“Selling out” used to be the ultimate sin, but with wealth disparity in the U.S. being what it is, millennials and Gen Z kiddos are often more than willing to sell their soul for guaranteed healthcare. Follow a celebrity on Instagram and you’re bound to see them shilling miracle weight loss garbage or brain pills, desperate to get that lucrative Amazon sponsorship. It’s depressing, but if there’s a spark inside of you that still longs to bite the hand that feeds, the online pranksters at MSCHF would like to make it worth your while.
Via the Anti Advertising Advertising Club, MSCHF is tasking TikTok users with “attacking” brands like Amazon, Tesla, Facebook, and even TikTok using one of their nine custom sounds. Rack up enough views and the MSCHF team will pay up. “Attack Tesla for employee health negligence and union busting,” the site declares, promising to pay $1,000 if you get more than 50,000 views using the clip, a parody of Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” about Elon Musk.
Below, see the full list of brands and potential payouts. Head here to hear all the custom sounds, which throw an anti-capitalist spin on tracks like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” and The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” among others.
“Sponsored posts are a cringey ubiquitous evil of social platforms—a content paradigm that arises inexorably from the basic conditions of the world: brands want to get in front of audiences at any cost, and young people on social platforms have audiences,” reads the project’s manifesto.
“The ability to sell out, perhaps ironically, is not democratized,” it continues. “Not everyone is sufficiently influential to be blessed by the Giant Brand Hand In The Sky. Still, we all buy products: if we cannot become paid shills for brands, we can at least attack them in unison. Anti Advertising Advertising Club is dedicated to reversing the flow of attention-economy juice through the top-of-funnel pipeline. If every user’s desire is to sell out, we’ll happily enable that impulse if it means we can punch at the companies doing the buying.”
The posts are already rolling in:
https://www.tiktok.com/@southernbelleinsults/video/6881652261014097157
https://www.tiktok.com/@southernbelleinsults/video/6882761069232770310
https://www.tiktok.com/@southernbelleinsults/video/6882457633840827654
12 Comments
Mmmm, dark money.
The last people you should trust to pay you thousands of dollars for giving them free marketing are “online pranksters”Nice job shitting on young people for having to get healthcare through our employers while you’re at it. that is totally what we thought was the best solution when we all got together in the 1940’s.
Getting paid to be anti-capitalism. Seems like someone isn’t thinking this through
Hey, it worked for Rage Against the Machine!
it may be a form of capitalism but its not free market capitalism, its crony capitalism, given the lobbying in place to keep these big firms in power and not break up big tech
Strange how Twitter isn’t on that list…
Twitter doesn’t make money.
Ohhhh not literally. I was just about to buy some of that Kardashian diarrhea tea to make it really count too.
Would this still fly on the AV Club if they targeted the endless affiliate shills from G/O Media? Yeah, we know there’s a GIANT IMPENETRABLE WALL between “advertising and editorial” because everyone clicks through the disclaimers and reads the fine print. It’s not advertising, it’s “COMMERCE CONTENT.”
You ever get that feeling that you KNOW someone’s gonna post that “yet you participate in society” comic sometime?
I think this article would go over a lot better if the “Get Out and Vote” previously stapled to the top of the screen hadn’t been replaced with a “Make Jeff Bezos the first trillionaire!”
the site declares, promising to pay $1,000 if you get more than 50,000 views using the clip, a parody of Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” about Elon Musk. … Head here to hear all the custom sounds, which throw an anti-capitalist spin on tracks like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” and The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” among others.
But I want to keep liking those songs.