Study Hall Digest 2/18/2020

By Study Hall managing editor Erin Schwartz (@webschwartz), pinch-hitting for Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Leave Chinedu Alone

There is an old saying that every day, there is a main character on Twitter, and the game is to never be that character. This past Sunday, a Nigerian Buttigieg reply guy named Chinedu found himself at the center of a conspiracy theory that his Twitter account, @easychinedu, was in fact a sock puppet run by Buttigieg advisor Lis Smith. The strongest bit of evidence was a tweet that begins “Team Pete. Hey. It’s Lis,” which the account’s owner later explained was a joke mimicking the tone of a campaign email. But online sleuths pointed to similar syntax between Smith and Chinedu, a reference to waking up at 5 pm, Nigerian time, mixed with the xenophobic assumption that people outside of the US don’t follow US politics.

By 3:40 pm, Olivia Nuzzi had confirmed Chinedu’s identity. Then BuzzFeed confirmed it, then Ali Breland of Mother Jones, then Ashley Feinberg at Slate, then Newsweek, then Shuja Haider at The Outline, then the Atlanta Business Journal. In the Newsweek article, he is holding a sheet of paper over the lower half of his face with Sunday’s date and “I AM NOT LIS SMITH” written in red ink, and has also provided screenshots proving he’s the owner of the account to reporters. At this point, he just wants to be left alone. “People are sending me tweets, messages to confirm fake emails, either reporters or just regular people trying to get me to confirm who I am,” he told Feinberg. “So I just want my privacy, you know? That’s all I want from this.”

I am sympathetic to the need to debunk a political conspiracy in real time, but the image of a random Twitter user holding a sign with the date over his face like a kidnapping victim does not sit well with me. I suppose anyone who tweets could end up at the center of a news cycle and have dozens of people demand they confirm their identity. But solving the mystery of one serial poster also gives a false sense of closure when online disinformation campaigns tend to be more diffuse, propped up by networks of bots that don’t pass for people on their own. Notably, the Buttigieg campaign has a history of fabricating black support. Still, to use another old internet saying — it’s heartbreaking when the worst person you know makes a great point, as Lis Smith eventually did — it doesn’t feel coincidental that the person the internet fixated on is from Nigeria!

The Golden Age of Magazines and the Coolness Scam

We are in the golden age of memoirs about the golden age of magazines, or more specifically, Condé Nast publications from 1984 to roughly 2005. This past week, Katherine Rosman wrote in the New York Times about the downfall of Details, responding to former editor-in-chief Dan Peres’s new addiction memoir, As Needed for Pain. Rosman writes of the clout magazines wielded at the time: “People went to newsstands or physical mailboxes to find bound pieces of paper dropped by postal workers that would tell them who and what was cool, giving them topics for cocktail-party and water-cooler chatter.”

I have been trying to put my finger on what feels strange about golden-age-of-magazines discourse, and it’s a version of the sentiment Rosman is describing: there is an idea that, back in the day, not only were magazine editors better at identifying what was cool, but that there was more cool to go around; the tending of highly-paid editors made the world’s raw quantity of cool increase. I am, of course, subtweeting Tina Brown here, who, in her diary/memoir The Vanity Fair Diaries, credits herself with creating “buzz” at Vanity Fair through curated blends of celebrity profiles, marquee feature writers, and salacious crime stories. Also this off-the-wall 2013 article by NYT fashion critic Suzy Menkes complaining that bloggers suck because they wear interesting-looking clothing.

There are a lot of problems with this. I will put aside my weakest argument, which is that any teen today knows what’s cool better than Tina Brown, who invited Henry Kissinger to her parties. What bothers me about golden-age-of-magazines nostalgia is an elevation of gatekeeping into a cultural service. Many cool things happened from 1984 to 2005 that were not written up in a Condé Nast magazine, particularly culture from queer communities and communities of color. It is nice to see the zeitgeist outpace upper-class magazines today, but it makes you wonder why the myth lasted so long.

The Bloomberg Meme Wars Have Begun

On Thursday, the New York Times’s Taylor Lorenz found the source of a crop of Michael Bloomberg-funded memes that tried to make the internet forget he’s a racist, sexist, and Islamophobic oligarch: Meme 2020. The shadowy company is made up of powerful meme-makers and lists Mick Purzycki, the chief executive of Jerry Media (a.k.a. The company that helped legitimize Fyre Festival), as its lead strategist. No price tag has been placed on the ad-buy from Bloomberg, but Lorenz speculated to NPR that his campaign spent over a million dollars to convince the accounts to rehabilitate Bloomberg’s image, one shitpost at a time. (This inspired Study Hall to launch a staff-funded Negative Bloomberg Meme Microgrant to balance the scales.)

