No_System! [exclusive interview]

By Spun Counterguy on December 11, 2023

No_System is streetwear that combines style and messaging. Whether it’s through their clothing, patches or stickers, those coming across it will have to pause to consider what the message is and then what they think about it. No System’s Brian Behm explains all.

Spun Counterguy: Can you explain what No_System as a company is and where did the name come from?

Brian Behm: No_System is mostly my working name. It’s a streetwear brand, it’s a podcast, it’s a musician? Everything that I do I do under the name of No_System.

I talk a lot about agency and trying to work outside the system. “There is No_System” is one of the catchphrases. I like that it means both “there’s a company called No_System” and at the end of the day, there is no system. The cavalry isn’t coming. We can care for others but in order to care for them we have to take care of ourselves.

No_System also shrinks down to No_Sys which sounds like Gnosis, the Greek work for Knowledge. So Nosysknows is me being cheeky. There’s another saying that defines No_System that says “see beneath the surface.” Even if I disagree in a lot of ways with the gnostics, the idea of secret knowledge has always appealed to me. I like how they had secret knowledge of what the world actually was. I believe everyone has worth and seeing beneath the surface and taking a deeper look at things plays into that.

Anyway, I’ve been a designer and a branding guy for a long time and No_System became a little puzzle. I joke sometimes that the entire company is kind of an art project because while we’ve had a few people involved at various points in time, we’ve always been a lot smaller than we sometimes look.

Given the aesthetic style that No System exudes, am I right in guessing that you had at least a few years of being under the influence of the punk subculture?

Yeah, I’m a 90s kid. I spent a lot of time making flyers for a coffee shop in the suburbs of St. Paul and making music zines during and after high school. I spent about 20 summers of my life either attending or working for a music festival called Cornerstone. I got to know a lot of bands even if I was always band adjacent.

Sometimes me and my former punk friends like to debate about if a punk rocker can actually ever be a non-conformist given the often narrow definitions of what a punk is and then the general sense that they pretty much all look and sound alike. Did you ever wrestle with that perceived inconsistency?

The short part of the answer- though there’s a better answer- is that I probably wrestled more with whether I was punk at all. I’ve always felt like an outsider. As an adult I can see that a lot of that was my ADHD and how that affects development, but as a kid it just made me feel even more like I didn’t fit. No_System is basically me designing for him and who I could see my girls growing up into.

(Gothix)

How I first heard about your company is that I guess you guys partnered with YouTube personality Gothix on some things. How did that come about?

I put No_System out into the world in the spring of 2019. During Covid, things kind of slowed to a crawl and honestly, my mental health wasn’t great before Covid. The first version of the company had been focused on designing augmented reality experiences into t-shirts. I was always amused that Shepherd Fairey could steal OBEY! From They Live, but he couldn’t steal the mechanism. I wanted to steal the mechanism. See Beneath the Surface was originally about the shirts having AR. (I promise this gets to Gothix)

It was too much work with my misfunctioning brain to do the design, record the music and build the AR experience plus market; I couldn’t juggle all of the pieces. Then, during Covid, I got really sidetracked by music and started to rap. Not my wife’s favorite memory.

As I was getting back into design stuff again, I was talking with a friend (Jessi Bennett who’s also now a coworker) about Thomas Sowell. We’d watched that late 2020 Hoover Institute doc and we were talking about a section where a guy talked about how he saw connections between Sowell and hardcore ethics. That led, particularly in January of 2021 to thinking about pre-Thatcherite London and post-Covid economics. Over the next couple of days, I came up with our Badasses of Thought and Action punk logos just to amuse Jessi.

Anyway, I stumbled onto Gothix as she was starting to explore all of this too. She and Jessi were two of the first people I’d met in real life who I could really tell that I was designing for. I sent her a note (I joke that I have a habit of collecting people) and we started to get to know each other.

