What we do and who we do it for

Trust on the grifternet, and the Spyplane position on affiliate links and spon

Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane

Real quick —

If you’re in the Bay, come hear Blackbird Spyplane play some of our favorite music on one of earth’s best sound systems, the OJAS HiFi Listening Room at SFMOMA, next Tuesday, August 6th, from 1:30-5 p.m. The set will end with Sleep’s 1996 hourlong masterpiece “Dopesmoker,” which will be hallucinatory on these speakers.

---

Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, André 3000, 100 gecs, Danielle Haim, Mac DeMarco, Jerry Seinfeld, Matty Matheson, Michael Stipe, Phoebe Bridgers, Seth Rogen, Emily Bode, Alison Roman, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, King Krule, Steven Yeun, John C. Reilly, Clairo, Conner O’Malley, and more are here.

— Jonah & Erin

Today we’ve got a meta sletter for you, where we’re going to “smash the ‘enhance’” on our own recon and explore a controversial & murky topic at the heart of what we do & who we do it for.

Blackbird Spyplane does many incredible things, after all, and a big one is identify, celebrate & link to cool new clothes. Since day one, when we do this, Erin and I (Jonah) have made it a point to never use affiliate links.

Affiliate links contain codes that tell a retailer to kick back a percentage of sales revenue when people click that link and buy something. Over the past several years — as “the influencer economy” spawned “the recommender economy,” and as once-robust profit models continued to wither across media — affiliate links have become standard practice among lots of legacy-media outlets and new-media independent creators, too. Some people, channeling their inner diehard doctrinaire Gen-X voices, might say that if you use affiliate links (and do sponsored posts, and run ads) you’re a sell-out. Other people will tell those people, “Fall back, crusty b*tch, I’m an honest person trying to make a living in a deeply cursed system, let me get this bread.” We live on the grifternet. Do you hate the game or hate the players?

Intriguingly, though, the spread of affiliate links — including to the increasingly crowded field of “recs-based” sletters — has coincided with a golden age for a different revenue model entirely: subscription-based crowdfunding, which makes it easier than ever for people to support independent writers and artists on a regular, recurring basis. This model has its drawbacks. In much the same way that we as a society wouldn’t need to start GoFundMes for medical expenses if we lived in a country with a more sane & humane approach to healthcare, it would be very tight if cultural production was taken more substantially out of the market, as it is in countries with more robust public-arts funding (and more robust social-safety nets, which make culture-making easier, too).

But Erin and I find crowdfunding fundamentally beautiful. Kind of like a political candidate who says no to corporate donors and accepts only small contributions from real people — and therefore owes nothing to corporate donors and everything to real people — the subscription model offers us a grassroots, reader-funded way to make a newsletter exactly the way we want, with neither ads nor affiliate links.

Our hunch is that this helps make Blackbird Spyplane feel different than other places online, and that if we suddenly adopted spon-vibed revenue streams, it would bum people out. So we do this instead:

You could call this a Spyplane “market differentiator,” but it also just feels less grody and artificial to us, personally.

Big emphasis on personally. Because while we’re not alone in giving ads and affiliate links a miss, we also have friends at podcasts and publications we love, admire and/or respect who use different models, including ads and affiliate links, that work for them. And truly, G-d bless anyone who’s found a way to make unconventional, personal work on an independent level these days.

But for a few reasons Blackbird Spyplane can’t go there. Here are the 2 big ones:

1. As readers, Erin and I have always trusted a recommendation less when the recommender stands to profit directly from it. It turns them, by definition, from someone recommending something just because they think it rocks into a person selling something that, sure, they could still think rocks, but it isn’t just about love anymore. This recommender might be well-intentioned, and you could say “everyone does it,” but the fact that they’ll make money if you click & cop creates a clear conflict of interest between them and their readers.

Erin and I both worked at different magazines for years, and we’ve seen firsthand how products can get written up for reasons besides their intrinsic dopeness. These include gifting in the hopes of coverage, advertiser relationships, and affiliate partnerships — all of which it’s Spyplane Policy to refuse. There are established titles operating partially or primarily in the recommendations business that have come to lean depressingly hard on spon deals & SEO-driven affiliate models. These places can’t forge the kinds of connections with readers sletters can — if you’ve got a sletter, why go the same route as [CORPORATE OUTLET REDACTED]? Why not make a sletter “powered” by your subscribers?

2. We’ve created the No. 1 source for anticonsumerist dope-clothes intel across all media, which means we do our thing elegantly & enlightenedly within a vexing contradiction: We don’t think people should buy mad s**t, and yet we routinely point readers toward mad cool s**t to buy.

