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Hey pals. Do you ever just look around and get the feeling that everything is just… worse?
This week, we’re joined by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, and Lauren Boyle, co-founder of the long-running NYC art collective DIS, to discuss how the story of the 21st century became one where consumer experiences are always getting crappier, jobs are becoming increasingly precarious, and workers are constantly being asked to do more more with less.
Putting on our finance hats, we zero in on something called the leveraged buyout, a shadowy business maneuver from the world of private equity that happens to be the subject of Syzygy, Jacob’s excellent new documentary for DIS’ streaming platform DIS.ART. Mild spoiler: The film was inspired by a supremely strange Meta commercial that aired at the 2022 Super Bowl, and takes us on a surprising and thought-provoking journey involving gaming pioneer Atari, Chuck E. Cheese, and private equity giant Apollo Global Management, which acquired the kitschy pizza party chain in 2014 using this very practice.
We explore how leveraged buyouts funnel resources away from companies and ordinary Americans and into the coffers of the corporate overclass, DIS’s evolving role as a patron of video work that makes theory accessible to the people, and what it means to successfully adapt to an internet that is always changing for the worse.
Watch Syzygy on DIS.ART, where you can also check out two other great documentaries from Jacob: September 5, 2006, on the story of the Facebook news feed, and The Seasteaders, a collaboration with Daniel Keller of New Models.
Check out Far Off Sounds, a documentary webseries and podcast Jacob co-hosts about obscure musical subcultures. You can also subscribe to it on Patreon.
If you happen to be in Hong Kong between now and the end of June, you can catch Jacob’s work at Subject to Shadow Ban, a DIS-curated group exhibition at M+ featuring folks like Nicholas Korody, Mandy Harris Williams, and (past TCJ guest) Joshua Citarella.
Starting tomorrow (February 3) and through the 26th of the month, DIS will be exhibiting a new video work, Everything But the World, at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin. Extremely sick trailer here.
For a crash-course on leveraged buyouts, check out Hannah Levintova’s reporting for Mother Jones. Or, if you’re feeling zany, check out boyfriend-of-the-pod Drew Millard’s exploration of the Philadelphia 76ers’ weird experiment in using private equity tactics to build a championship roster.
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