Quibi’s demise—just six months after the premium short-form smartphone-focused streaming service went live—made headlines last week. Company founder (and former head of Walt Disney Studios) Jeffrey Katzenberg claimed the COVID-19 pandemic held sole responsibility for Quibi’s $1.8 billion failure. As is usually the case, the reality is much more complicated. The Quibi fiasco makes a good case, I think, for ethnographic research in business.

When Quibi launched in early April, my senior year of college had just moved online. Like everyone else I knew, I was figuring out what it meant to quarantine and work from home—washing groceries, juggling Zoom calls and classes, baking bread, and of course, watching a lot of TV. I was also writing up the results of my senior thesis research project on prairie restoration in Midwestern urban parks. I had spent most of 2019 analyzing survey data and talking with residents in my town about what they thought of the Parks Department’s recent “re-wilding” initiative. They really didn’t like “overgrown” grass in their parks, it turned out, and the reasons why were complex and had to do with ideas about place attachment, aesthetic order, and a very specific sort of nature-culture relationship. If the Parks Department had commissioned a study like mine before deciding to reintroduce prairie areas into the parks, they may have had an easier time targeting relevant stakeholders with relevant information (why prairies are good for the city and the environment, what the process of reintroduction would look like, etc.) to avoid the backlash they ended up getting. All this is to say, ethnographic research is a pretty good tool for explaining what’s happening and why in a given place and, in turn, informing decisions.

During Quibi’s early days, I remember chatting (over Zoom) with a friend at length about the bizarreness of this new “Netflix challenger.” Though I never subscribed to Quibi (a recent college grad can only afford so many streaming services), I did see a lot of the company’s ads. Katzenberg spent $63 million on marketing during Quibi’s short life—including on a series of Super Bowl ads depicting characters in life-threatening situations where they had “just a Quibi” of time left (to live?), just enough to watch a “quick bite” of TV on their phones. Watching an actor playing the president’s advisor warn her that an asteroid would hit Earth in “two to three Quibis, tops” felt like being force-fed a corporate neologism. The logic of the core concept—10-minute or less TV show episodes—also seemed hard to pin down. As my friend put it—“who watches a show they enjoy and says, ‘you know, I’d really like less of this.’” Especially during the pandemic, I know I’ve gravitated toward longform content—movies, hours-long podcasts, etc. Furthermore, in Quibi’s ideal use case—liminal time spent waiting in line or commuting—people seem to be doomscrolling Twitter or watching truly short-form (10 second not 10 minute) free content on TikTok and Snapchat. The question everyone seemed to be asking this summer was “who’s actually watching Quibi?”

Quibi’s executives banked a lot on their hunch that premium “quick bites” were exactly what young Americans wanted. They furnished a lavish 49,000-foot office and attracted big names—Steven Spielberg, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Lopez, Chistoph Waltz, to name just a few—to produce shows with $100,000/minute budgets. From the beginning, the young company seemed to ooze hubris. A Vulture article asked why Katzenberg, a seasoned executive in his late 60s who doesn’t use social media and has his emails printed out by an assistant, believed he had “uniquely penetrating insight into the unacknowledged desires of young people.” Company insiders, quoted in the same article, said Katzenberg was incredibly dismissive of Quibi’s audience and claimed he “knew millennials better than millennials.” When asked “where’s the data” his response seemed to consistently be “go with your gut.” The Guardian called Quibi an “idea born in a LA conference room that will probably die in the real world.” And die it did.

Quibi turned out to be a “product not enough real people wanted” and “a solution to a problem that didn’t really exist.” There was probably a way to figure that out without spending about $2 billion—a way that involves data, not the gut. Netflix famously hired cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken to visit binge watchers in their homes and figure them out. McCracken, like Tricia Wang and other tech anthropologists, believes in using qualitative ethnographic (“thick” and unquantifiable) data to contextualize quantitative “big” (quantifiable and generalizing) data that corporations typically use to inform decisions and design algorithms. In response to his research, Netflix began distributing shows whole seasons at a time (instead of episodes weekly) to facilitate the binging that McCracken found users loved so much. It seems like Quibi’s founders should have imitated their self-proclaimed competitors and conducted research (especially ethnographic research) to determine whether the product they planned to offer was one that people actually wanted.

Some have claimed that Netflix’s move to embrace anthropology was merely an attempt to put a human face on big data and “make its algorithmic future seem a little less dystopian.” Corporate anthropology is certainly a complicated and controversial issue. By suggesting Quibi’s founders could have hired someone like McCracken to go out into the world and study how people really consume short-form content and how they’d like to, I don’t mean to say it’s always anthropology’s duty to help businesses learn to run themselves better. Private-sector ethnography is certainly limited and can simplify and reduce “culture to mere consumerism” as many have argued in the past, but it can also counter algorithms and the quantification bias and empower consumers who are usually voiceless. In this case, it could have told Katzenberg what those consumers were shouting: “We don’t want this!” When billions of dollars are on the line, it only makes sense to take a few Quibis and do the research before renting the office space.

Christian Elliott

Christian is a journalism graduate student at Northwestern University. He received his Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology and environmental studies from Augustana College, a small liberal arts school in Rock Island, Illinois, in 2020. He enjoys bringing together anthropological research/theory and personal experience to tell true (written and audio) stories and understand our complicated, globalized world a little better. You can reach Christian on Twitter @csbelliott.

