Nologolympians, bingewatching, and why magazines aren’t dead
No-logo sportswear hits the Olympic track
For the month of August, Discomfort Zone is going summer-bod slim! You’re getting a lite edition for the price of a regular one (which is zero dollars). Enjoy it and then head out into the sun or the shade, depending on your preference.
Have you ever paid for a shopping bag and then realized you’re doing free advertising for the store by carrying it around? The same situation applies to track athletes who wear branded apparel and shoes.
As you watch Olympic competitors striving for medals in Paris, are you aware that only the big-name track-and-field stars get sponsorship deals from global brands like Nike, Adidas, and Puma? Lesser-known athletes who don’t earn a penny for representing their countries are basically human billboards providing tons of free publicity to the brands whose logos adorn their gear.
Now, one small athletic apparel brand aims to change how the race for dollars is run. Bandit Running’s Unsponsored Project provides exclusive logo-free all-black kits for individual athletes such as American sprinters Chris Royster and TJ Smith. Bandit also stepped in to create the Olympic uniform for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines middle-distance runners when their sponsor dropped out last year.
Although upstart Brooklyn label Bandit is hoping for some brand recognition itself, the Unsponsored Project’s goal is to create a win-win scenario where athletes who shine on the Olympic stage receive cash compensation with no strings attached while potentially attracting deals from the major labels.
As the company explains, “We supply all of our supported athletes with unbranded kits and warmups in order to make it as clear as possible that they are unaffiliated and open for sponsorship business. In doing so, we took our pinnacle Bandit racing kits and removed the branding, creating a clean, all-black top and bottom to make their free agent status loud and clear.”
During last year’s project launch, nine athletes wore unbranded singlets and crops at the US Outdoors championships, with one athlete earning a full-time sponsorship deal with a major footwear brand as a result of Bandit’s involvement.
The majority of track-and-field athletes are semi-pro at best, meaning they have to work one or more jobs to support themselves during the brief period when they are at their physical peak. The Bandit initiative represents a no-strings-attached opportunity to run like the wind without giving billion-dollar brands a free place in the sun.
The Games embrace AI
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) might as well rename itself the AIOC this summer, as the Paris Games plug into a slew of enhancements powered by artificial intelligence. This Wired article outlines the cutting-edge tech on display at the Olympics, and there’s no denying that the impact of gen AI will be felt in a number of areas. These range from improved judging accuracy to real-time energy management using digital twins, and from 360-degree viewer experiences to social media monitoring to protect athletes from online abuse.
The IOC’s Chief Technology Officer, Ilario Corna, commented, “We are taking a measured approach for now, to test and evaluate how AI can be used to enhance the Olympic Games and have them future-ready.” That future will arrive next year when the IOC plans to launch a global AI-driven talent identification project to ensure that AI in sports is available to everyone.
Capitalism’s endgame might be trading bananas
An anonymous online game that involves clicking on a picture of a banana appeared to be June’s most-played game on Steam. But the Banana game’s anonymous developers then revealed that only one-third of the players were humans.
What’s the point of setting up bots to click on a digital fruit? Players earn “bananas” that are initially worth just a few cents, but with enough clicks can rise in value to hundreds of dollars and be traded for real-world bucks. They aren’t NFTs but they are digital trading cards. Or maybe they’re a Ponzi scheme.
Meta cancels celeb AI bots
Just last September, Meta made a big announcement that users would be able to interact with AI characters who looked and sounded like celebrities such as Tom Brady, Paris Hilton, and Bear Grylls. This week the project was canceled in favor of AI Studio, which will allow US users to create chatbots of themselves.
Chatting with an AI version of yourself is a key feature of my futuristic satire, 2084. Here’s my novel’s explanation of a “memoryself”:
The premise was simple and the promise was seductive: the entirety of the data forming one’s online self – from baby pictures uploaded by fawning parents to teenage selfies, and from long-forgotten group chats to comment section tirades – the personas, the posts, the memes and the reels, the information was compiled by artificial intelligence to form a sort of historical avatar that could converse with its real-world contemporary self as though it was a different person. This was narcissism on speed, and it resulted in the occasional overdose.
Looks like Mr. Zuckerberg is making my dreams/nightmares come true sooner than expected!
Arjun Basu, brand strategist, author, podcaster
I can’t be the only person who feels like online “discourse” is accelerating off a cliff in a crazymobile fuelled by outrage, misinformation, misogyny, tribalism, and aggression. One sanctuary from digital distraction is print magazines. Turning the pages of a beautifully designed and written mag can seem like a relic of the twentieth century. But could magazines be making a comeback, à la vinyl records? To find out, I talked to Arjun Basu, whose podcast Full Bleed is about the future of magazines – and the magazines of the future.
