Fracking for Cool
On Vice, the ZIRP Era, and Amalia Ulman's "Magic Farm"
As we head into the season of year-end lists, I wanted to share an essay that was originally commissioned for a limited-edition booklet accompanying the US release of Amalia Ulman’s 2025 film “Magic Farm”. I’m a bit biased but it’s truly one of the year’s best, and, though the film is “about” much more, it captures the absurdism of the ZIRP-enabled “hipster globalization” era like nothing else I’ve yet seen. While it’s set in Argentina, it chimed with my experiences working in similar creative industries in Asia in the early 2010s (including, occasionally and quite ambivalently, with Vice itself). I was glad for the chance to ruminate a bit on the political economy of cool, ZIRP-era media, and the colonial dynamics of “trend forecasting”, as part of ongoing writing on related themes. Ulman has always been ridiculously ahead of her time—her 2014 project Excellences and Perfections presaged the way social media would enforce a commodification of the self that would unfold over the coming decade. With “Magic Farm”, she turns that gaze backward, on a moment we’re only starting to make sense of now that it is over. Also in that same booklet was this great piece by Whitney Mallett about American Apparel, now also up online. Enjoy, follow Amalia’s own blog, and seek out the film if you haven’t seen it yet.
“We’ll Get You Your Thumbnail: The Hipster Media Empire and the End of the ZIRP Era”
Samantha Culp
In an early scene in Amalia Ulman’s 2025 film Magic Farm, Dave (Simon Rex), the executive of a media company, is preparing to fly back to New York only hours after arriving in Argentina for a shoot. His largely American team is attempting to profile a wacky local musician they discovered online, but are having trouble locating him. He tells his young staff, who seem to already be facing the limits of their own competence as journalists: “You guys just make a good show, okay? This is already costing twice as much as that piece we did on the Bolivian teen exorcists.” The sweet-natured sound guy Justin (Joe Apollonio) knowingly reassures him: “Don’t worry dude—we’ll get you your thumbnail.”
This small exchange illustrates so much about these characters and their world, but also, more broadly, the extractive economics of the hipster media empire they work for, and the entire zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) era of capitalism which we can only see clearly now that it’s in the rear-view mirror. For anyone who ever worked for Vice, the company that clearly inspired the fictitious one in this film, the scene triggers an uncanny sense of déjà vu.
Someday, our grandchildren may ask us: “What was Vice anyway?” In retrospect, the company’s arc reads like an Adderall-fueled allegory about the cooptation of youth culture by neoliberal globalization. Originally started as a government grant-funded punk zine in Montreal in 1994, Vice grew into a free, ad-supported print magazine that was ubiquitous in record stores and vintage boutiques across North America and beyond. Vice covered “music, art, trends, and drug culture” with a rude signature voice and brash photography from the likes of Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson. The three original founders of Vice—Shane Smith, Suroosh Alvi, and Gavin McInnes—honed a template that was, in McInnes’ own words, “stupid in a smart way and smart in a stupid way,” and were unafraid to offend anyone across the political spectrum, which often meant plenty of “ironic racism” in the magazine’s pages1. This took on an even darker cast after McInnes parted ways with the magazine in 2008, and went on to found violent alt-right extremist group the Proud Boys.
Vice’s sensibility sold, to put it mildly, and they began two decades of manic expansion. In a late ’90s interview, Alvi defined this ethos as punk capitalism: “Staying who we are, yet wanting to do some business.”2 By 1999 the company had moved to New York and in 2006 launched a digital video website in partnership with MTV, which soon sprouted dedicated verticals on art, electronic music, food, and sports. At the same time, Vice established Virtue, a marketing and creative agency to service brands that wanted to advertise with them, and to pursue lucrative partnerships with companies like Intel, Google, Snapchat, Levi Strauss & Co, Hennessy, Unilever, Bank of America, Toyota, and Philip Morris. In essence, Vice made the cool “thumbnails” that attracted young eyeballs, and Virtue made the ads that would sit next to them, reaching the wallets on the other side of those eyeballs. Multinational corporations paid handsomely to blend in better—in other words, Vice offered them a hipster camouflage for the same old beer, car, and sneaker ads. The difference between these two types of thumbnail could be negligible, which was of course the point (particularly because it was often the same people working on both). Eventually, critics would say Vice was “an advertising agency with a news outlet attached,” instead of the other way around. But the business model for traditional media was imploding, the argument went, so if doing some sneaker-sponsored video profiles of graffiti artists could help bankroll the fun, weird shit on the site—as well as the occasional hard-hitting political reportage, what was wrong with that? The argument continued from a growing number of genuinely great journalists who came onboard to work for Vice—what if, uh, there are fewer and fewer other jobs out there?
