In 2019 MSCHF made an internal handbook. Inspired by art movement manifestos and the instructional nature of The KLF's

1988 The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), the MSCHF handbook contained precepts and frameworks to assist in the creation of successful MSCHF works. The book (110 pages) consisted entirely of full-bleed images and single declarative sentences. MSCHF, the artist-entity, was a growing team of people with diverse skill sets. The handbook was intended to be a series of reference points, each of which would act as shorthand for conversations' worth of ideas from the MSCHF team's internal dialogues.

Excerpts from the handbook are presented here with annota-tions. The goal is to explain key concepts associated with the first few years of MSCHF's existence, as it was developing and refining these operating guidelines. The annotations preserve some of the free-associative and jotted-notes quality of the process that originally produced the handbook.

The handbook was not originally intended to be legible to an outside audience. The principles gathered together into the handbook were extrapolated from the work at least as much as they informed it. It was made for readers with deep familiarity with doing that work: the MSCHF team itself. That context is in some ways now contained within the pages of this book: the works described in the case studies that follow in Made by MSCHF represent the clearest "worked examples" to accompany this handbook.

However, rules only work for so long. The annotations reflect MSCHF's thoughts on these various working tenets at the time they were developed. Some have expired. We have broken multiple rules and changed our thinking about others over the course of MSCHF's existence. MSCHF has never hesitated to discard a rule if it is no longer productive. In some such cases, these may be obvious, and in others less so. The endnotes to this section highlight select instances that bear further commentary in retrospect.

Handbook

SPREAD ACROSS CATEGORIES

1. MSCHF structurally avoids the Pigeonhole Problem. MSCHF makes things that (collectively) cannot be defined by object category. MSCHF ensures its ideas are not pre-constrained by execution.
1. Category jumps are potent. MSCHF looks for tools, thoughts, and techniques from other spaces that can be used in unfamiliar spaces.
1. The audience for MSCHF is spread across categories.
1. Audience is never a driver for what MSCHF makes.
1. Never do the same thing twice.

THE SPICY PRESENT AND CAPITALISM'S HOPEFUL MONSTERS

1. No one talks about the future anymore. Instead, everything accelerates the present to a fever pitch, intensifying and weirding the horrid idiosyncrasies and dysfunctions of the current moment. There's a hole where the future used to be, and all that remains is the increasingly spicy present.
1. What MSCHF makes is always real, not hypothetical.

It is not fiction or future; it is the accelerated and intensified present.

1. MSCHF looks for ways to exacerbate the Spicy Present, to extrapolate it into absurdity.
1. We are not the only ones doing this: capitalist innovation is engaged in this same process, producing mutants and monsters searching for their own evolutionary fitness.

DON'T DISCOUNT CENTER CULTURE

1. Billions and billions served!
1. Make it shitty! Aesthetic populism communicates effectively.
1. MSCHF looks for concepts that slap in one sentence and slap harder in three.
1. There is a prevailing tendency for artists to run away from the biggest cultural stages because they are lowbrow or surface-level or distasteful. There are plenty of times when this makes sense! But it does abdicate a huge amount of power.
1. MSCHF, as a practice and as an entity, manifests the ambition for creative work/a creative entity to wield tangible communication power, competitive with the cultural power held by global companies, celebrities, and media entities.

DEATH IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS BIRTH

1. Projects end! How things die is part of the content of the work.
1. MSCHF designs its own archival preservation and ends projects on its own terms.
1. From a practical standpoint: We can't cease what we're no longer doing! We can't desist from nothing!
1. MSCHF has a plan to burn it all down.

MAKE CULTURAL READYMADES

1. Using materials that people have strong associations with = people will have strong reactions to your work.
1. MSCHF uses a sampling-based working process. Sample sounds, sample images, sample concepts. Sample the thing that signifies culture larger than itself (for example: golf!).
1. Give people more entry points to the work. Steal audiences. Get the audience from one half of the readymade into the same space as the audience for the other half.

