How to Murder Propaganda

This is the last part in a four part series called The Road to Consumer Nationalism. Part 1 2 3 .

Fight global citizenship with originality. Occupy their channels with more original, more fascinating, hotter, cooler. Make real propaganda for ideologically aligned projects/brands, and spec work for the brands they own. Prove that people respond to our vision not theirs. Put the strong horse next to the weak one. See which one people choose.

Before landing the plane on this series about consumer nationalism, let’s review where we’ve been. The inexplicable rise of woke marketing—sudden and shocking—represents one of the most significant shifts in American cultural history. It still has yet to be properly investigated or explained. I’m attempting to do so here .

Talking heads on both sides explain woke marketing as an amplified version of Bernays-style purpose marketing , but it’s far more insidious. Purpose marketing appeals to certain segments, like civil rights selling beer to black people or feminism selling cigarettes to women . The woke takeover of mainstream advertising in 2017, continuing today, is a far more seismic shift. It drastically overhauls core messaging at every level. This is obvious because it mirrors the rise of woke content in general—the sudden insistence on populating every film or TV show with interracial couples and gay characters; the Academy Awards’ highly communist new race regulations . Woke ads aren’t purpose-based advertisements, they aren’t advertisements at all, at least in the traditional sense. They’re recruitment campaigns.

But recruitment campaigns for what? The answer is lifetime subscribers. Corporations once sold products to customers. When this was the goal, you had a beautiful woman sell your clothing brand. Classic propaganda. Create a problem—you’re ugly in comparison—and introduce a product as the calamine lotion that soothes it. You buy, you get a little more beautiful.

In promoting beauty, brands made the world more beautiful too. They created their own beautiful forms of public nature filled with beauty because people want beauty. Then suddenly it all shifted to ugliness because corporations don’t care primarily about selling products to customers anymore. Traditional sales is now quaint and old fashioned, far less profitable than accessing and recruiting citizens. Development banks set up public private partnerships the world-over giving corporations access to vast pools taxpayer dollars in the form of various green, woke, equitable initiatives (they drink our milkshakes). On the consumer level, corporations create dependent identities that require constant repeat purchases in order to “affirm.”

In other words, manipulating consumers to buy your product on an la carte basis is now one of the least efficient ways to scale. Instead of selling beauty to the strong, you sell identity to the weak. That old communist instinct to glorify the commoner! It’s more profitable to advertise a mentality than a product, to recruit for a recurring lifetime of purchases. And thus we have the weak, the obese, the ugly on billboards. Capitalists create problems and solutions. Nations create duties and benefits. The global citizens’ duty? Be you! But to be you, you need us.

Like all communism, it’s destined to fail. Right now our only job is to fight.

Hating corporations I get, but not brands. They illustrate something inarticulable about human creations . They can be beautiful, like human-made nature—each brand a plant in its own right. Its ads are its flower petals. Billboards trees. Wheatpastes bushes.

As a branding enthusiast, I’ve always loved bottled water. It’s the cleanest canvas upon which to paint a brand. The product is featureless so success is based entirely on how you package and sell it. Bottled water is to the brander what the business suit is to a fashion designer. The blankest square in which to express ones arguments.

Many agree. Bottled water is now a $300 billion market in the U.S. alone, by far the largest water market in history. In LA, water sommelier Martin Riese makes grocery store TikToks with millions of views. The restaurant at LACMA has a water menu. Erewhon sells $30 nano-pure Hyper-Oxygenated water. Yeah, it’s a PR stunt, but that’s the point. Some would call these projects ironic. It’s not irony, I allege. Rather, it’s the giddy feeling we get when we’ve filled up on so much culture that we can see it from above. The bottled water craze isn’t ironic, it’s Deep Fried .

Which of course brings us, irritatingly, to Liquid Death Mountain Water, one of the best examples of Deep Fried culture. Liquid Death comes in tall cans with a cartoonishly satanic design.

Founder Mike Cessario worked on the Warped Tour with pop punk bands like Paramore and Pennywise. He noticed that the musicians didn’t like being seen drinking water bottles while performing. Instead, they poured water into energy drink cans. Besides proving that today’s punk rock stars are in fact insipid posers, this is Deep Fried in its own right—water disguised as caffeine, disguised as soda, what we call soda originally sold as medicine. The mechanism of cultural replication laid bare.

Cessario spent a piddly $1.5k on a spec commercial for Liquid Death and another $3k on Facebook promotion. It rapidly got millions of views and the rest was history. Why do people love it so much? Same reason they love espresso martinis, Lil’ Peep, TikTok, and all Deep Fried things: the feeling of tongue in cheek sardonicism we experience when culture overcomes itself. 

