Steak-umm Philosophical Twitter

2017

Date: August 2017 · Place: Twitter; Reading, Pennsylvania · Figures: Nathan Allebach, agency copywriter · Allebach Communications, agency · Steak-umm, frozen-beef brand owned by Quaker Maid · Tags: Brand, Philosophy, Twitter 01. Beef Account Goes Mononoke In August 2017 the Steak-umm account, a frozen-beef brand from Reading, Pennsylvania, posts steak-umm bless. The line catches. Within months the account is running long-form threads about media literacy, generational despair, and the difficulty of knowing the truth in a fragmented information environment. The copywriter is Nathan Allebach, working at his family's agency in suburban Philadelphia. The bit is sincere. Allebach writes the account as a sleep-deprived young person who happens to work for a frozen-beef brand. The frozen-beef brand notices its sales rising and lets him keep going. 02. Brand as Public Intellectual By 2020 Steak-umm tweets thread-form essays about epistemic humility during the pandemic. The accounts gets profiled in The New York Times. Allebach uses the platform to thank teachers, push voter registration, and discuss his own anxiety. The lineage is direct: Denny's establishes brand-as-shitpost, Nihilist Arby's parodies it, MoonPie deploys it earnestly, Steak-umm pushes it to philosophy. The corporate Twitter account becomes a poet under late capitalism. The product remains a thin disc of pressed beef. Sources • @steak_umm Twitter archive, August 2017 onward • Taylor Lorenz, 'How Steak-umm Became a Welcome Voice During the Coronavirus Pandemic', New York Times, 9 April 2020 • Nathan Allebach interview, Marketing Brew, 23 May 2019