Q. The general public and even many people who work in the communications field seem to believe that print magazines are dead. What evidence have you seen to the contrary?
A. Print magazines are not dead. The industry has changed, surely, and is in a transitional phase, but it is not dead. If anything, the very things that made the digital space so powerful may be the same things that will ensure the survival of print.
I host a podcast about the future of magazines and the magazines of the future called The Full Bleed. After the first season, I put the overarching themes into a blog post but quite simply they are:
A new reader-supported model has gained traction as smaller publishers try to wean themselves off the dictates of advertisers
More than a handful of major publications that went digital-only are reintroducing their print versions to create a fuller and more robust media ecosystem
Many print brands are doing fine, even without a digital presence
The backlash to the muck of the internet is good for print
The physical, creative, and editorial quality of the newer print magazines is off the charts
Print is now seen as an antidote to the mess of the internet, especially with the rise of AI. Coming out of the pandemic, many people grew fatigued of their screens and research shows this among the young as well. If also you extend the discussion of print to books, e-books seem to have plateaued, print is holding steady, and the real rise is in audiobooks (as an aside, BookTok, which obviously lives entirely within TikTok, is almost totally centered around… physical books).
Not only that, but research has consistently shown that the print experience is far more immersive and better at recall (though not as good for “action” for reasons that are obvious) and that ads work better in print.
Is print diminished? Most surely. Especially in North America. You’d be foolish to believe otherwise. But print magazines survive and will continue to for some time yet. A new set of independent publishers are crafting and publishing tremendously original magazines all over the world.
Beyond the traditional centers like New York, Paris, Tokyo, and London, original magazines are coming out of Berlin and Amsterdam, Montreal and Toronto, Madrid and Mexico City, Shanghai and Sydney… you name it. These publications might be more difficult to find now, and, yes, you may first come across them online, but the print versions are worth seeking out. Because the variety out there right now is astounding.
Arjun Basu is a writer and brand, content, and marketing consultant, as well as the host of the Full Bleed Podcast. His upcoming novel, The Reeds, will be published in October. He lives in Montreal.
Don’t cringe when you binge
When the ancient Greeks sat down to listen to an hours-long epic poem by Homer, were they binge-watching? Heck, yes! And nobody felt guilty doing it.
While it’s true that giant corporations like Netflix profit from our undivided attention, this article in The Conversation points out that dramatic cliffhangers and narrative closure have been around as long as people have loved stories.
There is personal and social value to the experience and sharing of an epic tale, and nobody should be ashamed. Especially women, who, as the article points out, were the victims of a moral panic in England when novels became popular. Men believed that women had become hooked on books, which led to them exhibiting all kinds of unsavory behavior, including… laughing out loud!
As one male commentator put it, “Women, of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels […T]he depravity is universal. My sight is every-where offended by these foolish, yet dangerous, books.”
So, ladies (and gentlemen), turn on the TV and slouch on that couch or open that laptop and lay your head on that bed, then binge-watch to your heart’s content. It’s part of what makes you a person. And if you aren’t a subscriber to Discomfort Zone, I strongly encourage you to go back to the archives and binge every issue!
The family feud that created Adidas vs Puma
In keeping with the pseudo-Olympic theme of this issue, do you know the origin story of Adidas and Puma? Rudi and Adi Dassler were brothers who created a boot and shoe manufacturing company in a tiny Bavarian town just over a century ago. They ended up being buried at opposite ends of the same century. Why? Because of the family feud that split the original company and spawned Adidas and Puma.
From Jessie Owens, who defied Hitler by winning gold at the 1936 Berlin games to Muhammad Ali who ruled the boxing ring wearing Adidas, to Pele, who amazed soccer fans in Puma shoes, the brands created by the Dassler brothers are part of sports history.
This episode of Tim Harford’s always-fascinating Cautionary Tales podcast covers the betrayal, revenge, and bitter hatred that fueled one of the greatest business rivalries of all time.
Are humans imitating AI a shallowfake?
Worried about deepfakes? Maybe we should just make fun of them. I love this short video posted on Tumblr of two young men pretending to be a generative AI video.
Did you enjoy this issue of Discomfort Zone? You can comment directly in the Substack app or drop me a line by emailing me at john@johnbdutton.com.
And why not connect with me on LinkedIn if you haven’t already?
Additional reporting by Diana Sia Yambaye.
Legal disclaimer: All images in this newsletter that are not the property of the author are used with permission or reproduced under the fair use provisions of the Canadian Copyright Act while giving appropriate credit.