Meet the Anchor babies
Plus: Coming to a natural wine bar near you!
I’ve been working the Anchor Brewing Co. beat hard lately, breaking news in June about parent company Sapporo USA’s slapdash strategy pivot and Christmas cancelation, then publishing a handful of scoops and analysis last week about its closure announcement, why Anchor workers thought said announcement was bullshit, and how a high-powered flack spun the whole thing to too-credulous mainstream media anyway. This week, I broke more news, reporting Wednesday night that Anchor Brewing Union workers are going to try a Hail Mary to buy the historic San Francisco brewery and turn it into a worker-owned co-op. It’s been a busy summer!
Like most journalists, I use social media to promote my coverage. Particularly Twitter: even though the platform has become more unstable and unpleasant to use under Elon Musk’s ownership, it remains indispensable for breaking news.1 As I’ve rolled out Anchor scoops there over the past month and a half, threads of my reportage have collectively received thousands of retweets.2 Any reporter can tell you that going even slightly viral on Twitter is a double-edged sword. Your stories are being seen by more people, which is good, but a lot of those people are annoying as shit and now want to talk to you, which is bad. These irritating/tiresome/boot-licking tweeters are variously known as trolls, sea lions, or reply-guys (they’re almost always guys, in my experience), depending on their particular behavior. In my coverage of San Francisco’s iconic steam brewery this summer, I’ve encountered all of the above in my Twitter mentions posting bad-faith, irrelevant, or otherwise unappealing discourse. Let’s call them Anchor babies.
In the broadest possible sense, an Anchor baby is a guy (again, basically all guys) trying to make the news of the likely demise of a century-and-a-half-old American institution beloved by tens of millions of people across time and space about them somehow. But having countenanced this vexing cohort for the past month and a half, I’ve learned that Anchor babies are far from a monolith. They all have dumb shit to say, but they don’t all say the same dumb shit.
My involuntary field research reveals a few common subtypes of this pesky creature. While their takes are ill-informed and just plain bad, they nevertheless represent the way millions of Americans think about corporations, labor, culture, and power, and shouldn’t be dismissed without being debunked. So without further ado, allow me to introduce the Anchor babies.