#the hr team at this institution are actually evil…i want war

[birthdayplant]

the higher ups at my job got a 40 (FOURTY) percent raise while all the rest of us got 45 fucking cent raise…

[arcticdementor]

“Hey bro! Check out this Nike ad!” This was my entry point into a new world.

…

Since Carlos had lived mostly outside the United States, he was able to follow soccer on a level I’d never encountered in my hometown. Back then, before social media and the advent of scarf-wearing Northwestern fútbol hipsters, big-time European soccer was like the metric system: Known to almost all but ourselves. But Carlos knew, and immediately used LimeWire to curate me a massive archive of 1990s through early 2000s soccer highlights. What was I doing in the world without them?

Oddly enough, in trying to inculcate me in soccer fandom, he started not with game highlights, but with the advertisements. Yes, Carlos was an educator and a voluntary footsoldier for Big Apparel. Going in, I had no clue about high-quality, internationally popular Nike soccer ads. The ads, written by the legendary Wieden+Kennedy firm, were miniature movies, films that were often creatively daring but also quite funny. The most popular of these ads might be “Good vs. Evil,” from 1996, where Nike’s best soccer players team up to play Satan’s literal army. The blending of sacrilege, theology and comedy just worked, like a more ambitious version of Space Jam that somehow took itself less seriously than Space Jam.

…

Yes, I know ads aren’t supposed to be high art. I understand that they are the purest distillation of manipulative greed. And yet, they sometimes are culturally relevant generational touchstones. While Nike was weaving soccer into enduring pop culture abroad, it was having a similar kind of success with basketball and baseball stateside. These ads weren’t just pure ephemera. Michael Jordan’s commercials were so good that, as he nears age 60, his sneaker still outsells any modern athlete’s. “Chicks dig the long ball” is a phrase (a) that can get you sent to the modern HR department and b) whose origins are fondly remembered by most American men over the age of 35.

Modern Nike ads will never be so remembered. It’s not because we’re so inundated with information these days, though we are. And it’s not because today’s overexposed athletes lack the mystique of the 1990s superstars, though they do. It’s because the modern Nike ads are beyond fucking terrible.

…

They’re bad for many causes, but one in particular is an incongruity at the company’s heart. Nike, like so many major institutions, is suffering from what I’ll call Existence Dissonance. It’s happening in a particular way, for a particular reason and the result is that what Nike is happens to be at cross-purposes from what Nike aspires to be.

…

For all the talk of a racial reckoning within major industries, Nike’s main problem is this: It’s a company built on masculinity, most specifically Michael Jordan’s alpha dog brand of it. Now, due to its own ambitions, scandals, and intellectual trends, Nike finds masculinity problematic enough to loudly reject.

This rejection is part of the broader culture war, but it’s accelerating due to an arcane quirk in the apparel giant’s strange restructuring plan, announced in June. Under the leadership of new CEO John Donahoe, Nike is moving away from its classic discrete sports categories (Nike Basketball, Nike Soccer, etc.) in favor of a system where all products are shoveled into one of three divisions: men’s, women’s and kids’. Obviously Nike made clothing tailored to the specificities of all these groups before, but now, Nike is emphasizing gender over sport. Gone is the model of the product appealing to basketball fans because they are basketball fans. It’s now replaced by a model of, say, the product appealing to women because they are women.

And hey, women buy sneakers too. Actually, women buy the lion’s share of clothing in the United States. While women shoppers are market dominant in nearly every aspect of American apparel, the clothing multinational named after a Greek goddess happens to be a major exception. At Nike, according to its own records, men account for roughly twice as much revenue as women do.

You might see that stat and think, “Well, this means that Nike will prioritize men over women in its new, odd, gendered segmentation of the company.” That’s not necessarily how this all works, thanks to a phenomenon I’ll call Undecided Whale. The idea is that a company, as its aims grow more expansive, starts catering less to the locked-in core customer and more to a potential whale which demonstrates some interest. Sure, you can just keep doing what’s made you rich, but how can you even focus on your primary business with that whale out there, swimming so tantalizingly close? The whale, should you bring it in, has the potential to enrich you far more than your core customers ever did. And yeah yeah yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but those were birds. This is a damned whale! And so you start forgetting about your base.

