Black Friday is a love story about marketing AIs. The elevator pitch – in the parallel universe in which it gets pitched – would be that it’s Romeo and Juliet meets Tron.
Set in the near future, where social media is largely populated by corporate artificial intelligences that speak directly for brands, a pair of AI representatives for two of the world’s largest multinationals come to put their programmed rivalries aside and discover their love for one another, and that the world is not what they thought.
The story takes place on what we call Twitter, with the accounts – or characters – conversing by @ing one another or through the eternal language of advertising. It was made by scheduling tweets for multiple accounts to take place over a year, incorporating many of the awareness day hashtags that social media marketers regularly (and ruefully) use when there’s nothing actually say. Such is digital marketing; such is romance.
The tweets were then collated into four chronological lists and are now embedded on this website, the story having assumed its ultimate form. It comes in at about 25 thousand words, but the tweets and hashtag series within it were intended to work somewhat independently.
Note, February 2024: Written in 2019, Black Friday features an eccentric billionaire buying Twitter and monkeying around with the way it works. Since then, an eccentric billionaire has bought Twitter and monkeyed around with the way it works, resulting in the removal of the “collections” feature by which the posts of @GoodlifeLtd and @SeiglerShaid were ordered into the story. The tweets have instead been preserved directly on this site, away from any tech-bro’s excitable fingers.