Jonah Peretti vs Nike — viral email as tactical media

2001

Artists: Jonah Peretti · Year: 2001 · Medium: Viral-email documentation — email exchange between Peretti and Nike customer service, subsequently forwarded across the internet · Substrate: Email; Nike customer-service portal; personal forwarding to approximately 10 recipients that cascaded into millions of reads · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Institution: MIT Media Lab (graduate student at the time) Jonah Peretti, a twenty-seven-year-old MIT Media Lab masters' student, ordered a pair of Nike sneakers from Nike's online iD customization service on 5 January 2001, requesting that they be personalized with the word "sweatshop." Nike declined. Peretti asked why — since the word was not profane, not trademarked, and not on Nike's published list of prohibited terms. Nike declined again. Peretti wrote a mild, polite, quietly devastating email exchange back and forth with Nike customer service over the course of about a week. He then sent the email chain to a dozen of his friends with the subject line "A clever email exchange with Nike." His friends forwarded it to their friends. Within six weeks the email chain had been forwarded approximately ten million times worldwide, had been reported on in The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, and NPR, and had appeared in The Wall Street Journal. The Nike email is, by most sensible accounting, the first email to go fully viral in the mass-media-covered sense. It was the demonstration case, in 2001, that a short text artifact could propagate through the internet's forwarding infrastructure to audiences larger than a national broadcast network could reach, faster, and with zero production cost. Peretti wrote later that he had been genuinely surprised — he had sent the email expecting maybe a few dozen forwards. What Peretti extracted from the event was a pattern that shaped the next two decades of his career. He co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005, then founded BuzzFeed in 2006, and has run both on an operating theory derived directly from the Nike email: that social contagion is the dominant organizing force of internet attention, that you can engineer for it, and that the artifact's internal design — the specific words, the specific narrative arc — is what determines whether it propagates. Peretti is in this archive as the figure in whom internet-art strategy and commercial-media strategy collapsed into the same practice. The Nike email is not an artwork in any traditional sense. It is, however, one of the most consequential artifacts of 2001. Every subsequent viral-content apparatus in this archive and outside of it has been, in some sense, trying to reproduce what Peretti accidentally produced. Lore Peretti was at the time a graduate student in a loose, experimental program at the MIT Media Lab called Smart Cities; he was not primarily interested in media theory. He wrote the Nike email exchange partly on a lark, in the gaps between his graduate research. The first forward went to his sister Chelsea Peretti, who is now a comedian and television writer; she forwarded it to her friends, who forwarded it to theirs. The Peretti family has kept track of the forward chain: by March 2001, within six weeks of the first email, documented forwards ran into the millions. Peretti himself was by all accounts moderately embarrassed by the attention at the time. He has said, in subsequent interviews, that the email's success taught him that clarity and a good small story travel further than a polemic, a lesson that has shaped both his editorial instincts at HuffPost and BuzzFeed's entire editorial premise for the subsequent two decades. Sources • Peretti, Jonah — "My Nike Media Adventure" (The Nation, 2001-04-04). • Shirky, Clay — Here Comes Everybody (Penguin, 2008; chapter on the Nike email). • Peretti family email archive (private) — partial reproduction at forwarded-email-archives / Internet Archive.