You can see this dynamic in other places. For the NBA, China is its Undecided Whale. It could be argued that the NBA fixates more on China than on America, even if the vast majority of TV money comes from U.S. viewership. The league figures it has more or less hit its ceiling in its home country, so China becomes an obsession as this massive, theoretical growth engine.

…

Here’s the main issue for Nike in this endeavor: The company, as a raison d’être, promotes athletic excellence. While women are among Nike’s major sports stars, the core of high-level performance, in the overwhelming majority of sports, is male. Every sane person knows that, though nobody in professional class life seems rude enough to say so. Obviously, there’s the observable reality of who tends to set records and there’s also the pervasive understanding that testosterone, the main male sex hormone, happens to give unfair advantages to the athletes who inject it.

Speaking of which, there’s a famous This American Life episode from 2002 where the public radio journos actually test their own testosterone levels. The big joke of the episode is just how comically low their T levels are. Sure, you would stereotype bookish public radio men in this way, and yet the results are on the nose enough to shock.

As a nerdy media-weakling type, I can relate to the stunning realization that you’ve been largely living apart from T. Before working in the NBA setting, I was an intern in the cubicles of Salon.com’s San Francisco office, around the time it was shifting from respectable online magazine into inane outrage content mill. Going from that setting to the NBA locker room was some jarring whiplash, like leaving the faculty lounge for a pirate ship. To quote Charles Barkley on the latter culture, “The locker room is sexist, racist, and homophobic … and it’s fun and I miss it.”

…

The “Good vs. Evil” ad boasts a “Like” to “Dislike” ratio of 20-to-1 on YouTube. On June 17th of 2021, Nike put out an ad ahead of the Euro Cup that referenced “Good vs. Evil” as briefly as it could. In this case, a little child popped his collar and used Cantona’s catchphrase. As of this writing, the new ad has earned a thousand more punches of the Dislike than of the Like button.

When you see it, it’s no surprise that the latest Euro Cup ad is disliked. I mean, you have to look at this shit. I know we’re so numb to the ever-escalating emanations of radical chic from our largest corporations, but sometimes it’s worth pausing just to take stock and gawk.

…

But today we are in the land of new football, where we take dictatorial direction from less-than-athletic minors. After her announcement, we are treated to a montage of different people who offer tolerance bromides.

“There are no borders here!”

“Here, you can be whoever you want. Be with whoever you want.”

(Two men kiss following that line, because subtlety isn’t part of this new world order.)

Then, a woman who appears to be breastfeeding under a soccer shirt, threatens, in French, “And if you disagree …”

And this is when the little boy gives us Cantona’s “au revoir” line before kicking a ball out of a soccer stadium, presumably because that’s what happens to the ignorant soccer hooligan. He gets kicked out for raging against gay men kissing or French ladies breastfeeding or somesuch. Later, a referee wearing a hijab instructs us, “Leave the hate,” before narrator girl explains, “You might as well join us because no one can stop us.”

Is that last line supposed to be … inspiring? That’s what a movie villain says, like if Bane took the form of Stan Marsh’s sister. Speaking of which, was this ad actually written by the creators of South Park as an elaborate prank? It’s certainly more convincing as an aggressive parody of liberals than as a sales pitch. Why, in anything other than a comedic setup, is a woman breastfeeding in a big-budget Euro Cup ad?

It’s tempting to fall into the pro-vanguardism template the boomers have handed down to us and sheepishly say, “I must be getting old, because this seems weird to me,” but let’s get real. You dislike this ad because it sucks. You are having a natural, human response to shitty art. This a hollow sermon from a priest whose sins were in the papers. Nobody is impressed by what Nike’s doing here. Nobody thinks Nike, a multinational famous for its sweatshops, is ushering us into an enlightened utopia. Sure, most media types are afraid to criticize the ad publicly. You might inspire suspicion that what you’re secretly against is men kissing and women breastfeeding, but nobody actually likes the stupid ad. No college kid would show it to a new friend he’s trying to impress, and it’s hard to envision a massive cohort of Gen Z women giving a shit about this ad either.

Now juxtapose that ad not just against the classics of the 1990s but also the 2000s products that preceded the Great Awokening. Compare it to another Nike Euro Cup advertisement, Guy Ritchie’s “Take It to the Next Level.”

