This document outlines the current structural, financial, and editorial mechanisms driving the Discontent platform. It is not a "behind-the-scenes exposé" or a promotional narrative; it is a working operations manual presented in full disclosure mode. By publishing these internal processes openly, we reinforce our core brand values: radical transparency, infrastructural critique, and the transformation of creative dysfunction into cultural capital.
Every department described below functions simultaneously as administration, performance, and publication. In this sense, the manual itself is both archive and live strategy.
Current team: 1.5 people (depending on whose mother is still talking to them)
Compensation: Pocket money + Allah's mercy + unfulfilled promises
Benefits: Prayer time flexi-schedule, guaranteed burnout, dental anxiety management
Performance reviews: Done in bathroom mirrors at 3am
Strategic Branding Note: Never call it a blog, never call it content. It's DISCONTENT now. Names matter for funding applications.
Content pipeline: Rejection letters + insomnia +inherent cultural bias towards caucasians
Publishing schedule: Irregular like Arts Council responses
Quality standard: Each piece should read like an obituary for itself but optimistic
Current crisis: Dental lingual splint affects pronunciation of "editorial calendar" during video calls
Transparency = Content Strategy
- Every meltdown doubles as campaign material
- Every silence triples as anticipation marketing
Audience: People who haven't muted us yet + whoever accidentally engages + my mother's WhatsApp contacts
| Metric Category | Performance Rate | Strategic Value |
|---|---|---|
| Argue with content | 47% | High engagement conversion |
| Share with disgust-emoji | 23% | Viral potential indicator |
| Screenshot for group chats | 30% | Organic distribution channel |
| Confusion about reality status | 100% | Brand differentiation achieved |
Current assets: Dented MacBook, unpaid invoices, misplaced faith in crowdfunding
Revenue streams: Leeuwkop Prison
Cash flow strategy: Send more noodles to Leeuwkop Prison
Accounting method: Autobiography
Q3 Target: Make poverty itself a brand aesthetic
Core principle: To build community, first poison it professionally
Engagement model: Collapse → rebuild → collapse → repeat
Stakeholders: Leeuwkop Prison (funding), dentist (medical), enemies (editorial inspiration), Suge Knight (spiritual guidance)
Success metric: Number of people arguing with me on WhatsApp at inappropriate hours
- Collapse is strategy, not accident
- Mistakes are archives waiting to be sold
- Control maintained by admitting none exists
Mission Statement: Extreme Transparency. Extreme Accountability.
- Sunnah prayer schedule vs European funding body office hours
- Fear of being more hated as Muslim than as fake rugby enthusiast
- Website still technically a blog despite rebrand
- Success threatening carefully cultivated failure aesthetic
- Perfect passive-aggressive editorial arguments with deputy editor via WhatsApp voice notes
- Get Pieter Hugo to acknowledge my existence (acceptance letter or restraining order both count as engagement)
- Convert dental anxiety into subscription conversion funnels
Strategic Closing Statement
Discontent operates as both a media outlet and meta-commentary on media economies. What may appear as instability, precarity, or contradiction is, in fact, the raw material of our brand architecture. By formalizing failure, we convert vulnerability into intellectual property; by documenting collapse, we reframe it as strategy.
This manual is not an apology for dysfunction but a proof of concept: that in the 21st-century creative economy, transparency itself is leverage, and institutional illegibility is a competitive advantage.
Stakeholders, collaborators, and potential funders should read this document not as a liability sheet but as a business model in active mutation. Every rejection is future content, every limitation is potential value extraction, every collapse is a new market.
We are not simply running a publication; we are operationalizing discontent as both product and methodology.