Because of discernible profits plus the brilliant bullshit artistry of Vice’s executive chairman Shane Smith, from 2013 Vice began attracting attention and capital from the “old media” establishment: companies like Fox, Disney, and Hearst (via the television network A&E) invested hundreds of millions of dollars. Vice started tackling more ambitious reporting, setting out to disprove they were merely “hipsters with camcorders” when it came to important global news stories. In a 2013 interview, Vice UK editor-in-chief Alex Miller explained: “We have basically gone from putting on loads of parties and taking drugs and staying up late and watching bands to thinking, actually, the world is changing, it's becoming a more serious place.”3 HBO began airing a Vice news show that was originally pitched as “60 Minutes meets Jackass,” but soon won awards for surprisingly serious journalism on topics like human rights abuses in Myanmar and the Syrian civil war.
With each new funding round, channel launch, international office opening, or Emmy win, Smith claimed bigger valuations for the company. After an investment deal with the private equity firm TPG Capital in 2017, Vice’s value went up to 5.7 billion USD. For a time they even planned to go public. But then it all began crumbling, through #MeToo scandals, mass layoffs, dwindling profits, and a rotating door of new C-suiters, who each wandered off with six-figure bonuses even as the rest of their staffs were downsized by the hundreds. Following multiple rounds of layoffs, the firm filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Vice’s future is unknown, but it’s clear this chapter of its history is finished.
Those are just the headlines. It’s harder to give a snapshot of just how influential and omnipresent Vice was during the years of its ascension—particularly as it solidified its global reach by opening offices in over 30 countries that churned out content by and for diverse regional audiences, as well as helping cover trends and news for the largely Anglophone mothership. For a certain time, in certain global cities, if you worked in or around journalism, documentary, music, or art, it was highly likely you might end up working for Vice. Whether you were paid—much, on time, or at all—for such work is another question, as Vice was notorious for underpaying their young creatives (the “vibe” and the dangled carrot of future projects were meant to supplement the fee)4. There was also a persistent rumor that Vice had an unofficial policy of paying freelancer invoices as late as possible—often up to six months—so that at any given moment, there were more assets on the books to look good for investors.
I myself was one of these freelancers on more than one occasion. One job involved scouting for a sneaker company that wanted a campaign featuring an artist making an eye-catching public piece in some Southeast Asian locale. After rounds of client feedback, it became uncomfortably similar to a scenario in Magic Farm, when it was clear we would have to reverse-engineer a trend or character that didn’t quite exist: “Can you find a female street artist, in Indonesia, who has a cool look, speaks English, and does, like, massive wall murals with either neon-colored tape or recycled LED lights?” Coordinating with local artist friends, we did manage to “cast” this role with an artist who was willing to stretch her typical practice for a pretty sizable fee, but the piece never got made.
Of course, Vice did not invent the commodification of youth culture, nor the concept of “coolhunting” in the Global South for markets in the Global North (and sometimes vice versa). They were just the latest, perhaps most state-of-the-art machinery in the cool-industrial complex, putting a particularly efficient twist on fracking pockets of “undiscovered” cultural and aesthetic energy for profit. The world of trend forecasting, market research, and consumer ethnography has long been criticized for its colonial dynamics. Nowhere is this better summarized than in a throwaway line from Malcolm Gladwell’s canonical 1997 article on the rise of coolhunters, which describes them as “the Lewis and Clark of cool,” after the military explorers who led an 1804 expedition across western North America to map Indigenous lands and facilitate colonial expansion5.
Not all of Vice/Virtue’s activities could be categorized as “trend reports,” but their general positioning was based on the same logic, and they were right on time to tap into the rising tides of neoliberal globalization, even as they reported on its injustices and catastrophes in their news section. In her excellent history of the trend industry, scholar Devon Powers describes how trends became an ever-more prevalent lingua franca in the corporate world of the 1990s. “What distinguishes the trend industry’s take on globalization is its forward momentum, or the contention that globalization is where the future resides,” she argues. “The global is the future because it represents the plane of possibility; like the future, the global is at once boundless and manageable, reachable and elusive, quotidian and utopic.”6 For its part, Vice helped package a hipster vision of globalization, with its Bolivian teen exorcists and heavy metalheads in Baghdad, which was at once intimidatingly exotic yet reassuringly accessible. And Vice was able to expand so extensively through another historical development that eventually also led to its downfall—the era of zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP).
