The Blackbird Spyplane Profound Essay Archive
Mindsets, ways to live a Mach 3+ life, and ruminations on vexing questions — with 100% "unbeatable" answers
Blackbird Spyplane isn’t just your No. 1 source across all media for “unbeatable recon.” We’re also your No. 1 source for delightful philosophical grappling with the most profound questions life and the swag sciences inspire…
We wanted to gather together our greatest essays, mindsets and swag-semiotical explorations into how to live a Mach 3+ life from over the years.
Enjoy.
2025
I (Jonah) started to feel like I was looking at a phone even when my phone wasn’t out. But your attention is all you have, and wasting it feels annihilating — so I decided to do something about it. 2025’s Profound Year End Essay.
Why would anyone outsource the delight of making things — of being human — to generative AI?
A simple remedy for scrolling addiction: Realizing that you look dumb looking at your phone, and also we should tell time by church bells.
Does fashion hate women? A conversation between Erin and New York Times Styles editor Stella Bugbee.
A defining question of our times, answered definitively.
We made national headlines with this scoop.
Against cursed cheesy money-getting and the inevitable commercialization of all human existence.
There’s a flood of “good clothes” these days. But only the best of them have a smell.
What’s going on with the fetish for (sclerotic) blue-chip institutions? We need based pleasures and blessed new forms.
As earth’s No. 1 most anti-consumerist dope-clothes newsletter we are the only people who can correctly answer this question.
Who’s still buying stuff that looks this torched?
2024
The best new clothing store in the world has no web shop. How do some of our favorite stores thrive by staying offline?
Status anxiety in the Unswaggy Valley.
The thing where people divide the price of a garment by the number of times they wear it, in an effort to assess and/or demonstrate its “true value,” is actually a misguided and joyless way to think about clothes.
The endangered pleasures of inefficiency, inconvenience, and ecstatic boredom in the Dark Digital Hyper-Abundance Era.
Regarding every purchase you make as an asset in the future resale market… couldn’t be us!
The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people to consumer demographics, but because, in an era when we’re all encouraged to cultivate our own “personal brands,” it also reduces each of us to a salesperson, seeking out likeminded people in order to sell them things…
Trash jawns are too cheap. Slappers have gone $$$tratospheric. A major Spyplane Essay on value and swag.
2023
We live in a SALES BLOAT era because sales are, at root, an essential feature of a system built on excess production.
Beware the S.O.S. (State of Shopping), a cursed swag-vacuum limbo realm of copping a new garment, unable to cross the threshold into weaving a garment into your gestalt to the degree it registers as truly, effortlessly, naturally yours.
What it means to put together an outfit.
The Taliban has fresher trucks than us. The Honda Fit is dead. You can’t find a sauced-out 2-door to save your life. How did we get here?
The term “affordable” has been almost totally co-opted into just another dull and swagless shopping category. If you have Mad Interesting Naturally Developed Swag, Enthusiasm and Taste — a.k.a. “M.I.N.D.S.E.T. Mindset” — you can freak a Goodwill and come out looking incredible.
The e-commerce giant is valued in the billions. People compare it to Amazon. What does its rise mean for small designers & shops? A landmark piece of Spyplane Investigative Reporting.
There’s a swag crater in the secondhand market, and it’s only growing, because the primary market has been choking on ever-increasing varieties of garbage for more than a decade.
Stack Your Cuffs King! Getting dressed from the cuffs out, and unlocking Mach 7+ layering combos.
Pan Sear Your Kicks — wear is the only way to take ownership of a piece.
Is it ever okay to “showroom,” i.e., hit a brick-and-mortar store, try on something you like, and then bounce to go buy it online at a lower price…?
A taxonomy of good & bad stains.
Exploring the allure of cursed garments and logos, which reflects a mounting frustration with the nagging sense that symbolic debates do not actually serve justice and that our political power as individuals is almost fully coterminous with our consumer choices.
2022
The easiest way to problematize “be yourself” is to recognize that, while it contains within it a valuable kernel of truth, so does the exact opposite advice, which is also way more interesting and, ultimately, way more useful when it comes to developing personal style: Be someone else!
Celebrating the weird treasure that is Chris Smith’s 1999 documentary American Movie, and the broader lessons contained within.
Tools to help everyone stop feeling like they need to buy everything they like all the time, including the N.O. C.A.P. Mindset (Non-Obsessive Chill Artgoer’s Perspective).
How do trends work? Tackling the question of whether it’s possible to escape the cycles, and whether it’s even desirable.