EXPLOIT EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE

1. MSCHF combines inputs and outputs to create absurd systems.
1. Don't build it from scratch if it's already there: people already understand how to use it; there's already a user base.
1. If you build it, they will come (BAD) vs. build it where they are (GOOD),
1. Using real" infrastructure steals authenticity. authority, and credibility.
1. We don't make fiction. Things that exist in standard systems people use every day are real, not fictional, and getting people to act on "real" systems is more powerful than getting them to act on constructed ones.
1. Using existing pieces of culture as building blocks comprises the process of creating infinite dongles.

BE ATHLETIC

1. Athletic aesthetics (with apologies to Brad Troemel) applied to product. Match the pace of cultural consumption in the surrounding context-not of social media content but product release cycles.*
1. When making things at high frequency, people remember the first thing they saw, the best thing they have seen, and the most recent thing they saw. Best and last both benefit from volume.
1. Hit factory = many one-hit wonders in a row.
1. Every context jump is like starting from scratch. The best audience will come along for the ride but must be amalgamated out of pieces of audience for each hit.

MAKE IT REAL

1. Soylent could have been a speculative artwork. Instead, it's real.
1. The Softbank WeWork EBITDA slide is speculative fiction. Outside the art world, the distinction blurs anyway.
1. Real things do not have to be consumed as art, do not rely on audience suspension of disbelief, and can be encountered in the same contexts as mundane objects.
1. Commit to physical proliferation. Is there any difference between making one of something and making a render? Make work that doesn't wink and doesn't blink. Don't give people an easy out to take it less seriously.
1. Images spread online. Objects spread and allow people to make their own images. Realized concepts > speculative images › unrealized concepts.

LET THE CROWD PLAY IT

1. Make work that benefits conceptually from increased audience size. Make scale an integral part of the concept so that the marginal utility of additional audience does not decrease with audience size.
1. Crowd-enacted, or crowd-mediated, performance makes the audience complete the work, not consume it. Active participation > passive consumption.
1. This entails risk: projects can fall flat based on what the crowd does, which is wholly outside of our hands.
1. Interactive absurdity creates distributed reality TV.

Everyone's a participant! The truest audience for a reality TV show is its participants, not the viewers.

USE POWER

1. Use all the tools available.
1. Who are we competing with? We are interested in mass scale and working online: We are competing with the Disneys, Facebooks, and Amazons of the world. How do we beat them?
1. MSCHF uses the form of business as an artistic choice. MSCHF takes advantage of the practical benefits of being a company.

Retrospective Notes

The preceding brand book excerpts and their annotations describe the thoughts that guided MSCHF's inception. We have broken multiple of these rules and changed our thinking about others over the course of MSCHF's existence. Sometimes these may be obvious, and sometimes less so. A few notes:

• Pace of outputs
• • Frequent releases on an ironclad schedule was creatively productive for MSCHF for years. We kept increasing our pace, and eventually we felt it was hurting us, so we scaled back. These tenets are just tools; change anything that stops being helpful.
• Making the same thing twice
• • This is a useful framework for not pigeonholing your practice but not a great way of operating a sustainable business.
• Allowing a short three-word summary
• • MSCHF has fallen into using "artist group" or similar in the press and elsewhere to describe ourselves. But perhaps that barely counts, because no one knows what that means.
• We now have an Instagram account
• • MSCHF's first distribution channel was Venmo. Whenever a new project dropped, we sent people one cent, with a link in the message field. We built a click farm rig to automate this. Venmo, which was building a paid advertising program, shut us down. Some of the MSCHF team are still personally banned from Venmo.
  • We moved to text messaging. We soon needed many phone numbers. These were normal text messages-people could text back, and often we'd end up chatting. Following two drops that dealt with campaign fundraising and weed, respectively, we were deplatformed by T-Mobile. No one with T-Mobile as a service provider could receive messages we sent.
  • In desperation, we built an app. So far we have not been kicked off the Apple Store.
  • We've been deplatformed from Shopify (due to legal action from Subway, of all places). We've been put on something called the MATCH List. Eventually, we learned our lesson and decided to build up as many redundant channels as possible. Reluctantly we now have an Instagram account, an email list, a new text messaging list, and so on.
  • Additionally, people were making fake MSCHF social accounts. Our hand was forced.
• We still think knockoffs are very cool
• • But we now have IP lawyers.
  • If you steal from MSCHF, do something cool. If you do something boring, we will come after you!

Contexts

• 🏷️#mschf (See: 📝MSCHF)