A Bloodbath In The Arena

Image: Badly edited by author

Theodore Roosevelt once famously said,

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

In other words, people who naysay or criticise from the side (wait, that’s me) are nothing compared to those who actually roll up their sleeves and give it a shot, no matter the outcome. The concept does have some merit. Without doers, nothing gets done. But this way of thinking has also given birth to the idea that you can get a free pass to do whatever you want, to “fake it till they make it,” to follow the dream no matter who it harms or who you fuck over in the process, as long as it’s in pursuit of doing. It’s this exact thinking that’s brought us such entrepreneurial prodigies like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and Adam Neumann, among many others. 

Marques Brownlee, known by the moniker MKBHD, has been one of those critics that Roosevelt would have called out. His schtick is product reviews, and he’s been wildly successful at it, amassing an audience of nearly 20 million on YouTube alone. With a loyal following of that magnitude, his opinions have immense sway. He basically helped kill the Humane AI pin and car company Fisker with a single hard-hitting review. (I should note that’s not really his style — he is guilty of being a bit too schmoozy with big tech companies. But how else are you going to get that sweet early access? It’s a fine line for sure, and Brownlee certainly walks on the safe side.) 

Still, the point is that he is a reviewer. He is on the sidelines, pointing out how the “strong man stumbles.” He frequently highlights where the “doer of deeds could have done them better.” 

Until now.

To borrow the deliciously meme-able line from the ultimate grifter Chamath Palihapitiya, he’s moved from being an observer to being “in the arena, trying stuff.” 

And it has been a bloodbath. 

The gist of it is that Brownlee has released a phone wallpaper app called Panels. Though designed to support artists, the app will take a 50/50 split of the income made. There is the first problem — we all give Apple some serious shit for monopolising the App Store and demanding only a 30% cut. The second problem is that when it launched, the app immediately asked to track app activity and location. Why? The third problem is that it’s full of adverts. The fourth is that it’s pretty poorly designed, and most of the wallpapers are nothing that you can’t find anywhere else (some are just literal solid colours). To top it off, accessing these images at full resolution will set you back a $12 monthly subscription fee. If you’d like to get plain orange in standard resolution, well that will cost you the time it takes to watch two adverts.

It’s all very… miscalculated. Marques Brownlee gets products. He clearly has a sense of the marketplace, of future trends, of user grievances with current technology. So how couldn’t he have foreseen the obvious outcome here — who on earth is paying for wallpapers? And if they are, who on earth is going to pay $50 a year subscription service for them?

This review by John Gruber puts it succinctly —

“Panels isn’t a premium app. Premium apps don’t ask to track you across apps. Premium apps don’t make you watch ads to get to their free content. Premium apps look and feel native to their platforms. Premium apps don’t have sketchy privacy report cards. As it stands, Panels is incongruous and incoherent.”

The app is currently sitting with a 2.1/5 score on the App Store, with over 1200 reviews. In other words, its reputation is probably beyond saving already.

For someone who once wrote, “My rule #1 on the internet that’s never been successfully broken is to charge for something that was previously free,” this is a huge swing and a miss. It’s left him looking like the very grifter he is quick to call out. What’s worse is the guy has the weight and audience to have brought almost any idea to life, and this is what he chose? For a man who calls out products — sometimes driving the final nail into their coffin — he has decided to release something that lacks quality, lacks a market and deploys potentially egregious data harvesting. 

He’s already having to go on the defensive in response to the backlash, and sadly, he’s choosing to lean on the good old “building in public” crutch. 

As a writer and someone in the ‘content industry,’ I see many people follow the same path: grow an audience, develop a relationship and build trust, think long and hard about when and what to do to monetise, and eventually, work alongside your audience to launch something they love that has you laughing all the way to the bank. 

Brownlee has done those hard yards and then some. He’s spent years building up one of the best reputations in tech. And now, he’s decided to risk all of that for the sake of a $50-a-year wallpaper app full of ads and low-resolution images that track your location. 

It’s baffling. 

Maybe the backlash is also indicative of where we, the consumer, are at. Slowly but surely, we’ve been wisening up to Big Tech, the overlords who run it and the ones who sell it (whether intentionally or not) through their content. We’ve become a little better at spotting and calling out grifters. We’re starting to see the signs when we’re having our legs pulled and getting a little more comfortable calling out the bullshit. And perhaps, finally, we’ve started to push back against shitty cash-grab products.

It gives me the faintest of hopes for the future.