I am in awe of Microsoft Sam's supercut, "Every Covid-19 Commerical is Exactly the Same."



Sam's right: every one of these videos hits the same notes: "We're here for you," "uncertain times," "people," "families," "we're all in this together."

1/

And Sam's right about the reasons: they're all laboring under the same constraints: producing in a hurry, using stock footage and B-roll, while in the same crisis (in part, this is testament to how similar every director's idea of B-roll is, too).

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But the writing and narration are eerily similar, too, reflecting just how quickly our rhetoric has ossified into cliche.

More than that, I think the writing represents the limited number of ways to paper over the truth we are all sensing.

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That these corporations are not our friends. They are colony organisms that treat us as their inconvenient gut flora. If they survive, it will be because they hire the lobbyists who help them divert stimulus away from us to their shareholders.

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"We're all in it together" the same way were were "all in it together" in 2008, when the banks trousered trillions, used signature mills to steal our houses, and corrupted our political process for a decade.

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They used the money they grifted to back the Trump campaign, because of course they did, because they'd back Adolf Hitler if he'd lower their taxes by a nickel.

"We're all in it together." Some of us are more in this than others.

eof/