What followed for Liquid Death was a roadmap of consumer nationalism. The word that appears most often in reference to the brand is “cult.” Customers contractually sell their souls to Liquid Death in exchange for access to limited edition merch drops. It calls this “the country club” membership to its brand. 200,000 people have sold their souls so far.

There’s an Instagram culture devoted to Liquid Death tattoos. Cessario had the face of a random Liquid Death customer tattooed on his arm after the customer chugged a can of Liquid Death water in under 15 seconds for 365 consecutive days.

https://youtu.be/KHuxrhITHg0

NFTs followed: Murder Head Death Club (see top of piece), humorous illustrations of severed heads with variations on causes of death. The 6,666 piece collection launched at a starting price of .0666 ETH. It comes with great utility, access to an even deeper “country club” of Liquid Death citizens. One of the benefits? Airdrop of a lower level member’s soul.

Liquid Death also released a heavy metal album called “Greatest Hates” on Spotify. Its top track is titled “Fire Your Marketing Guy.”

Network Spirituality

MHDC members signal devotion by filling their pfps with their owned NFTs. This practice resembles more famous NFT projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and the lesser known but perhaps even more significant Milady Maker. (Tellingly, both the Mildays and Bored Ape Yacht Club projects have recently been “outed’ as containing references to Nazi propaganda, but both cancellation attempts have largely failed). The motto of Milady owners is “I Long for Network Spirituality.” 

Network Spirituality is the concept of exporting your identity (or maybe soul) to the internet, and then intermingling it with others to the point where you are no longer distinguishable. I first heard rumblings of the concept when interviewing Frogtwitter’s lost son Menaquione-4 for a piece about freedom of speech back in 2017. He said something strange that stuck with me for years afterwards, and I didn’t understand it until I heard about network spirituality. He said that frogs weren’t just chatting in private threads, they were melding their minds. Communing on a higher plane, becoming a single entity—a sort of Voltron of shitposting.

Later, a group of younger, less serious, but more technologically advanced edgelords called the Remilia Collective adopted the notion of Network Spirituality to describe their unified approach to identity. In creating a series of popular NFTs called Miladys, each depicting a variation of an anime-style girlchild, the collective made “I yearn for Network Spirituality” their central call to action. Milady crypto keys became entry passes to IRL raves in Manhattan. They shitposted in unison—riffing, obfuscating, trolling—all extremely provocative, an irresistible tractor beam for young, very online anti-identitarians. 

As one Milady explains, Network Spirituality is “the unified ecosystem of posting, of interdependent roles embedded in the network and embodied by posters, who lubricate the system for hived art production. each part (each poster) operates independently yet constitutes the whole.” 

Another called it “the shedding of meat-space ego and the adoption of a wired persona that’s plugged into a network hive.” 

Network spirituality strips us of inborn, traditional identities. Milady holders think this is rebellious and revolutionary—they’ve compared it to the right to bear arms. But in another way, the meatspace identities they eschew already threaten globalist hegemony, connective forces outside of money and thus outside of its direct control. You can see how much we crave return to race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, family. Globalists downplay religion (because religion separates identities from the market), so suddenly the lit It Lit girls are all Catholic, the boys Eastern Orthodox.

Network spirituality could be the ultimate form of consumer nationalism. A large and growing category of DAO projects seek to “re-imagine” (what they actually mean is re-conquer) physical space in the form of flat, blockchain enabled IRL communities. Kift, City of Delosa, CityDAO, Cabin are all variations on the “network state ,” a new form of decentralized nation-state where citizenship is tokenized. Vitalik Buterin blogs about network states with “crowdfunded territory” to build new, vaguely-utopian societies run by tech overlords. They’re the precursor to the post-sovereignty corporate nations that companies, via woke marketing, are working their way towards.

Let’s say The Cathedral follows tech dorks into network spirituality to provide us with a new kind of identity—mind melding for the sake of mind melding. Not just the satisfaction of consumerism—up until now mostly a distraction—but consumerism as citizenship. A kind of micro-patriotism. The Coca-Cola Select Club comes with a 1,000 pound statue delivered to your home, etched with your lifetime cryptographic key to the Coca Cola Network State. That DAO offers a Discord, metaverse raves, dating apps, IRL tastings, special concert deals, and of course rare mint NFTs for your Twitter pfp. You were a loser before you joined Select, before you minted that rare Santa, before you gave over your soul to the Networked Coca Cola State.  And that’s all before it integrates with neuralink, at which point you and Coca Cola become indistinguishable.

