New media ambassadors are the ones to watch as depicted in the latest episode of Atlanta, titled “The Streisand Effect.” The show opens with Paper Boi joining Earn for a toke and a joke after his late night club performance.
Within minutes, another man glides into the frame chuckling along with the two cousins. He’s way too comfortable, already. Too eager. Too smiley. Both Paper and Earn frown at him.
The man (Black? Asian? Black and Asian?) introduces himself as Zan and drops the N-Bomb almost immediately. “Paper Boi?,” he starts, as if he didn’t realize that was who he pulled up on. “Blowing up my n*gga…” Paper responds with a curt “I don’t know you.”
Zan answered, “But I’m still ya n*gga. Believe me.”
Increasingly annoyed with the entire scenario, Paper spits: “Are you Black?” Zan’s crooked smile disappears, replaced by a thin veil of sincerity, “Of course I am.”
And this is the way it goes for the entire episode. “The Streisand Effect” is a real term—it’s an online circumstance where someone with a noteworthy following tries to censor a piece of information but in doing that, draws a ton of attention to it. That happens here with Zan.
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Photo: FX
He’s almost a caricature of today’s social media phenoms. Zan pulled up with the hashtag-embroidered hat, ready for pictures of Paper Boi and when his overzealous presence was waved off, he took to social media by the next morning to humiliate the rapper.
“Yeah man,” Earn warns. “Don’t bait this dude. You gon’ make it worse.” But Paper was already furiously typing away. It all results in the Streisand Effect. See?
We especially like Atlanta because it targets every part of what it means to be an up-and-coming rapper today. These are the things you have to deal with — the increased visibility, the little kids imitating your actions (“good” or “bad”), and the nagging ass bloggers in it for the likes.
As irritating as Zan is though, there is one moment here where he makes a little sense and shows Paper that the two are more alike than he would like to believe. After tracking him down at his pizza delivery job, Paper hops in Zan’s modest whip with his “business partner” in the back (Atlanta’s smallest superstar Street Money PJ pops up here). He low-key threatens Zan with cliched phrases: “This ain’t no game aiight? I’m tired of people messing with me online. You messing with my life, this my job. I know it looks like all fun and games on The Shade Room but n*ggas die. People are forgotten. Sh*t is real.” Then “Rap is making the best out of a bad situation.”
Zan offers his own perspective. “It’s all a game. We’re all just hustling. You’re exploiting your situation to make rap. And I’m exploiting you exploiting that.” Point taken.
CONTINUED
In other news, Earn wakes up looking down the barrel of a gun, literally and figuratively. His mission for the day is to pawn a phone and hopefully get some bread off it. Enough to begin paying Vanessa back slowly. Darius convinces him that he can flip the money, trade the phone in for a samurai sword and end up with more bread in the end. This results in the two heading on a journey around the metro area. Still Earn ends up frustrated by evening after hearing that he wouldn’t see the profit for a season or two, thanks to Darius’s “foresight.”
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Donning a “Keep On Keeping On” tee shirt, Earn loses hope. “Are you joking?” he asks, incredulous. “See… I’m poor Darius. And poor people don’t have time for investments because poor people are too busy trying not to be poor.” Darius makes the connection, finally, and offers his phone up to be traded in. “I get a new one every month anyway so ‘they’ don’t track me,” he shrugs, then says matter-of-factly, “We’re friends now.”
Good to have good people in your corner. Paper still needs that follow-up hit though.