We try to wrestle that contradiction into as close an approximation of Blessed Equilibrium as we can. Because even if the market for cool things as currently configured often feels depressing and cursed, we still believe that cool clothes (and other cool things people make) can be sick talismans of human ingenuity and vessels of interpersonal connection that make life feel happier and fuller.

If Blackbird Spyplane’s livelihood involved affiliate links, though, it would create a financial incentive for us to recommend more & more s**t from bigger & bigger platforms, knocking the Blessed Equilibrium out of whack, and threatening to turn us from a small independent publication like none other on earth into yet another content operation barnacled to e-commerce leviathans!

Before you know it, we might be doing 🥴 “Surprisingly Swaggy Pr*me Day Deals” roundups 🥴.

“Blackbird Spyplane, thank you,” you’re probably saying right now. “You are two of the realest to ever do it, and while people tend to say Gen-X values are outmoded, we agree that there’s something tight about at least considering the possibility that ‘selling out’ still exists & should be avoided if possible, R.I.P. Steve Albini who could have made millions off In Utero but kept it 100 instead. But you say you don’t use affiliate links for new clothes. Why do you use them for slappers on eBay, Etsy and Bookshop?”

Great question, easy answer: Because we thought about it & decided we have zero compunctions about being financially incentivized to encourage Spy Nation to buy secondhand gems, handmade small-maker wares, and books from independent booksellers. Especially because the revenue we’re talking about is minuscule, since we aren’t constantly linking to 3,000 food processors sitting in an Am*zon warehouse or 600 cardigans sitting in an Ssense warehouse, wetting our beaks off each unit sold. Instead, we’re occasionally linking to a couple sick vintage sweatshirts and Barbour jackets at a time.

If that! Because, for Blackbird Spyplane, it all comes back to swag — and we believe that an overwhelming focus on copping clothes in the absence of other, non-commercial interests is not a pathway to true holistic swag.

Seeing & copping great clothes at great stores run by people with great taste is a wonderful thing. But we don’t ever want to lure readers too deep into the compulsively acquisitive dark anti-swag vortex we call “The State of Shopping.” Quite the contrary, one of the counterintuitive truths we’ve discovered when it comes to Mach 3+ clothes-rocking is that if you only care about acquiring clothes, then clothes don’t look as good on you as when you actually wear your clothes while caring deeply about other things, too.

So yes, we round up sick garments and champion small stores that carry them, but we also have conversations with cool people across the arts & sciences about unique, cherished belongings; we write landmark essays about car colors and coffee-shop aesthetics; we do deep-dive reports into How Trends Work, seam construction and How to Wear Colors Well; and we devise mindsets for living a more interesting life with no commerce involved baby.

We’ve got to acknowledge the undeniable truth, of course, that the lines can get blurry. Every so often we collaborate with brands we respect on small-batch drops we couldn’t execute on our own, when we know the results will be meaningful. Every now and then we design our own tees and caps to sell in small batches, because it’s fun to make physical mementos of a virtual newsletter, we’re pro-memento, and yes, it helps keep the lights on. This isn’t a new frontier, obviously: The New Yorker, PBS, etc., have been fundraising off logo totes and umbrellas for decades. We weigh that fun and financial upside against our knowledge that the world absolutely does not “need” any more tees or caps.

“BBSP — we’re grateful for the nuanced soul searching, but literally no one asked. Why drop these profound thoughts at all?”

Because circa 2024, the difference between the prerogatives of a “publication” and a “shop” can be fuzzy and tough to define, even here at the Plane. We’re all figuring it out as we go along. But we think it’s important to actually stop and do the work of “figuring it out” sometimes, and not just “go along.”

Please be clear: We soar at rarefied altitudes and are extremely powerful, but we are not “high & mighty.” Erin and I can’t s**t on other people just because they orient themselves differently than we do amid the fuzziness. What we can do is let these other mfs cook whatever delicious or dogs**t meals they wanna cook, and keep our own corner of the “content kitchen” clean.

When things get cuckoo in here, the burners are all on HIGH and the grease is flying, we like to remind ourselves of Blackbird Spyplane’s core proposition: We work hard to make a sletter so good, so big-brained, so ahead-of-the-curve-yet-correct in its diagnoses of fire s**t, and so unique, that cool people will happily underpay us to help us keep doing exactly that.

Because the lines can and will get fuzzy. But at least one thing has always felt clear to us: If you want to try and do something fun, strange and special on the internet, it helps to owe nothing to anyone but your readers.

The SpyTalk Chat Room, where Spyfriends request & share bespoke intel, is here.

Our newest Home-Goods Guide is here.

The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.