Equal and Opposite Absurdity

On a recent episode of Astral Flight Simulation, Curtis Yarvin explains that the next phase of dissident activism will take the form of absurd and theatrical acts, like flash mobs. We so lack the stomach for organized IRL rebellion that the only successful actions can be circus-like, ironic, Deep Fried activations that relish in their meaninglessness. BAP also speaks to this—“remember you can go into the kitchen and demand a pickle!” Sky King , Storm Area 51, Killdozer , 4chan’s brilliant trolling of Shia Labeouf’s flag —all examples of successful, circus-like acts of rebellion that didn’t harm innocent people and went far further in undermining globalism than any rationalist argument or act of senseless violence.

This is where we’re at with marketing. Propaganda, that is to say Bernays/Alinksy-style manipulative lying, is going out of fashion. Simple propagation—just straight up telling people what you are, is in. Ryan Air, tells the ugly truth to its customers on TikTok: “when you realise that no matter how much they complain, they will always fly with you:”

https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanair/video/7138071334243831046

This sort of honesty would have once turned consumers off, but now we can’t get enough of it. Another recent Twitter trend saw brands tweeting single words:

https://twitter.com/Amtrak/status/1565414263530950662

Propaganda is shifting back to propagation—back towards its original meaning of simply forwarding the messaging of the Catholic church without manipulation, without constantly engineering new spoons of sugar to feed it with. This is good news because the globalist woke marketers believe strongly in the power of propaganda—in fact it’s how they spend most of their working hours. The Biden administration isn’t much more than a writer’s room of adderall-fueled Harvard grads thinking up ways to manipulate “the base.” They’re trying to keep up with Deep Fried brands, but in doing so they’re undermining their existence, their raison d’etre. They should be very afraid of the death of propaganda.

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1565512354493857802

Right now, corporations are enjoying the strange disruption. Deep Fried brand actions are becoming far more impactful than Super Bowl commercials which, despite their extreme viewpoints, don’t move the needle at all. So PBR tweets less about woke and more about eating ass, Mr. Peanut shakes his nuts, Steak Umms beefs with Neil deGrasse Tyson in a way that would make Frogtwitter proud.

https://twitter.com/steak_umm/status/1381822900521607171

Liquid Death soul sale NFTs are just the beginning. Here’s where consumer nationalism is headed. Your Experian CreditWork Premium membership requires purchase of a Great Creditors in History NFT. The purchase activates your Equinox Global Membership which, via smart contract, injects fractions of points to your credit score for every Equinox x Peloton Sustainability Powers America Project spin class you attend. Once you reach a certain number of Climate Points, you automatically mint an NFT Supreme Pin that, in collaboration with Twitter, you can append to your profile pic. It’s only a matter of time before these signifiers integrate with civic rights and duties in exchange for the “tax” of buying a token.

With brand nationalism, we don’t need Bernays anymore. People do it to themselves. Elon Musk mocked “The Current Thing,” the endless parade of events paired with causes—George Floyd x BLM, Ukraine x NATO, Uvalde x Guns, Roe v. Wade x Abortion—that we must do something about right now. The reason for Current Thing-ism is money. Each of these events is turned into an “activation” because political entities, like Amazon, know they need fresh content to keep their subscribers engaged.

Thus, Yarvin’s question about if or when to build a bridge from The Remnant to the masses has been answered. The damage wrought by the propagandists-in-charge has passed zero barrier. The mechanisms of control have been revealed. Consumers accept them. We don’t need ad hoc meaning to drive our consumption, because consumption is who we are. We don’t need to lie and manipulate—to engage in marketing. The time to propagandize—nay to propagate—is now. Yes, that means you.

How? Take a look at the brilliant—if slightly undercooked—advertising in Raw Egg Nationalist’s Man’s World . Some of it parodical; other ads beautifully designed and cuttingly clever. They have much more to say and are far more effective as propaganda than anything brands are currently spending billions on every year.

We’re talmbout stuffing the pipes. Not with garbage. With beautiful aesthetics and strong messaging. Evolving meme warfare to propaganda warfare. The consumer is ready to stop being lied to, they’re craving not phony purpose, but honest propagation. That gives the beautiful, the strong, the efficient, the undeniable a massive advantage. We just need to turn on the flow.

Propaganda will regress from manipulation back towards propagation. Dissident movements will now compete on equal footing for citizen subscribers—offering ownable cryptographic IDs and subscriptions against their merch drops and streaming content. Unconcerned with the project of manipulation, The Remnant will raise its flag. Citizens were tricked into becoming consumers, but that process is complete. The march back towards responsible citizenship can begin.

So I say again: Fight global citizenship with originality. Occupy their channels with more original, more fascinating, hotter, cooler. Make real propaganda for ideologically aligned projects/brands, and spec work for the brands they own. Prove that people respond to our vision not theirs. Accept that consumer nationalism is coming, and propagate the values of our own nation. Put the strong horse next to the weak one. See which one people choose.

This is the last part in a four part series called The Road to Consumer Nationalism. Part 1 2 3 .