joy cometh with the morning

Hermetic

Photo of the inky-blue sky over Brighton

I mentioned the other day about McDonalds' vibecrafting, and I was thinking a bit about that when out for a jog. I've started seeing these adverts up on bus stops for McDonalds "World Menu Heist". The gimmick here appears to be that they're taking the most popular items from various international McDonalds menus and making them available here. You can get a special Canadian maple burger or something. I don't really eat at McDonalds so it's not really for me, but it struck me as weirdly sinister.

There was a story I heard, I think on the Attitude Era podcast, about a WWE writer who was unwinding on the WWE private jet watching some comedy. (Richard Pryor, as I recall.) Vince McMahon walks over to him and says "what're you watching there pal?" and the writer says he's watching some comedy, and Vince says "why aren't you watching Santino Marella?", who was a comedy wrestler they had at the time[1].

This has always stuck with me as an explanation for not just a lot of the content that was on the WWE Network, but also for the worldview of Vince, and, perhaps, of executives at other media companies. They want to, if not exactly become the world, then certainly to become the world for their superfans. They want to be a monopoly on the way that those people engage with media; to create a hermetic world where they mediate the ins and outs. I'm sure I'm over-drawing the conclusion here but this felt to me like McDonalds somehow trying to become everything. To encompass the world. I really didn't like it.

  1. I hope he'll forgive me for saying: he's not as funny as Richard Pryor ↩ī¸Ž