nmjc: this newsletter is about hanging out, but it’s often about whatever happens to be on our minds any given week. randa is palestinian, harry is jewish, we spend a lot of time online and we live in the US. so naturally these past few weeks we’ve been thinking about palestine, israel, and what we can do to stop our government from perpetuating violence. we’re trying to figure out the extent to which nmjc should keep discussing this topic that is important to us while also recognizing that it’s probably not what you’re here for. (that said - if you are interested in more of this stuff, let us know)
as we figure that out, we wanted to share an essay harry wrote about “flip” - a shopping app you may have heard of…
we also would recommend that you read this n+1 piece and watch this debate :
N+1 Open Letter : A Dangerous Conflation
Norman Finkelstein & Eli Lake Debate
ok here’s Harry’s essay. Thanks everyone.
My story starts last week. I’m blasting brown noise at the off-brand standing desk, figuring out how to Zelle this incompetent real estate broker a small fortune for him to let me live in “Fort Green”. Suddenly I get a text that will change the course of my life.
Now my associate, who I’ll call “The Prince” (nothing to read into here that’s just his nickname), has an excellent track record of sending me weird stuff like this. Most recently he put me onto some kind of “Doordash but for candles” venture where I was able to secure a set of 130$ candles for free.
I download the app he suggests – Flip– and begin to poke around. Flip appears to be basically Instagram if it were literally only ads. You can flick from reel to reel and enjoy an endless stream of exactly 26-year-old blond women trying on eye cream. It’s so fire and stupid. We do a quick riff about sending hinge matches flip coupons to former hinge flings.
As you see in the picture above, The Prince didn’t just suggest I join Flip, he gave me a $75 coupon. (more on why it’s 75 later). This is where the alarm bells begin a bit. No way I actually get $75 real dollars for free.
I put up a bit of a fight but The Prince adeptly convinces me.
The process of buying something with the coupon is somewhat involved, but not really that involved considering you get a free 75$ coupon. I had to type in all of my personal data (minus credit card info) and allow Flip access to all my contacts.
After that two things happen:
I successfully purchased a 70$ candle for 3$
I was presented with a screen where I could now send any person in my contacts coupons of varying amounts of money, seemingly depending on how many friends on Flip they already have. Some people are worth upwards of $140.
A quick aside here, the people in my contacts who have lots of Flip friends are totally bizarre, and when talking to other people about their contacts, a throughline I have found is that everyone seems to have a drug dealer with like 230 friends on flip.
This part is crucial to understanding why Flip is so insane. If I invite someone to Flip a few things happen. They get a coupon for some amount between $50 and $140. If they then use that coupon to buy anything, I get that same exact coupon, and I can seemingly do this an infinite amount of times.
Now in doing a dive into what Flip has to offer, the Ux is incoherent. You can’t really search for anything easily so the best solution I found is just scrolling the explore page until I found something I wanted. The overarching aesthetic of everything available on Flip I would describe as “millennial mid” or like “6-figure cheugy”
As I scroll through pillows and wicker boxes and small matte coffee grinders I start drifting into two different lines of thinking. The first is how am I being fucked here, the second is how can I amass thousands of dollars in Flip currency to buy more things. As I am a genius, I’m about to think about both of these things at once.
I text around 6 people who I suspect will both likely sign up, and ultimately understand if this app steals their credit card info. Randa googles “Flip scam Reddit” and a small community of confused people trade stories of actual kitschy stuff actually arriving at their doorstep.
So the stuff does appear “real”. The Prince sends me a picture of a candle actually being delivered to his house. So what then is the catch? The next obvious guess is that my data and personal information are somehow being extracted. That seems to be true. But even that doesn’t seem like enough of a scam. I give my personal info away so I can look at Instagram, obviously, I’d give it away for a base payment of $75.
At this point, i feel like i’m taking crazy pills. How did The Prince send this to me? Why haven’t I heard of this before? Everything I thought I knew about money and connectivity is being upended in real-time.
My friend Seth speculates that this is a giant government experiment, and we’re lab mice an elaborate test to see how much money it takes for people to sign up for something.
I did a little googling and found some totally insane articles.
The TLDR is Flip is founded by an Israeli American and and a former Iraqi refugee who was given a green card to found Flip– A tik tok but for shopping platform that has 60 million in series b funding, with investors that range from a UAE sovereign fund, to Israeli VC firms1.
I’ll leave that there with no further commentary.
It has now been about a week since receiving that initial text. I have purchased a steam cleaner, a medium-sized wicker box, a candle that sounds like a fireplace, and two bottles of Graza Olive Oil, summing to about $400, all for roughly $11 USD. Every day I get a very slow trickle of friends joining the app. There is a button that lets you “say hi” to your new friends on the app, but the button doesn’t appear to actually do anything when clicked. When you Google Flip, almost nothing about the app comes up.
I’m getting basically expensive things for free. In fact, slowly and silently, Flip users across the country are getting expensive things for basically free. What’s more, there is no incentive by anyone to keep this a secret! Explicitly the opposite is actually true.
Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I was once privy to a Brazzers account in high school that a friend of a friend sent me, it was shut down within days. That is typically my relationship to free internet stuff.
I have a few theories
Perennially mid-millennial-coded stuff is worth less than 5$ to most people.
People care more about data security than I realized
Google (which is getting worse) is failing me, and actually, there are legions of people freaking out about this
Perhaps most compellingly, the line between “scam” and “growth marketing” has become so thin that people mostly think this Flip campaign literally is a scam. In the crypto space, bits of free currency are given out constantly to bait people into joining their apps, or at least were given out when money was flowing in the crypto space. Maybe this is just a marketing lesson learned from crypto, brought into the world of trad-fi commerce. Maybe the vaguely millennial aesthetic is so synonymous with gutted low-quality mid stuff that people take one look at Flip, and its modernist boring aesthetic and think ‘this is bad news’.
Whose to say what comes next for Flip, a totally real and good company. In any case, bang my dms if you wanna get into flip, the app tells my im entitled to upwards of 30 thousand dollars of flip currency if I invite my entire contacts list. That might be enough for a stone pizza oven.
Per Forbes: Flip Fit launched with $3.75 million in Seed funding led by TLV Partners with participation from Lool Ventures.
i want in!
> a steam cleaner, a medium-sized wicker box, a candle that sounds like a fireplace, and two bottles of Graza Olive Oil, summing to about $400
Depending on the steam cleaner, that seems more like $50 worth of stuff then $400 worth of stuff.
So it feels like the scam is that you are actually getting Flip Bucks not USD and flip bucks are worth a lot less than USD?
Or do you spend the money off platform and I'm misunderstanding?