Born Outside The Matrix

Ben Dietz on Leaving VICE, Building [SIC] Weekly, and Why Gen Z’s Digital-Native Culture Will Reshape Everything

Every Thursday, the best minds across the cultural industries have opened their inboxes to find Ben Dietz's weekly brain dump—a curated creative chaos he calls [SIC] Weekly that somehow makes sense of branding, pop culture trends, and everything in between. The former VICE insider has his very own way of seeing connections where others see noise-and today’s interview is no exception: Murder at Burning Man pairs with gateways to hell. J.Crew's AI controversy reveals our collective blindness to cultural shifts happening in real time. Has he cracked the code of authentic community building in an algorithmic overload age?

How would you define yourself professionally?

I'm a consultant and advisor to brands, agencies, and publishers.

Tell me about [SIC] Weekly newsletter. How did it come about?

[SIC] Weekly began as an informational resource for my colleagues and co-workers at VICE, the media company, where I worked for many years. As the company grew larger and reached its most expansive point, it became increasingly difficult for all of us to be on the same page, culturally or otherwise. So, I started sending an email once a week to people, saying, "Here are developments that I think are interesting in our collective space" – media, marketing, and brands.

Then I would throw in things that I thought were personally interesting: maybe a new DJ mix, an article about skateboarding, or a favorite fashion designer. It lived for about a year or two within VICE's ecosystem, just as an email. What happened was people started taking other jobs elsewhere, or my clients would hear about it in meetings and ask to be added to the list.

When I left VICE in 2020, I started publishing it as a Substack so everybody could still get access to it, and I could potentially grow the audience. It's an exercise for me to essentially scrape the plaque off my brain every morning once I've consumed all my sources of information. I read the internet for a couple of hours, open tabs, make notes, read stories, then take all that stuff, put it in a database, and publish it.

I used to publish on Thursdays, but this week will be the first ever Wednesday edition – I'm switching the free issue to Wednesdays. For paid subscribers, I also do a daily version called [SIC] Day on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday.

What makes something worthy of inclusion when you wake up in the morning?

It's definitely intuitive. I'm not out looking for things. I'm encountering them, absorbing them, and then going, "Okay, that seems significant" or "That seems connected to something else I just saw."

For example, today I included a story from the New York Times about an alleged murder at Burning Man. My wife and I have a longstanding belief that Burning Man is a hellscape – to be clear, we've never been, but people tell us we should go all the time. Then there was an article in Mental Floss about "10 Real Life Gateways to Hell" – places where you can see magma coming out of the earth. It was just sort of funny: here's this hellscape Burning Man, here are gateways to hell. There's a little corollary there. Obviously, they have nothing to do with each other, but it's a funny connection in my brain.

What were the biggest lessons you learned working at VICE?

The essence of communication, which becomes the basis for how marketing, advertising, and community building work: you have to speak to your audience in the voice they speak to each other in, or you have to implicate them in your way of speaking.

What was amazing to me as a reader of VICE in 2001-2002, before I became part of the company, was that it managed to sound slangy and vernacular, but also not exclusionary. It wasn't like that scene in Airplane where Barbara Billingsley speaks jive – it's not this arm's length thing where you're not part of the club. It's very much "we're inviting you into the situation."

The other big lesson was that all stories are ultimately subjective. The idea of objective journalism is an absolute myth. So it's totally appropriate to put yourself in the story or to put the vested interests in the story – you just have to do so in a way where it's clear what those vested interests are. It's fine to say "I'm wearing this hat because this brand sent it to me," but you have to actually say that. The audience can then judge and understand where your incentive is.

You've mentioned the importance of transparency about relationships with brands. How do you navigate that?

I grew up in straight edge hardcore culture in Syracuse – we were skateboarders first, then became fans of punk rock, then hardcore. The best bands in that space became straight edge, which meant no drinking, no drugs, no smoking. It led to vegetarianism and veganism, then got more hardcore about various things. People would say they couldn't have candy because it had ladybug shells in the dye, or bearing grease in skateboard wheels, because it had lanolin from sheep.

What became clear was that you're going to cut yourself off from any degree of pleasure or access in life if you go too far down this road. To me, it's always been an exercise in moderation. It's fine to say "I like free stuff," "I like free tickets," "I like special access" – so long as you say it and it's clear.

I had a conversation with art critic Carlo McCormick, whose work I really admire, a couple of years ago, who said being a critic is "a vow of penury, of asceticism" – basically taking a vow of poverty if you want to do this work. I find that reductive and ridiculous. I think you can have a valid opinion without subjecting yourself to artificial hardship.

How do you see Gen Z and Gen Alpha shaping pop culture differently than previous generations?

