, technical hiccups, and pulled ads. Then the channel’s figurehead Andrew Neil abruptly disappeared promising to be back at some point in the summer.
This week things have kicked up a gear. In an almighty thunderclap of irony, viewers of the station that sold itself on being free-speech and anti-cancel culture, held a collective boycott of the channel after ex-Boris Johnson advisor Guto Harri ‘took the knee’ on air. This, as the Guardian scooped with barely-contained glee, led to official viewing figures of zero at certain points in the following week. Having initially defended Harri, the channel then signalled that he’d been removed as a contributor…but at least they didn’t cancel him for expressing a commonly held opinion, because that would have been shatteringly hypocritical…
This set off a chain reaction; star presenter Alistair Stewart revealed that a ‘horse-related broken hip’ would see him join Neil in absentia from on-air duties. This seems to the the tip of a behind-the scenes iceberg in which a spate of staff are quitting, notably John McAndrew, the director of programming and de-factor number two.
More problematically from a crisis communication standpoint, news of these mass resignations is leaking liberally to the Guardian, suggesting a broader rebellion. But these issue have bled beyond communications and reputation, and if GB News lasts until the end of 2021 it’ll be doing well.