Source

In this series of posts, I provide an account of my new relationship with the American Geophysical Union (the largest community of earth & space scientists) as an anthropologist who is doing inter-disciplinary research in the Lumbee Tribe after Hurricane Matthew (2016). Thank you to Matthew Thompson for inviting me to write with Anthrodendum.

In recent years, anthropology has joined many other academic disciplines in accusing humans of destroying the earth. This destruction has been summed up in one word: “anthropocene”. The word “anthropocene” has a mysterious history. Wikipedia contributors have created a fairly accessible article that sheds light on the origins of the word. One of the most interesting origin stories is that “anthropocene” was sort of an accident that jumped off the lips of Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen in the early 2000s. An article in Smithsonian magazine documents how “anthropocene” subsequently became fashionable in the planetary science community. Afterwards, British scholars in the journal for the Geological Society of America (GSA) asked readers to consider the term “anthropocene” – which is literally a mashup of  “human” & “new” –  as the official label for the planetary epoch within which we now live.

Here, I want to draw attention to something. There are two (2) assumptions within conversations about “anthropocene” that I cannot ignore:

• There is an assumption that changes in the earth are the created by all humans who are equally present.
• There is also an assumption that we all had/have equitable opportunities to affect, craft, & enact policies regarding human vulnerability.

Although anthropologists have been talking about the anthropocene, I’m not sure if we have been talking  within it.

To be within the anthropocene means that we fully realize that the naming of a planetary epoch is, like many other things, a colonial process. Sidney Mintz (an anthropologist) prefaced his book Sweetness & Power (1985) with a poignant quote from J.H. Bernardin de Saint Pierre:

“I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them.”

Mintz began Sweetness & Power this way because it had become quite apparent in his fieldwork that Europe (and subsequently America) took the lead in a global endeavor to exploit brown and black peoples for the sake of stripping the Earth of indigenous natural resources & cultivating crops through the enslavement of those brown and black peoples. Mintz’s text was formidable in that it called out the capitalistic processes that were owned by White entrepreneurs & that placed inequitable pressure on non-White people to accept changes in land & reinventions of their diets.

For example, Mintz pointed out that, in the early 1900s, sugar was being “pumped” into the crevasses of many poor communities. As a result, sugar became associated with “the good life” (pp. 188-190). In indigenous communities today, the “good life” has become epidemic rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease that are catalyzed by sugary (sugar-like) substances. Sugar replaced other (perhaps indigenous) sources of calories. Mintz asserts that sugar contained more calories per unit of land harvested than any other crop, a reality which led to the rise of corporations like Nestle that have turned the hyper-harvest of sugar into its current global domination of consumable goods. (Nestle is accused of hijacking water throughout the United States.)

This story of food-centered corporations hijacking land & water parallels stories of other corporations that aim to use particular sections of the American ecosystem to advance their profits against the cultural and biomedical needs of vulnerable and/or indigenous community members. Recent stories about Chemours (formerly Dupont) illustrate conditions within which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has turned a blind eye toward corporate poisoning of ecosystems in eastern North Carolina. In other news, the state of North Carolina recently approved the advancement of the Atlantic Coastal Pipeline through eastern North Carolina, which allows natural gas companies to systematically target many of the state’s Native American communities.This type of collusion between federal, state, and local powerbrokers – vis-a-vis Native America – is not new.

Consider the disappearance of particular animals in the United States within Native American territories. Before the 20th century, the U.S. federal government sponsored the annihilation of herds of buffalo – effectively annihilating the ecosystems of various tribal communities in Native America. These sorts of policies continued into the mid-20th century when the federal government had a hands-off approach to financial practices in and around Native American farming communities. In North Carolina, laws protecting the fair sale/trade of land were positioned to advantage White landowners. White land owners would employ Native American sharecroppers and they (the White land owners) would demand that Native American sharecroppers purchase and use an overabundance of pesticides on the lands that the sharecroppers farmed. By the 1960s, the pesticide of choice was DDT, which was pushed by federal agricultural programs as a global cure-all in an era where jungles in Vietnam & swamps in the U.S. South were being cleared for reasons that we still don’t fully understand. Native American ecosystems throughout the U.S. South lost important animals like rabbits, raccoons, & quail. Even after the large-scale denunciation of DDT as a pesticide of choice across the United States in the late 1960s, ecosystems in North Carolina’s Native American communities have never been restored.

So, yes, as we enter into the “anthropocene”, we might find that the term remains wanting. We must consider what it means that the “anthropocene” possesses assumptions that we are equally present and that we equitably participate in the business & governance of the planet when both assumptions are wrong. Indeed, we must acknowledge that in our collective conversation about a changing planet, our goal ought to be to set the stage for purposeful human conversations about how we see the planet differently.

To be continued…

David Shane Lowry

David Shane Lowry, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT. In this role, David is leading a new conversation at MIT about the responsibilities of MIT (and science/technology education, more generally) in the theft of American Indian land and the dismantling of American Indian health and community. Since 2013, David has lectured across the United States – roles in which he has become well versed in conversations at the intersection of race, (health) science & popular culture. His first book, titled Lumbee Pipelines (under contract with University of Nebraska Press), explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions to create opportunities that are both uplifting and oppressive. His second book, titled Black Jesus, is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. It began when David realized that he and Jordan shared the same anthropology advisor at UNC … 23 years apart.

Source