We Don’t Need to Let Bad Things Happen With The Ease at Which They’re Currently Happening
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The Super Bowl is an amazing event. It is, first and foremost, a quasi-national holiday in America, where friends and family gather together, cook some of the most ungodly foods (chicken wings, bean dip, ‘slutty’ brownies) and settle in for several hours on the sofa, drinking the weak lager to which America is addicted. Second most, it is a festival of commercialism, and the biggest televisual advertising opportunity, each year, in North America. Third most, it has a nice concert in the middle that generates a lot of social media buzz. And, fourth most, some large men participate in a game with obscure rules and minimal sporting artistry.
Because it happens in America, and we are still living in a world of American cultural centricity, we, the rest of the world, are forced to act like it matters. I’m reminded of the sprinter Noah Lyle’s amazing press conference where he called out the NBA. “World champion of what?” Lyles asked. “The United States?!” But, of course, to be a champion in the United States is to be a champion of the world. And last night’s Super Bowl had two champions: the Philadelphia Eagles and Kendrick Lamar.
At the same time that the Eagles were demolishing the Kansas City Chiefs, ending their chances of an historic ‘three-peat’ (they had secured the rights to use the term from Miami Heat president Pat Riley, in a very amusing bit of premature legal wrangling), viewers in Los Angeles were watching an advert in which the rapper Kanye West, filmed on an iPhone, promoted his fashion brand Yeezy. The contents of the advert are largely inconsequential — West just says that he’s spent all the money for the ad on a new set of teeth and that’s why he’s filming on an iPhone — but the impact ought to be.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the ad didn’t air nationally (the brands that air nationally during the Super Bowl tend to be huge ones like Pepsi, Facebook, Bud Light or any number of upcoming movies) but was sold in local markets, including Los Angeles where West has historically been based. An ad sale for the LA market during the Super Bowl is still a significant purchase: LA, after all, is a city of almost 4m people, and the most culturally influential city in the world. The ad that Angelenos saw bore a simple call to action: GO TO YEEZY[.]COM (warning: don’t).
I’m going to skip through the contents of the website because while shocking, they are deliberately provocative and intended to bait pieces exactly like this. Essentially, Yeezy — which has been a significant fashion brand in the past — has one item for sale. It’s a plain white tee, available in three sizes, bearing a swastika. In the UK it costs £17.
For the past several days, West has been participating in a very public meltdown on Elon Musk’s X platform, in which he has taken aim, particularly, at Jewish people. This piece isn’t about West, so I won’t go into his long history of performative anti-semitism, a thread that has run through his public persona for several years and has seen him ostracised from the mainstream and previously banned from Twitter (Mr Musk reinstated him in July 2023). Recent posts have also been overtly homophobic, misogynistic, defamatory and basically everything else a bad person on an end-of-the-world bender might write. His tirades (I used the plural because each morning last week I expected him to have been banned, and each morning he fired up the ol’ Twitter machine and started mouthing off again) have made international news.
But apparently no-one doing ad sales for the Los Angeles region during the Super Bowl (the ad also re-aired on Fox two hours after their broadcast of the game had ended) heard about this. If they had — if anyone had — they would surely have asked the question. “Hey, we didn’t sell air space to Kanye West, did we?” And then they’d open their big planning diary and see, handwritten in pink ink, “yeezy ad, 30 second slot, los angeles”. And so they’d have known, surely, that they had sold an advert to Kanye West, and they’d be able to look at what he was selling on Yeezy.com and make a decision about its suitability for placement in America’s biggest sporting broadcast event of the year.
That would be a form of quick self-regulation that wouldn’t necessitate the involvement of the FTC who will presumably — one has to assume, God — get involved after the fact. This is a significant failure of oversight, where the most generous interpretation is that Yeezy is a legacy advertiser with the channel, stumped up the cash, and at the point that the sale was being approved their website was either blank or selling a product slightly less overtly racist than a swastika t-shirt. There is no law specifically against the sale of swastika branded products in the US (as there is in many European countries) and West is probably defended by America’s obsession with the first amendment. And perhaps someone got skittish about the possibility of becoming embroiled in a lawsuit with the rapper, and all the negativity publicity associated (especially for Fox, who would consider themselves to be a free speech fundamentalist network).
So it happened. An advert for swastika t-shirts aired during the Super Bowl. This is America in 2025, after all. No big deal, I guess.
The second level of oversight that I feel has failed in this instance is the way that companies like Shopify and Google facilitate the sale of these swastika t-shirts by overseeing transactions between Yeezy and the losers who want to buy them.
