Streampunks

MAANY PEYVAN is a lead writer at Google, where he creates editorial and social content, advises on executive communications strategy, and leads speechwriting for YouTube. He was previously an appointee in the Obama administration, serving as chief speech-writer at the US Agency for International Development. He holds a bachelor of arts in behavioral biology and a master’s degree in international relations, both from Johns Hopkins University.

Shane has called Vice everything from “the next MTV” to “the next CNN” to “the Time Warner of the streets.” Brian has said that AwesomenessTV is the new Nickelodeon. And Ted Sarandos, my old boss, said that Netflix’s ambition was to become HBO faster than HBO could become Netflix.

In 1906, John Philip Sousa, who wrote “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” penned an essay for Appleton’s Magazine about the evils of recorded music. In “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” he wrote that music had to be performed live in order for people to truly appreciate it

Then in 2003, something life-changing happened: Casey’s iPod died. Eighteen months in, its battery had lost the ability to hold its charge. When he visited the Apple Store to buy a new battery, he was told it was irreplaceable and he would have to either pay $250 plus shipping to have the battery replaced or spend another $300 to $400 to purchase a new iPod. Frustrated, he decided to make a movie about it. In “iPod’s Dirty Secret,” Van films Casey while he goes around New York spray painting over iPod ads with a stencil that says, “iPOD’S UNREPLACEABLE BATTERY LASTS ONLY 18 MONTHS.”

Before Casey ever posted his first video to YouTube, in 2010, he had produced two films, been nominated for an Emmy, won an Independent Spirit Award, had his short films showcased in international art exhibitions, and sold a series to HBO that he, along with his brother, wrote, starred in, directed, edited, and produced.

The first video ever to go viral on YouTube was called “Touch of Gold.” In it, grainy footage from the sidelines of a soccer stadium shows the star athlete Ronaldinho trying on a new pair of cleats that have been brought to him in a golden suitcase. After lacing them up, he starts to juggle a nearby soccer ball, and for the next minute, he never lets it touch the ground. The feat is even more impressive because he juggles the ball from the sideline to the arc of the penalty box and then proceeds to launch the ball off the crossbar and back to himself four times in a row.
The video is just over two and a half minutes long, and when it was released, it set off a frenzy of speculation about whether it was real.
Sadly, it wasn’t. Not only was the video itself faked, the premise was deceitful, too. It wasn’t illicitly captured footage smuggled out of the Maracanã stadium in Rio; it was an ad for Nike. A million views later, and advertising would never be the same.

And all the stories I’d heard about how terrible life was in America were quickly dispelled after I watched Beverly Hills Cop. If you’ve seen that movie, you were probably focusing on Eddie Murphy’s jokes. When I watched it as a teenager, I was marveling at the expensive cars, the fashionable clothing, and the fancy houses.

Shane told me that this kind of disinformation ran both ways and was what made him so eager to visit North Korea and report from places that are supposed to be forbidden. “It was ‘Commies eat babies, and you can buy a house for a pair of blue jeans,’ and all this stuff. And we were the capitalists!” But the misinformation persisted on both sides because the two sides weren’t allowed to communicate. The people dispensing the propaganda knew that truth was the ultimate antidote.

When I was growing up in Prague, we had a different word for fake news: propaganda.

Although the timing would suggest that the formation of these sites was driven by political polarization, a book written by two Tufts University sociologists, Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, examined the growing trend of “the outrage industry” and concluded that it was just good business. “There has been an increase in political polarization in the citizenry, but not nearly enough to account for this development,” Sobieraj told CNN. “The technological, regulatory, and media space has shifted into one in which [partisan news] is profitable, and profit is the driving force.”