Ten years ago, essayist and programmer Paul Ford wrote The American Room about the distinctive environment of video-first social media. These off-white backdrops represented a lack of imagination or care—or, perhaps, it reflected an emerging reality of a declining middle class. Now, though, "sitting in an empty beige room and talking about products" is the claimed intellectual property of an influencer who has sued another influencer to stop them doing it the way she does it. Both women stage their "clean girl" content in similarly pale, austere, sterile environments. Mia Sato reports on an astonishing lawsuit, and first we meet its target.
The table and cream chair next to it are surrounded by cool bare white walls, everything bathed in soft natural light filtered through semi-sheer snow-colored curtains. After a few minutes of walking through her home, it starts to feel like I'm browsing paint chips at Lowe's: Extra White, Grecian Ivory, Shiitake, White Heron. She likes it this way.
And then we meet the woman suing for "copyright infringement, tortious interference with prospective business relations, misappropriating another person's likeness, among other accusations."
I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it's like I never left Sheil's house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set.
The buried lede, as it were: the women briefly worked together on it all IRL and there are some very specific similarities in the content, including a disturbingly similar tattoo. It's not clear who is the copycat, who was first to have a beige table, who was first to hang a grid of black-framed square photos on the wall. But thousands of people post product content from similar rooms and hundreds from substantially identical ones. Presumably the point of this lawsuit is to incur legal costs on the target out of spite, not because they want to put any of it before a court.
An advertant image of genteel middle-class purity being sold to those inadvertantly living in it; the items are shown off, then returned to Amazon.
Bad influence [The Verge]