As the race rockets towards Nevada (and the possibility of another caucus data disaster), the state’s massive Culinary Union helped prop up the “Bernie Bro/Twitter troll” narrative by calling out the “vicious attacks” of Sanders supporters after the Union came out against Medicare For All. That rebuke opened the door for Bloomberg to launch an anti-Bernie attack ad yesterday that was criticized for doctoring peoples’ tweets and, in one section of the ad, cutting between mildly rude tweets so fast that nobody could read them. The companion press release by Bloomberg campaign manager Kevin Sheekey just listed a bunch of tweets calling Bloomberg an “oligarch” and “racist authoritarian,” which he is???

It’s sad to see Bloomberg use the same storyline from the last election cycle. As Political Data Daddy Nate Silver explained, he’s just adopting the Trump playbook to distract the media with inconsequential storylines and distract from the reality that more young women, young people of color, and Hispanic voters support Sanders than any other candidate. On the eve of the first Democratic debate to feature Bloomberg, let’s hope that false narratives focused on trolls and memes will get less airtime than discussions about Bloomberg’s disastrous policy history. — Chris Erik Thomas

Longread of the Week: In The Outline, John Ganz reminds us that 19th-century New York City was pure anarchy with the story of the Astor Place Opera House Riot of 1849. A flame war between two Shakespearean actors, a foppish Brit and an American, led to a massive brawl that culminated in the military firing artillery at the crowd; the conflict left 31 people dead. “Reflecting on the Astor Place Riot, it’s hard to take seriously the frequently heard melodrama on the right and center that we are faced with such a high pitch of identity politics that the continuance of the Union is in doubt,” he writes. “Online mobs are one thing, but it’s good to remember the appellation ‘mob’ in that case is often more metaphorical than real.”

Comings and Goings

— Hamilton Nolan, formerly of Splinter (RIP), will cover labor full-time at In These Times.

— Brian Walsh is leaving Medium’s OneZero to join Axios as a “Future Correspondent,” reminding us that Axios still exists.

Everything Else

— Newspaper company McClatchy, the owner of the Sacramento Bee and the Miami Herald, plus 28 other daily newspapers, has filed for bankruptcy. (Their 30 newsrooms will continue operating during the process.) The hedge fund Chatham Asset Management is taking over control of the company, which sounds bleakly familiar.

— We now know what Spotify paid for The Ringer, and it’s a zillion dollars. Okay, it’s actually $250 million, but that’s a lot of money to spend on podcasts!

— Jalaiah Harmon, the 14-year-old choreographer who invented the Renegade, a viral TikTok dance set to “Lottery” by K-Camp, is getting belated credit. Taylor Lorenz profiled her in the New York Times last week, K-Camp tweeted a video of Harmon doing the dance, and she performed at the NBA All-Star game this weekend. This feels in part like a late response to Doreen St Félix’s all-time classic Fader article on the cultural contributions of black teens on the internet going uncredited. (Here’s Harmon’s tutorial for the dance.)

— The sky is blue and Vice is massively overvalued. The Wall Street Journal reports that the media company is facing deadlines to make payouts to investors after failing to become profitable last year.

— In FontWatch news, The New Republic has redesigned and added a chunky, serif typeface that I feel like I’ve seen before…oh yeah.

— In an interview with Gabriella Paiella of GQ, Ira Glass revealed he has done ecstasy and that the experience mostly taught him about his own anxiety.

— Lawrence Ray, the subject of Ezra Marcus’s deeply disturbing New York Magazine feature “The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence,” has been indicted on charges of extortion, sex trafficking, forced labor trafficking, and money laundering, relating to information detailed in the article.

— Stuart Emmerich, late of LAT and now the new editor of Vogue.com, had never used a CMS before starting his new gig! Emmerich described the experience as “great” and opined that it “gives you incredible power over how things look.” Fingers crossed that Vogue.com turns out like a Geocities page.

— Following the example of musicians who get negative reviews in Pitchfork, the latest celebrity to quit the media is Mets left-fielder Yoenis Cespedes. Cespedes told Newsday reporter Tim Healey that he would be doing interviews “not today, not tomorrow, not at all this year,” which, same.