Didn't plan on writing about the debate. I don't really do politics here, eleven years into this blog, and I'm not about to start now. But something happened Tuesday night that's a tech story whether anyone wants to admit it or not, and I've been thinking about it since I woke up and refreshed Twitter out of habit before I'd even gotten out of bed.
A fly landed on Mike Pence's head during the VP debate and just stayed there. Over two minutes by most people's count, sitting in his white hair while he talked about whatever the topic was at that exact moment (I honestly couldn't tell you, I was watching the fly like everyone else was). Within the hour, before the debate had even wrapped, a parody account called @PenceFly existed and had picked up something like 25,000 followers. By this morning it's got way more than that. I don't know who made it or how they had the reflexes to grab the handle that fast, but somebody out there deserves a raise.
What I actually want to talk about is what happened after. The Biden campaign had a fly swatter for sale on their merch store — "Truth Over Flies" printed right on it, ten bucks — within a few hours of the debate ending. Not the next morning. That night. Somebody on a campaign staff, presumably already exhausted from debate logistics, had to notice the moment happening in real time, get it designed, get it approved, get it onto whatever storefront platform they're running, and push it live, all while the debate was still technically the news story and not yet the meme.
That's the part that gets me, honestly, more than the joke itself. It's not the fly, it's the supply chain behind the fly. I've watched this pattern before on a smaller scale, a bad tweet turning into a t-shirt a week later, a gaffe turning into a sticker somebody sells on Etsy for six bucks. I've never seen it happen this fast or reach this many people at once. Somewhere there is apparently a fully staffed rapid-response merch function on standby at a presidential campaign in 2020, just waiting for something like this to happen so they can ship a product before the news cycle even finishes the sentence. I don't love what that says about where all our money and attention is going, but I can't pretend it isn't an impressive bit of operational speed.
The other thing worth noting, and this is the part that actually bugs me a little, is how much oxygen this sucked out of everything else that happened this week. The House Judiciary Committee dropped a 449-page report on Tuesday about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google basically behaving like monopolies, with actual internal emails quoted in it, the kind of thing that fifteen years ago would've been the only tech story anyone talked about for a month. It came out the same week as the fly and got maybe a day and a half of real attention before Twitter moved on. I read about a third of that report last night with a second monitor open just so I wouldn't get distracted by the debate stuff, and even I found myself checking the fly account instead. Which is a little embarrassing to admit, but here we are.
I don't have a tidy point to make about any of this. I just think it's worth writing down, on a random Thursday, that we've built a media environment where an insect can outperform actual policy discussion by several orders of magnitude, and where a campaign's merch team can out-execute most startups I've covered on this blog for the last nine years. Somebody should study the fly swatter as a case study in shipping speed. I'd read that paper before I'd read the rest of the antitrust report, and I say that as someone who genuinely cares about the antitrust report.
Also, for what it's worth: I still don't understand who buys political fly swatters. But apparently a lot of people do, because I heard they sold out by midday.