In late 2008, after the American subprime mortgage crisis and resulting Great Recession, the U.S. Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to almost zero to try to stimulate growth, investment, and jobs. ZIRP remained in place until 2015, when the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates until approximately 2.5% in 2018, but then slashed them back down to near zero between 2020 and 2022 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The direct result of ZIRP in the U.S. was that borrowing money was cheap, which also meant that traditional investments were generating lower returns, so venture capital was driven to seek new and riskier horizons of investments for better payouts. This nearly 15-year period was a boom time for Silicon Valley, allowing established behemoths like Apple and Google to bolster their empires, and scrappy start-ups to focus on rapid expansion and user growth instead of immediate profitability. But the ripple effects were felt in realms far beyond tech. Investment flowed into entertainment, media, retail and food and beverage, inflating the value of certain companies, destabilizing traditional business models, and creating the consumer ecosystem of the upwardly mobile, Western millennial lifestyle that was taken as the new normal until the cheap cash that had irrigated this ecosystem started to dry up.
In Hollywood, the ZIRP-subsidized streaming wars supercharged a tidal wave of content, and then destroyed the foundational economics of film and television (perhaps permanently). A similar story unfolded in traditional journalism, as the business model for news institutions was first weakened by the shift to digital, then further eroded by the “pivot to video” gospel, based on largely fraudulent numbers touted by Facebook to get more publishers on its platform. This left many news outlets vulnerable to the interest of private equity firms, who did not care about the function of journalism, and would often drive them into the ground and strip them for parts. One metric estimates that over the past 19 years the U.S. lost “almost one-third of its newspapers and roughly two-thirds of its newspaper journalists.”7
Vice was one of the companies that surfed the wave better than most, benefitting from investment that let it build a bigger house of cards… until it collapsed. Vice had been profitable, but was now running on fumes, with one former executive calling their accounting practices “fanfiction finance.”8 The end of the ZIRP era revealed that the underlying economics of many business models had been nothing more than a mirage. Seen through this lens, the fact that the Magic Farm crew in Argentina ends up not finding their original story but concocting an entirely fake trend, for a segment that never even airs, is a perfect embodiment of the ZIRP era, and the fictions underlying late capitalism as a whole. It’s an additional layer of fitting irony that the team fails to investigate the actual, important story right under their noses—the spraying of crops with Monsanto’s toxic glyphosates (called “the most controversial pesticide in the world”) that are making the entire community sick. It’s not impossible to envision a “Magic Farm Extended Universe” in which some of their colleagues from the news side do eventually report on the agrochemical scandal—maybe even winning a Peabody award—but still get fired when the parent company goes bankrupt. The ruins that remain of this empire will be the thumbnails it was built from—or eventually, as server bills go unpaid and link rot sets in, the thumbnails will disappear, and only exist on some underpaid freelancer’s external hard-drive, buried deep in a drawer.
In June 2024, it was announced that Vice, or what remained of it, was partnering with a Tennessee-based private equity firm called Savage Ventures to relaunch their cultural, sports, and lifestyle content and would soon start an email newsletter. With all its staff laid off, who exactly will be writing these newsletters? As Los Angeles Times’s tech critic Brian Merchant points out, given the firm’s track record, it could likely be created by generative AI.9 Savage ventures indeed. The old days of “punk capitalism” look almost quaint in comparison.10
Lizzie Widdicombe, “The Bad Boy Brand,” The New Yorker (1 April 2013): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/08/the-bad-boy-brand
Alexandra Molotkow, “Vice: We've Been Had, and We Let It Happen,” Hazlitt (2 October 2014): https://hazlitt.net/longreads/vice-weve-been-had-and-we-let-it-happen.
Ben Machell, “The Vice squad,” The Times (26 January 2013): https://www.thetimes.com/article/the-vice-squad-xtgszscs6bs.
Elizabeth Lopatto, “Transparent Vice,” The Verge (1 April 2024): https://www.theverge.com/24094310/vice-media-layoffs-bankruptcy-shane-smith.
Malcolm Gladwell, “The Coolhunt,” The New Yorker (10 March 1997): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/03/17/the-coolhunt.
Devon Powers, On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future (University of Illinois Press, 2019), 113.
Ryan McCarthy, “Why Does Journalism Seem Like It’s Collapsing? Call It Market Failure,” Fast Company (2 February 2024): https://www.fastcompany.com/91021907/why-does-journalism-seem-like-its-collapsing-call-it-market-failure.
Lopatto, “Transparent Vice.”
This essay itself was completed before Vice relaunched in late 2024; I have not seen much of the new output, but at the very least, I hope they are paying their contributors decently and on time 🙏
Spot on; your deep dive into ZIRP-era media and the commodification of self is incredibily insightful.