Imagine a sphere. Think about it hovering in the space in front of you. What you observe, from your perspective, is it’s outside. Now imagine that you are on the inside of the sphere. Even though you cannot see the outside, you can infer that one exists. Logically and definitionally, a sphere must have an outside (I am sure some mathematician of note has proven that spheres topologically have two sides, an inside and an outside). Imagine now that the sphere that you observed was a hologram, an illusion of a 3 dimensional image created by projecting light onto a rapidly moving flat plane or screen. The fact that it is an advanced technological images does little to change its fundamental properties, a sphere is still a sphere and it still has an inside and an outside. Now imagine a glitch, the holographic machine begins to break down and as it does so, the surface of that holographic sphere begins to persistently and perpetually undulate, rotating and tessellating in on itself in defiance of geometry, seeming to bulge, tremble, reverberate and repeat as though it has neither inside nor outside, only an infinitely shifting topology of peristaltically undulating folds created by the flickering of the rapidly dying lights.
When I say that capitalism has no Outside, I want you to understand that I am not making a benign depressive or pessimistic comment or indulging in some kind of “capitalist realism”. I am suggesting that by design, an exterior surface is not possible. There is no breaking through or breaking out; anything perceived as such is done in error. To suggest this is not to ignore the other forms of political and economic organization that have existed before or since Capital’s genesis, but rather it is to suggest that Capital has always been with us. A fundamental force. A kind of will or drive; an impetus to endless connections, proliferations, and growth that has always been a part of the human experience, we simply didn’t have a name for it or know yet fully what it was like to be, think, and dream like Capital. Capital’s spectral haunting extends thus infinitely into both past and future, it simply needed the right conditions in order to realize itself.
What we are witnessing now in real time is the shifting of the folds. As Capital schizms and wriggles it “captures” more possibilities that might be mistaken to be Outside itself, yet the rippling of its body is little more than an adjustment, a stretch to reorder what was already its own. This rippling now takes the form of a kind of self-awareness. In his Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism, Nick Land argues that “accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun. (“We haven’t seen anything yet.”)” Yet one might ask what it means to intentionally seek to accelerate Capital’s overcoding and terratorializing dynamics, given that Capital is always already exceeding these, producing new hyper-velocities of capture and colonization, of which it is impossible to keep track? What does it mean for Capital to have become self-aware, for it to understand its own processes?
I have been thinking about this question after seeing the finale of Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime. I wrote about the show’s first season on this blog in the context of a very tame reflection on the question of whether we would know if we were living in a dystopia. What struck me this time around was the self awareness, the lucidity, and reflexive quality of the jokes and marketing which I observed to be part of or associated with Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime. The show makes a point to poke fun at the crude and at times grotesque rationales of contemporary marketing practices and discourses. It has always done this, existing as a rebuke of the kinds of crass and uncritical worship of superheroes that we see in so much of our popular culture, particularly the kind of woke-branded imagery that we see from the Marvel cinematic universe.
Yet, Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime takes this a step further. For example, one of the characters, Queen Maeve, is outed as bisexual during the events of the season, and we watch a grotesque scene in which Maeve and her partner have to sit down with Seth and Evan from Marketing and talk about her coming out story, her new image, and what it means for the brand. As we go through the season we see glimpses of adverts for “Brave Maeve Pride Bars” or “Brave Maeve’s Vegetarian Pride Lasagne” in the kind of crass and tasteless attempt to co-opt a person’s sexuality that could only be dreamed up in the insipid discourses of contemporary marketing that sees any demographic as a potential for growth and wealth generation, in the same kind of move that impels brands to co-opt Pride or in the same way that we saw Nike do with Colin Kaepernick. In presenting this do us, Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime is asking us to laugh and join them in mocking how “cringe” this kind of blatant marketing and commodification is, but this lampshading is fickle.
Perhaps the definitive example of this is Starlight’s costume. In Season 1, we sat through another uncomfortable scene with Seth and Evan from Marketing who tell Starlight all about her journey, her transformation, and her newfound acceptance of herself, as she sits there appalled and confused. The culmination of the scene is them unveiling her new costume which is much more revealing than her current one.
Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime makes fun of this new costume by having another character, Stormfront, engage in some facile lampshading of its own fetishized presentation of its female superheroes. She says: “Vought won’t let me have pockets in this. You can see every crease in my ass. You can practically see up Starlight’s uterus. You want to talk about girl power, let’s talk about getting some pockets!” Yet at the same time, the show uses this costume in the promotional material for Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime. This frequently occurring PR image, for example, features Starlight’s uterus in all of its glory.
The reason that I keep thinking about this self-awareness is that I wonder not whether the show is somehow hypocritical of its mockery of marketing, but because I can’t help but think about whether its marketing material is doing a kind of “anti-marketing shtick” on purpose. What convinced me to write this post was a sponsored video on Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime done by the Youtube content creator, Michael Reeves. I could not say how I started watching Michael Reeves’s videos – I think that it was through association, a recommended video around the time when another creator in the Youtube maker-space, Simone Giertz, was trending because of her brain tumour – but his sense of humour is dumb, dark, and juvenile(much like my own) so I kept watching his videos.
As Michael explains in his video, the marketing team for Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime, asked him to build a “Laser Baby”, like the one that appeared in Season 1 of the show, as a piece of sponsored content. As he explains, however, the pitch sent to him by the marketing team is “cringe” and as such he has to openly mock it throughout the video, making fun of the asinine storyboard that they sent him or openly ridiculing their attempt to make him add “Do not try this at home” disclaimers or caveats to the crude jokes that he makes about shaking babies. Throughout the video he weaves in mentions of Amazon Prime, The Boys, and Season 2, that is, the SEO or other key words that have probably led some algorithm to find this blog-post because of how many times I’ve said “Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime”. One wonders that this is not a more effective strategy, mocking marketing and corporate legal hand-wringing as a way of marketing more effectively. One wonders that this was not the plan all along. At time of writing the video has 7.5 million views, so even ignoring all of the other Youtubers and influencers that they got to promote the show, it’s safe to say that Amazon got their marketing message across, while being openly mocked for trying to do so.
Anti-marketing is marketing. There is no outside to Capital. Even me pointing out all of Amazon’s crude stratagems is successful marketing; generating buzz, creating talking points that leads to clicks, engagement, and other metrics that Capital can measure.
One thus wonders whether anti-marketing is the future of marketing. Forget the false conjurations of emotionality and sincerity that used to be a part of marketing campaigns targeted at your mom and dad and embrace a new politics of making fun of emotions and even the concept of marketing because we’re all so cynical and jaded that it’s the only way that we won’t disengage from attempts to sell us something. In Michael Reeves’s video we witness the transmutation of the mocking of “cringe” marketing ideas into marketing strategy. This is not ridicule or critique, it was Capital finding new ways to stimulate desire.
What monstrous futures await us as Capital becomes more self-aware. Its meat-husks know how cringe and unsettling its perverse strategies for “growth” are, so the active mockery of these becomes colonized, becomes a unique selling point, becomes part of what is for sale. The Boys shows us this by being a show produced for an by one megacorporation, Amazon, in order to actively mock the saccharine and naive superhero fantasies of another megacorporation, Disney.
What exactly can we accelerate here? Or put more bluntly, what can I inject into this machinic operation that the Business School is not already providing in spades as new strategies for connecting with consumers are dreamt up everyday by eager marketers. Nothing. The holographic sphere gives us a potent image of a undulating surface that has both and neither any inside or outside. There was never any outside, just a shifting of the folds, an optical illusion to make us believe that a way through was possible.
Sideeq Mohammed 