The Poster Boy of Guerilla Media

By Michelle Chihara, AlterNet. Posted January 23, 2002.

Jonah Peretti has already had his 15 minutes of fame. Last year, he ordered a pair of customizable Nikes online. He asked Nike to stitch the word "sweatshop" into them. Nike refused. Peretti and Nike exchanged a series of emails, which ended with Peretti's message: "I have decided to order the shoes with a different iD, but I would like to make one small request. Could you please send me a color snapshot of the 10-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes?"

The series of emails between Peretti and Nike became an overnight email sensation. Peretti had sent the text of the exchange to a only few close friends. Through the power of the Internet, he became a minor celebrity.

Now, Peretti and his sister, stand-up comic and performer Chelsea Peretti, have had another lightning-quick, word-of-mouth success. It's called Rejection Line, and it's a phone number in Manhattan as well as a Web site at RejectionLine.com. "Operators are Standing By!" the site trumpets, "Someone won't leave you alone? Give them 'your' number: 212-479-7990, the official New York Rejection Line! The rejection line team takes care of the rest, providing premium rejection services -- completely free of charge!"

The Rejection Line is a real phone number, complete with a message of rejection, and subsequent options to listen to "a comfort specialist," "a sad poem," or just "cling to unrealistic hope." It has gotten attention from everyone from the morning DJs at Z100 to Esquire magazine. AlterNet spoke with Peretti about his success, the power of technology, social networks, viral marketing and the trouble with the Left.

JONAH PERETTI: I promise this will be Authentic and Soundbite Free.

ALTERNET: That was already a soundbite.

JP: Right. Chelsea and I are actually trying to write a humorous piece about Rejection Line for All Things Considered on NPR, and it's hard not to write like an ad, when you're writing about your own project.

Do you have an overall philosophy?

JP: Yes. Chelsea is a performer and stand-up comic, so she sees this project more in those terms. But I'm really interested in social networks and media, and I'm interested in Rejection Line almost purely from that perspective. I like that it's funny, and I try to contribute to the humor. But there is a philosophy.

You know, none of the other press so far has made the connection between Rejection Line and the Nike email. The Rejection Line is getting pretty much just fluff pieces about it. A couple writers at the New York Times wanted to write different pieces, but their editors didn't want them to. Nothing ever showed up there.

So how does Rejection Line connect to the Nike emails?

JP: I was amazed that something I sent out to a dozen friends ended up going to a million people. It wasn't planned. I started getting emails saying, "Why are you sending this to me?" and they were from total strangers. I sent it to my close friends and, at the peak of the phenomenon, I was getting emails from New Zealand and Australia and all over the world, depending on what time of day it was in what time zone. How is it that something I sent to a few friends, that I didn't actively promote, or even put on a listserv, did that? How does that happen? I became intellectually fascinated by that.

Where were you at that point?

JP: I was at the MIT Media Lab in Boston, where those types of issues were being discussed, and there was a lot of research on related topics. It's very broad and interdisciplinary work, but for example, there's work about understanding meme -- self-replicating ideas, or self-replicating information. That's one area. Another rich area is social networks theory. Stanley Milgram is sort of the founder of that field, from Yale University in the '70s. He was doing experiments that led to the concept of six degrees of separation. He called the paper the "Small World Problem."

Milgram did an experiment where he got a whole bunch of letters together and gave them to people in the Midwest. He said, those letters should ultimately go to a stockbroker who lives in Boston. If you know him, just send him the letter. If you don't know him, send it to someone you think is more likely to know him.

So, basically, a bunch of people in the Midwest, none of whom knew the stockbroker, sent these letters to a friend in Boston, to someone who was a stockbroker, to someone close to Boston -- whatever metric they could think of. It took a little less than six steps for most of the letters to get to him. That's the concept of six degrees of separation, you're only six steps from everyone in the world.

In a way, that didn't matter that much until recently, because the Internet puts technical networks over the social networks. Before, Milgram had to use this specialized experiment in the mail. Now, with things like email forwards, in a couple of days you jump right through those six degrees. Social networks research becomes a way to think about new media.

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