I have a 19-year-old and a 16-year-old, and I think about what the analogs to my subcultural upbringing through skateboarding and hardcore are for them. A lot of it is micro-communities and memes through digital ecosystems, and that will have an incredible effect on culture going forward.

It has a lot to do with being in a place at a time and having shared experiences – but that place and time could be entirely virtual. You could be part of an algorithmic cohort that saw this meme versus that one, and 20 years down the road, you have a set of references other people don't have. That's what growing up skateboarding was like.

There's often discussion about this generation being "born into the matrix" without analog experiences. Do you think that fundamentally changes them?

The difference is by degrees, not statistically. My mother grew up without indoor plumbing for the first 10 years of her life, then got indoor plumbing and never went back to the outhouse because why would you? There's no nostalgia about that.

For these kids, being born into the matrix, it just is. I don't think it causes them to be different kinds of humans, in the same way my mother didn't become a different kind of human than her mother because she suddenly had indoor plumbing.

Those life stage changes happen at different times, but they still happen. One thing we talk about a lot on HIP REPLACEMENT, the podcast I do with Kyle Raymont Fitzpatrick, is how we view the difficulty around life stage changes depending on where we are relative to them.

Often, we interview someone just out of school who hasn't done any big life stage changes – no long-term relationships, cohabitation, major purchases, city moves for jobs, marriage, or children. I hear their anxiety and think back to when I was 23, trying to navigate the world, and I understand exactly why they're feeling that way. But it will work out – whether you get in a serious relationship at 24 like I did, or at 34, or never at all and do everything on your own, you'll get there.

The thing is, when you get there, it's going to be difficult. You're going to second-guess it. Nothing is going to be perfect. There's no fairy tale. The only way around it is through.

You've created Breakfast Clubbing, a community gathering. How does that fit into this cultural moment?

About four years ago, I started going to the same restaurant every Wednesday at 8:30 AM for breakfast, basically saying, "I'm going to breakfast; anybody who wants to come can come." It doesn't cost anything, there's no RSVP, you just show up.

What attracted me, partially because I have a wide network, partially because I was signaling "I'm here for conversation, I don't want anything out of it, and don't want you to try to get anything out of it" – was that people were very open to discussion.

It's evolved into a community all over the world where people have local chapters in their cities. You get a CEO who might have heard of me sitting next to a 22-year-old trying to find their way in the world. These two people never get to talk otherwise – the CEO only talks to their kids or people their power structure allows, the 22-year-old only talks to other 22-year-olds and maybe their manager.

When you collapse the layers of intermediation, you get fascinating conversations because people go, "Oh, I had no idea you thought of things like that." It's incredibly instructive for everyone and humanizes people who are viewed as distant or inaccessible.

What's caught your attention in fashion recently?

Two things. First, the expansion of Beams, the Japanese multi-brand department store. Beams Plus is probably my favorite brand – I'm a very Americana, New England, preppy sort of coded person, mixed with skateboarding and punk rock. I want classic American staples, but I want them to be a little weird. Beams Plus does that incredibly well. It's like the Ralph Lauren archetype, but on mushrooms.

What I love is that they've expanded into America, the idea of Americana being translated and reintroduced to America by this Japanese company. It's as if an American brand went to Italy and reintroduced Armani tailoring to Italy.

The other thing was the J.Crew AI controversy that Jonah Weiner from Blackbird Spyplane exposed last week. J.Crew had used an AI artist to recreate nostalgic J.Crew lookbook images to announce a new collaboration with Vans, and didn't initially credit the AI artist.

What I found most interesting was that Jonah published this exposé more than two weeks after the ads came out. The ads ran for weeks, and nobody noticed until Jonah's discerning eye caught it. What else are we missing? And how much does it matter? It didn't matter to anybody for two weeks until Jonah pointed it out, then it mattered to everybody.

What does that say about our current cultural moment?

It illustrates the tension between the need for instantaneity and the need for time and consideration. The instant something comes out now, it's assessed and dismissed as good or bad. It's very rarely reviewed and looked at again.

You can imagine whoever was responsible for that at J.Crew thinking, "We put it out, nobody cared, no big deal." Because everything is so ephemeral, it encourages us to think we can take every decision lightly and be sloppy in how we create and publish.

I read something from essentially a confession of a social media manager who said, "published is better than perfect" – you have to stay in the conversation constantly, and if you spend too much time making something pixel-perfect, you're losing momentum. I understand that thought, and I'm guilty of it myself, but it's dangerous because we could end up only participating in constant publishing instead of considered creation.

The positive side seems to be that independent journalists like Jonah are doing real investigative work.

Exactly. The interesting thing about the current moment is that the time taken to do that investigation was taken by somebody independently funded from the journalism ecosystem writ large. That's refreshing – it shows people are willing to go the extra mile and do research, which is what journalism is all about, whether you do it on Substack or the New York Times.