…

Here’s the problem, insofar as problems are pretended into existence by our media class: The ad is very, very male. Really, what we are watching here is a boyhood fantasy. Our protagonist gets called up to the big show, and next thing you know he’s cavorting with multiple ladies, and autographing titties to the chagrin of his date. He can be seen buying a luxury sports car and arriving at his childhood home in it as his father beams with pride. Training sessions show him either puking from exhaustion or playing grab-ass with his fellow soccer bros. This is jock life, distilled. Art works when it’s true and it’s true that this is a vivid depiction of a common fantasy realized.

Nike’s highly successful “Write the Future” ad (16,000 Likes, 257 Dislikes) works along similar themes.

…

The recent Olympic ads were especially heavy on cringe radical chic, and might have stood out less in this respect if the athletes themselves mirrored that tone on the big stage. Not so much in these Olympics. It seems as though Nike made the commercials in preparation for an explosion of telegenic activism, only to see American athletes mostly, quietly accept their medals, chomp down on the gold, and praise God or country. Perhaps you could consider Simone Biles bowing out of events due to mental health as a form of activism, but overall, the athletes basically behaved in the manner they would have back in 1996.

But Nike forged onwards anyway. This ad in celebration of the U.S. women’s basketball team made some waves, getting ripped in conservative media as the latest offense by woke capital.

…

“Today I have a presentation on dynasties,” a pink-haired teenage girl tells us. “But I refuse to talk about the ancient history and drama. That’s just the patriarchy. Instead, I’m going to talk about a dynasty that I actually look up to. An all-women dynasty. Women of color. Gay women. Women who fight for social justice. Women with a jump shot. A dynasty that makes your favorite men’s basketball, football, and baseball teams look like amateurs.”

When she says, “That’s just the patriarchy,” the camera pans to a bust of (I think) Julius Caesar. At another point, the girl says, “A dynasty that makes Alexander the Great look like Alexander the Okay.” Fuck you, Classical Antiquity. Fuck you, fans of teams. You’re all just the patriarchy. Or something.

Nike could easily sell the successful American women’s basketball team without denigrating other teams, genders and ancient Mediterranean empires that have nothing to do with this. Could but won’t. The company now conveys an almost visceral need for women to triumph over men because … well, nobody really explains why, even if it has something to do with Undecided Whaling. In Nike’s tentpole Olympics ad titled “Best Day Ever,” the narrator fantasizes about the future, declaring, “The WNBA will surpass the NBA in popularity!” ​

…

There are theories on the emergence of woke capital, with many having observed that, following Occupy Wall Street, media institutions ramped up on census category grievance. The thinking goes that, in response to the threat of a real economic revolution, the power players in our society pushed identity politics to undermine group solidarity. Well, that was a fiendishly brilliant plan, if anyone actually hatched it.

I’m not so convinced, though, as I’m more inclined to believe that a lot of history happens by happenstance. If we’re to specifically analyze the Nike Awokening, there is a recent top-down element of a mandate for Undecided Whaling, but that mandate was preceded by a socially conscious middle class campaign within the company.

This isn’t unique to Nike, either. Given my past life covering the team that tech moguls root for, I’ve run into such people. They aren’t, by and large, ideological. Very few are messianically devoted to seeing the world through the intersectionality lens. They are, however, terrified of their employees who feel this way. The mid-tier labor force, this cohort who actually internalized their university teachings, are full of fervor and willing to risk burned bridges in favor of causes they deem righteous. The big bosses just don’t want a headline-making walkout on their hands, so they placate and mollify, eventually bending the company’s voice into language of righteousness.

…

All the guilt and atonement transference make for bad art. And so the ads suck. There’s no Machiavellian conspiracy behind the production. It’s just a combination of desperately wanting female market share and desperately wanting to move on from the publicized sins of a masculine past. So, to message its ambitions, the exhausted corporation leans on the employees with the loudest answers.

There’s a lot of interplay between Nike and Wieden+Kennedy when the former asks the latter for a type of ad, but the through line from both sides is a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Based on conversations with people who’ve worked in both environments, there’s a dearth of personnel who are deeply connected to sports. In place of a grounding in a subculture, you’re getting ideas from folks who went to nice colleges and trendy ad schools, the type of people who throw words like “patriarchy” at the screen to celebrate a gold medal victory. The older leaders, uneasy in their station and thus obsessed with looking cutting edge, lean on the younger types because the youth are confident. Unfortunately, that confidence is rooted in an ability to regurgitate liturgy, rather than generative genius. They’ve a mandate to replace a marred past, which they leap at, but they’re incapable of inventing a better future.

