5
Going viral
‘Y was cancelled,’ read the e-mail. It was January
2001, and Jonah Peretti was trying to get some personalised trainers.
The problem was the name he’d requested; as a challenge to the
company, he’d asked for his trainers to be printed with the word
‘sweatshop’.[1]
Peretti, then a graduate student in the MIT Media Lab, ended up
exchanging a series of e-mails with Nike. The company reiterated
that it wouldn’t place the order because of ‘inappropriate slang’.
Unable to talk them round, Peretti decided to forward the e-mail
thread to a few friends. Many of them forwarded it to their friends,
who forwarded it on, and on, and on. Within days, the message had
spread to thousands of people. Soon the media picked up on the
story too. By the end of February, the e-mail chain had gained
coverage in The Guardian and Wall Street Journal, while NBC invited
Peretti on to the Today Show to debate the issue with a Nike
spokesperson. In March, the story went international, eventually
reaching several European newspapers. All from that single e-mail.
‘Although the press has presented my battle with Nike as a David
versus Goliath parable,’ Peretti later wrote, ‘the real story is the battle
between a company like Nike, with access to the mass media, and a
network of citizens on the Internet who have only micromedia at their
disposal.’[2]
The e-mail had spread remarkably far, but perhaps it had all been
just a fluke? Peretti’s friend and fellow PhD student Cameron Marlow
seemed to think so. Marlow – who would later become head of data
science at Facebook – didn’t believe a person could deliberately
make something take off like that. But Peretti reckoned that he could
do it again. Soon after the Nike e-mail, he got a job offer from a
multimedia non-profit called Eyebeam in New York. Peretti would end
up leading a ‘contagious media lab’ at Eyebeam, experimenting with