The two options are Shop Pay — run by Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce platform which does $7.1bn annual revenue and is Canada’s 2nd largest publicly traded company — and Google Pay. Google Pay is a secure wallet system used by many Google customers and by default on Android. In short, these are two of the biggest checkout systems in the world. Two of the biggest checkout systems in the world which are helping people buy swastika t-shirts, helping Kanye West get rich(er) from swastika t-shirts, and are, themselves, profiting on each sale of a swastika t-shirt.
Something has gone wrong. In politics we talk about a phenomenon called the Overton Window, named for the political scientist Joseph Overton. Overton proposed that all ideas fall within a range — from the unthinkable to the acceptable, and then back to the unthinkable — and that within that there’s a ‘window’ which policy could operate within. This is the forum of ideas, and in the past few decades it has operated near what is perceived as the political centre. In the UK, for example, policy debates on the health service are arguments about how much to spend and where to invest rather than, say, super polarised debates about scrapping free public healthcare vs investing an extra £500bn a year on the NHS. The debate about immigration, likewise, has been between two main parties asking how much we can reduce immigration, rather than one arguing for closed borders and one for open borders. The Overton Window has been small and it has moved, gradually, fractionally left of centre.
In the past few years we’ve talked far more about the Overton Window moving than we have about it expanding. Without wanting to get too self-righteous about Kanye West, a lot has to go wrong with a society before you reach a point where serious people will seriously defend a man’s right to sell swastika t-shirts in America, let alone advertise them during the Super Bowl. And yet there is a clear and present drift. Ideas that would’ve been labelled ‘unthinkable’ on Overton’s spectrum are currently thinkable, and big structures are supporting them.
But thinkable doesn’t mean permissible. Google Pay’s terms of service for vendors are extensive and put them in a headlock over correctly displaying the Google logo (which is apparently very important), as well as what can actually be sold. Items that are fraudulent (a crime!) or otherwise illegal (another crime!) are out of the question, as well as those items prohibited in their own ‘Content Policies’ (easily missed, and found in a separate document). Freedom of speech does not equal freedom of sale.
Their content policies give a more exhaustive list of things that Google Pay must not be used for: academic paper-writing services, adult goods, alcohol, animals, bulk marketing, child endangerment or abuse (seems obvious), copyright media, counterfeit goods, mod chips etc (for unlocking devices), drugs, regulated financial products, fund solicitations, gambling, government IDs, hacking, human parts (thank God), stolen goods, telecomms hacking equipment, ‘miracle cures’ (lol), MLM schemes, crime scene photos, precious materials, prescription drugs, protected cultural artefacts, regulated goods, traffic devices, travel packages, tobacco products, weapons, and currency.
And then, of course, there’s: offensive content and activities.
Which West is clearly in violation of. (There would be more plausible deniability of his desire to actively incite hatred against Jewish people if he hadn’t posted so much about Jewish people — his lawyer and/or business manager and/or therapist should have a word with him).
And so Google ought to shut down the Yeezy shop now, and they also ought to make a donation to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the sum of any and all profit they might’ve made off facilitating these transactions. Hopefully they will.
But we’re relying on deeply buried, loosely enforced terms of service to protect us against the rise and rise of a digital class whose Overton Window is now a metropolis-spanning panorama. X, particularly, is a lawless soup. I have an X account that follows 0 other accounts, which I use predominantly to see what the algorithm is throwing up without other prompts. At the top of my feed last week was a tweet promoting the trailer for the new Spongebob Squarepants movie, out on Netflix this spring. It had been quote-tweeted by an account which had also posted the full 1hr27m pirated version of the movie. At that point, the tweet had been re-posted 4.5k times and seen by 3m people. It had been up on the platform for more than 24 hours. If I was a Netflix executive I would’ve a) spoken to my lawyers, and b) never advertised on the platform again.
Because it’s all well and good for digital media to revert back to being a Wild West, the untamed prairies of old where things like intellectual property were routinely trampled and where hate speech razed villages with the coloniser’s abandon. The internet is de-maturing before our eyes, but we can’t allow everything to be dragged down with it. Netflix are not in thrall to social media — they should fight this. Google don’t need custom from a digital circus — they should deny this.
We — we the normal, we the residents of a rational planet earth — should not be making it so easy for bad things to happen. Google and Shopify don’t need to profit from hate, don’t need to facilitate its contagion. The structures are in place to tackle this lurch, but there seems a reluctance to get stuck into the dirty work, to purple our nails with blood of guiltiness. It feels like we are living through a bunfight on digital media where progressives and reversionists do daily, futile battle for supremacy of ideas. It is our darkling plain; these are our ignorant armies. And while these forces are engorging the window, making a single pane of glass that trembles with the latent promise of fracture, the oligopolistic class sit blithely by, at best skirting the fray and, at worst, profiting from it.