“Wet Putty” car colors are everywhere. We investigate.
A landmark piece of Spyplane trend reporting. An Auntwave garment-maker doesn’t need to be a literal aunt — their work will, however, contain such stereotypically aunt-like characteristics as “zany flair” and “kooky swag.”
An epic, user-friendly, two-part guide to wearing color well.
“Democratizing” as it’s used here is a euphemism that translates to “opening up new markets while driving down prices,” and the way prices tend to get driven down in the economy as currently configured is via gargantuan manufacturing capacity, cheap materials, shoddy environmental practices, and trash wages and poor conditions for workers…
Our famous, prophetic piece about the charm of spending time in Ungrammable Hang Zones online and in real life, and avoiding the torched, sterile, lifeless spaces that are becoming the norm.
People say you should get dressed for yourself. That is impossible, because getting dressed is an irreducibly social act, and you always get dressed for other people. Here’s why that’s OK, and how to find a reservoir of “personal drip. “
2021
We call bulls--t on Black Fr-day mania with our “Cop Hardly Anything on Sale” (C.H.A.O.S.) Mindset. Escape “The Theater of the Bargain.”
We expound on the powerful Beautiful Inward-Gazing Blessed Uninterrupted Closed System (B.I.G. B.U.C.S.) Mindset in which one creates a metaphorical Faraday cage around themselves, builds a personal library of pieces, and engages only with things they already own — books, records, clothes, etc.
No company embodies unethical jawns-purveying today as powerfully as Am*zon, with its multifarious, far-reaching TENTACLES and heinous labor practices. But do individual consumer choices, like boycotting evil corporations, make any impact? We talk with labor reporter Alex Press about how the forces of light can “beat Am*zon” — and whether the notion of “consuming nobly” might be a trap the Jeff Bezoses of the world want to bait us into.
The case for only buying clothes in person.
Life-Well-Lived Mindset is about embracing the stains, cracks and wear that inevitably come when you actually use your stuff. The point isn’t to get stains on clothes willy-nilly. It’s to live a life full of Mach 3+ stain-generating moments that are worth the stains!
An analysis of “Collector Brain Worms,” parasitic and beneficial alike.
Bootlegs — they’re everywhere. When are they cool, and when are they depressing? A classic Spyplane critique.
Sometimes when you think something is “nauseatingly ugly,” that’s all there is to it. But sometimes that nausea is your body’s way of alerting you that you are in the presence of an artistic genius so radical, destabilizing and vertiginous that it re-writes the laws of physics around you in real time.
2020
Gorp, a.k.a. outdoor gear is fire, except when it’s cursed. How can you tell the difference? This blockbuster BBSP essay — truly one of the most insane and most beautiful things we’ve published — contains a parable, which contains a moral spark, which contains a brain, which contains a galaxy, which contains the answer.
Do cops and soldiers have… swag? If, in highly cursed & qualified contexts, they do, can clothes enthusiasts “appropriate” that swag? We get into the inner workings of rocking popo / tactical / military gear — and why gorpy brands like Patagonia and Arc’teryx should kill their highly ungorpy defense and law-enforcement contracts.
Do beautiful clothes require rapacious unfettered free-market capitalism to exist? If we lived in a socialist utopia, would great clothes cease to exist? We get beautiful and challenging answers from Yung Chomsky of True Anon.
We uncover the hidden origins of Rage Against the Machine’s very sick molotov cocktail logo as it appears on one of my most cherished t-shirts — and trace it back to the CIA?! Tom Morello never responded to us on Twitter about this one. A fascinating read full of secret aesthetic genealogy.
SPYPLANE HOLY DECREES
We are famously non-judgmental and non-doctrinaire but every now and then we issue a judgmental & doctrinaire holy decree. Here are some of the most powerful:
Spyplane Holy Decree: 🚫Heather Gray Tees🚫
Heather gray tees are not what’s up and if you wear one you should be full of regret.
Biker jackets are not cool
Possibly the least-cool garment conceivable.
The Final Word on “Blue-Collar Stolen Valor”
Our ultimate Spyplane Holy Decree re: the concept of “blue-collar stolen valor” is that, when it isn’t invoked as a joke, it’s an incoherent and ahistorical semiotics game that anxious elites can play amongst themselves, rehearsing their own guilt about the mounting hardships of working people in the most frivolous way possible.
The Case Against No-Show Socks
Airtight.
There’s an even more exhaustive, less curated Essay Archive here.