THE PORTRAIT OF A MIRROR

My novel’s announcement in Publisher’s Marketplace:

MANY LOOPS MAGAZINE

When one of your articles gets republished in a new magazine all about recursion, it’s basically required to link back to it again, right?

This past June, I got an email from Melissa Mesku, the interim editor of ➰ ➰ ➰—I say interim, because, in her words, “the idea is it will eventually start producing itself via machine learning.” Obviously, I was intrigued—especially after reading her brilliant introduction to recursion in the form of the editor’s letter to the site. The full first issue launched 1/9/19, and can be found directly here or via the publication’s twitter handle, @many_loops.

I’m really eager to see how this project evolves over time, and especially whether and how AI takes it over.

THE SUPER BOWL'S WINNING AD IS INGENIOUSLY RECURSIVE

In the wake of the Super Bowl, the internet is in love with Tide laundry detergent. Here's why:

People are praising "It's a Tide Ad" for all sorts of reasons. It's high-fidelity parody, and very funny. It's tricky and meta, making Tide seem smart and woke. It's repetitive and simple, so even when viewers are initially faked out, they feel like they're in on the joke. Apparently the featured actor is beloved from Stranger Things, but I haven't seen the show and it didn't detract from my appreciation of the conceit. 

The original spot above aired in the first quarter and was followed up with a 15-second reminder in every quarter thereafter, in ads that initially appear to be for something else. Adweek called out "multiple spots" as the top trend in Super Bowl advertising overall, noting that "Rote repetition is important now more than ever." "Even the voice-overs that brought people back into the game after breaks kept the joke going," echoed the Washington Post: "'Brought to you by Tide. And Tide. And Tide. And Tide.'" 

But fundamentally, it is recursion, not repetition, that makes this campaign such a success: by embedding every other ad in a Tide ad, Tide embeds itself in every other ad--until, as the ad itself suggests, "Every ad is a Tide Ad."

Recursion is inherently complex, and it's fiendishly clever of P&G and Saatchi & Saatchi to have made a recursive message so simple. So clever, even, that you almost forget how well it's working. It's hard to pinpoint the precise moment when that subtle shift happens and, expecting to be faked out by a Tide Ad, you instead mistake another ad for Tide.

Now their ad is embedded, for free, all over the internet, even in this little corner here. I've been thinking about laundry detergent for two days.

(It's worth noting that P&G is a famous case study--one I reference in my day job with some regularity--of a traditional organization transforming itself into a design-thinking led company to foster innovation. I'm not surprised to see them behind a such a clever campaign.) 

ARCADE FIRE IS OBSESSED WITH RECURSION, TOO

Occasionally I'll run into a cultural artifact that so perfectly combines my four themes that it's hard to know where to start with it. Arcade Fire's latest album, Everything Now, is one of those cultural artifacts.

No surprise: the album and Infinite Content tour alike open with the title track, an ultra-digestible disco-pop anthem of anti-consumerist consumer success. At the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC last night, gargantuan disco balls framed the center ring, staged like a boxing match, the band entering with a tongue-in-cheek announcement of their Grammy record and combined weight. A four-sided jumbotron hovered above it, infinitely scrolling recursive graphics superimposed over live footage of Win Butler &co oozing rock star glamour. My husband's hot take? "New Arcade Fire is ABBA with irony." "Everything Now" is Arcade Fire's first single to reach #1 on a Billboard chart. 

Recursion is not a new theme for Arcade Fire. Reflektor, their third studio album, was an echo chamber of mirrors ("Just a reflection, of a reflection / Of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection"), but Everything Now is next-level. Leading up to the Album's release, the band created a fake corporation and a fake website, complete with a "Premature Premature [Self-]Evaluation"--a parody site of a parody site filled with embedded links to other meta-joke articles created by the band, pulling you into a click-circle of their "Infinite Content" that gets to the annular heart of the internet:

"We’ll probably spend at least a paragraph talking about the marketing campaign that has accompanied Everything Now—the logos, the corporate-speak, the Twitter account—saying that we get the joke, and maybe even noting that music sites and features like Premature Evaluation (and the new Premature Premature Evaluation) are all part of the same culture-marketing ecosystem."

That last link there is to a self-generated mock exposé of Everything Now's mock campaign, debunking self-perpetuated mock rumors such as, for example, Ben & Jerry's production of an Arcade Fire flavor. It's fake news blowing the whistle on fake news, like a billboard that blends into the background. 

Aside from "Infinite Content," which is a bit brash and annoyingly repetitive (the acoustic, almost bluegrassy reprise is better), the album is as good musically as it is conceptually. "Electric Blue" and "We Don't Deserve Love" are winners, featuring Régine Chassagne's voice at its most ethereal. My favorite song on the album, Creature Comfort, is a synthy little sermon, spouting what might be the mantra for selfie culture: "Saying God, make me famous / If you can't just make it painless / Just make it painless."

At the concert last night, they closed with "Everything Now (continued)" of course--just like on the album, where the first track bleeds into the last, forming an infinite loop.