…

Ironically, Nike mattered a lot more in the days when its position was less dominant. Back when it had to really fight for market share, it made bold, genre-altering art. The ads were synonymous with masculine victory, plus they were cheekily irreverent. And so the dudes loved them. Today, Nike is something else. It LARPs as a grandiose feminist nonprofit as it floats aimlessly on the vessel Michael Jordan built long ago. Like Jordan himself, Nike is rich forever off what it can replicate never. Unlike Jordan, it now wishes to be known for anything but its triumphs. Nike once told a story and that story resonated with its audience. Now it’s decided that its audience is the problem. It wouldn’t shock you to learn that Carlos hated the new Nike ads I texted to him. His exact words were, “I don’t want fucking activism from a sweatshop monopoly.” He’ll still buy the gear, though, just not the narrative. Nike remains, but the story about itself has run out. Au revoir. 

[ecotone99]

[HR] The Creeper

By D.L. Schindler

The curling frond unfurled, coiling almost perceptibly as it grew in darkness. Within hours the vine had reached the top of the arbor. The moon shone on it from between two conspiring night-clouds of black and electrum. Every light, golden city lights and even starlight slowed its baneful march. An evil plant.

As the dew of morning came the vine had made it from the ground to the sides and even the ceiling of the arbor. The sun turned its darkened green flesh a pale and weak color. All throughout the day it withered and its leaves died and shriveled. A plant that hates sunlight, an evil plant.

It was Gerand's job to; well he didn't have a job. He was house-sitting. For eleven months he had house-sat this vacation home. For whoever owned it. Most people would call him a squatter; instead of a house-sitter.

He was looking at the very sick plant out in the arbor and wondered what it was. He did know something about plants and was curious about the one that had suddenly appeared and died. It seemed to be growing, however.

He went outside with his jimmy stick and backpack and in flipflops. The whole neighborhood was empty. These vacation homes were sold before the big election crisis a couple years ago. The rich foreign owners were all too spooked to come to their vacation homes. Some kind of weird suburban setting with a view of the Laikipia Wilderness area. Beautiful, remote and somehow still urban. "Rich folk have weird tastes." Gerand decided daily as he looked around.

He was effectively king of the place. It was ironic that the ancestors of Gerand were indeed kings of ancient Laikipia. A lost tribe, a people vanished, a sole survivor. He knew nothing of his heritage; but still lived in regal dominance of his ancestral home, ignorant of tradition.

Two drunk hyenas watched him with droopy eyes from the shade of an open garage. He waved to them and they averted their gaze. Gerand continued with his homemade club and went into the next house he hadn't raided yet. Letting himself in was easy when all the doors were locked electronically and his stolen keycard was meant for the off-season keeper. There was no such person. Gerand ony had to break in one time, to the offices, and get the key. He had lived like a king in his favorite house ever since. With his backpack full of stored food he went back outside but stopped suddenly.

On the road in front of the driveway was an offroad vehicle belonging to the East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute. The driver was getting out and she had already seen him.

"You're not police." Gerand observed out-loud in greeting.

"You don't belong here." the pale-eyed woman said to him. She was walking towards him.

"So what do you want?" Gerand frowned. She was taller than him and had a terrible beauty. She held him rooted to the concrete, through his flipflops, with her steady eye-contact.

"I just want you to help me. I am looking around for a plant that might be here, by now." she said as she stood gazing downward at Gerand.

"Who are you?" Gerand asked with exclusion.

"Professor M'Weru of the East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute. Have you seen anything like this?" She quickly identified herself and then produced a folded Kodak photo from the back pocket of her cutoff jeans.

"Actually I have seen that." Gerand said after looking at the picture. It was a wilted plant like the one from the arbor.

"Were you in contact with it at any point?" M'Weru sounded concerned and alarmed, noticeably taking two steps back from him as she asked.

"No, I've only just seen it outside the sliding glass door. It is in the arbor in the backyard of my home." Gerand explained.

"That's good. I need your help to show me where it is. I must identify it, quickly, we are burning daylight." M'Weru sounded relieved, but somehow urgent at the same time.

"Uh, it's this way. We can walk there in a minute." Gerand led her back to his place after he said so.

The two hyenas in the garage across the street were gone, but he was sure they would have found the two humans as funny as they found anything else.

He led M'Weru inside the house and to the view of the plant. She nodded when she saw it. M'Weru took a medical mask from her other pocket and put it over her mouth and nose. She said:

"I am going to get some help. It has to be removed. It is very dangerous."

"Isn't it dead?" Gerand sounded perplexed.

M'Weru sighed and decided to tell Gerand quite a bit about the plant outside:

"Only while the sun shines. At night it will come back and grow and grow. It spreads itself inside living things. What ate fruit here and died in your garden? A monkey? A bird? When its corpse lay rotting this sprouted from seeds inside that killed the animal. It came from...a very bad place."

"What do you mean by all of that?" Gerand sounded slightly horrified.

"The seeds are so small that they are breathed in, a cloud of them if you are too close. Then inside the lungs of the animal they begin. It is an evil plant."

"I have never heard of a plant like that before. Where did you say it came from?" Gerand sounded more horrified as he asked this.

"Maybe Hell." M'Weru held the pale vines in her pale eyes. She then turned abruptly and went back to her vehicle to use its radio. They would burn it like the others.

Everywhere she had gone, from the very bad place to Lingi Grotto, she had found it there. It was everywhere. Growing in darkness, killing, eating, growing, spreading. She glared at the overgrown lawns of this place.

Gerand was watching her from his living room window. He saw her get on her radio and somehow felt on edge with his back to the plant. He turned and stared at it in horror. If he had met it in the dark it might have got him like it did the flying monkey she had mentioned. Well a bird or a monkey. When stressed, Gerand tended to lump his problems together.

The silence was punctuated by the scratching of a mole rat under the kitchen sink. It scurried out when Gerand opened the cupboard there. It ran into the living room and hid under a couch. When he looked it was laying on its side convulsing. Then it died.

There in the darkness, before his eyes, it swelled. Then it burst and several unfoiling vines slithered out and spread their leaves. Gerand coughed at the stench and dry cloud of spores. He rolled onto his back, his lungs aching already.

He was so scared that he would die like that animal that he was hyperventilating. When M'Weru returned she found him on his back with his eyes glazed with terror. She waved a hand back and forth before his face and got no response. She stepped back as she glanced around and saw the open cupboard, the withering vines coming from under the couch and the frightened victim on the floor. This was the work of Devils' Creeper, the thing she now searched.

"I am sorry, but there is nothing I can do for you." M'Weru told him. She left him there gasping and she walked outside and waited for reinforcements.

She had work to do. She carefully looked around from yard to yard and saw more of the plants in some places. Each time she found it she used her can of spray paint to mark the place. Her friends would come and help her to get rid of it. Purify this place.

Purity by fire.

They arrived in two hours, with just an hour left of daylight. Any light would slow the growth, but only daylight halted it. And only fire really cleansed it away.

She had time to look around while they got to work on the places she had marked. All of Lingi Grotto was infested. One vehicle went out and circled, searching for any animals that needed to be contained. The rest of them started breaking down doors and pouring gasoline. When the places M'Weru had marked with her spray can were boiling in black smoke the team drove out of the strange suburban oasis. It was surrounded on all sides by pristine wilderness with only one road leading in and out.

"Professor, do you think we might have eradicated it?" Jomo asked his boss. She was in her vehicle and the young man at her rolled down window. M'Weru was shaking her head 'no'.

"Where do we look next?" Jomo sounded worried. It was becoming harder to find, further and further from its source. Yet they kept finding it.

"This was probably the bird. I think that the one you saw, I think it flew here." Professor M'Weru decided.

The sun was setting.

"So what then, do we do now?" Jomo looked back to where the rest of the vehicles waited for deployment behind hers.

"We go home, get some rest and keep ourselves alert. I will keep going out and searching for it. We might not have got it all, and maybe we have. Time will tell." M'Weru spoke with confidence to her underling. Inside she was as frightened and as helpless as the man she had left on the living room floor to die.

Jomo could not sense her fear. She seemed strong and wise. Everyone saw this in her. M'Weru lifted her left hand out of her window and twirled it in the air above. The engines started as Jomo trotted quickly back to the vehicle behind hers. They all rolled out, heading home.

Soon enough the fires would be noticed and treated, far too late to stop the place being reduced to ashes. As the convoy departed the skies were a glowing nightmare behind them as the neighborhood they had left blazed furiously in their wake. The battle was won, but the war went on.

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