We sponsored an episode both to support her and try to show stuff to people we thought were hopefully more our people (we’re still searching for more of our people). Over time, we decided to collaborate. I was already helping a channel called Popcorn Planet with merch and I thought that since I was thinking about people like Vanessa when I designed anyway, maybe I could design FOR Vanessa.

One of her best friends eventually came on staff to help with the company (Star San). We had to shut down that part of the store earlier this year. I’m still trying to figure out how to make the company work and I had to, with my limited time, focus on something that would be more sustainable. I still care about Gothix a lot.

What has been some of the responses that you’ve gotten for your clothing line?

It’s a mix. When I meet someone who GETS it, REALLY gets it, it’s electric. I LOVE meeting ‘the others’. My wife definitely doesn’t understand my love of economics stuff and didn’t understand the band shirts. She doesn’t understand making music as someone like Friedrich Hayek even more. I’d say she’s like a lot of people.

People who would lean left in the anarchy and punk space get really bent out of shape about things like the capitalism shirt. I used to run Facebook ads for that collection and it would scoop them up. I grew a much thicker skin reading all of the nasty Facebook comments over how cringe we were for putting out capitalist propaganda. They’d always think we were a big company, which is maybe the downside of making art more like I’m in a band instead of just having a name that sounds like an artist.

That punk shirt collection though may have lent itself to my current job. I gave Jessi Bennett some shirts in thanks and she wore them to work pretty religiously. My coworkers at Emergent Order got to be reminded about my designs almost every day. By December of 2021 I left my freelance career to go work there full time.

All of the work I do through No_System ended up aligned with the work I do through Emergent Order. I’ve felt really thankful to be at a point in my life where at least the work that I’m doing is all pointed towards trying to make the world a better place through the same philosophies. Emergent Order was super inspirational to me. I’d seen the rap video John Papola and Russ Roberts had done with Keynes and Hayek. I thought it was SO cool to see someone explain this stuff and not speak down to people. I didn’t know who had made it, but I knew I wanted to know them.

They and Andrew Breitbart and his idea of politics being downstream from culture, both made me want to see what I could do. I’m so done with politics but I still have a lot of things I care about. I thought I might be able to reach more people by translating those feelings through my art.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to throw some of your designs back at you and have you explain the story behind them.

I’m always trying to connect ideas with people. One of the most recurring ideas is how nefarious inflation actually is. It’s easier to see it now when inflation has been high enough that almost none of our wages have kept up with it, but printing a bunch of cash only makes all of the cash that exists worth less and the only people that it helps is the very first cog in that system (the federal reserve/banks that take that money).

I’m also always just trying to make things that are amusing whether you know what’s going on or not. This was pieced together from a set of magazines that collect old corporate/commercial stock art. I took bits from different things to rebuild the robot banker and then illustrated extra stuff on top of that. The text was assembled from old newspapers and type specimens.

Death Metal logos amuse me. They’re so unintelligible intentionally. I did a death metal logo of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin. Figured if no one knew who he was, he maybe joined a Norwegian death metal band and wandered into the woods. Since then I’ve done other financial death metal shirts and a few silly sayings. I liked the idea of doing something for those days when all of the emails should have had a TL;DR.

This bit of illustration was leftover from an idea I’d had in between Gothix collections. We would have turned it into something else.

In hindsight, I’d maybe change the text, but I was trying to say that whatever horrible situation you find yourself in doesn’t have to be permanent. I always want to leave people in a better place. It’s not very goth or punk to say we do “self-help” stuff, but there’s definitely some affirmation going on. I’m a dad. That dad-ness and wanting to be supportive is kind of baked into everything I do.

This was a shirt we did as an experiment with my friend Stephen Kent. He wanted to do Star Wars shirts and I was really nervous about building an entire store of Star Wars things. I’ve always had a really awkward relationship with people doing fan art or appropriating other people’s IP. When I was at Rooster Teeth we had to send so many cease and desist orders to Chinese companies (mostly) making counterfeit merch from the anime series we produced (a show called RWBY). Stephen provided the concept and the text and I worked to find ways to take some of his reference renders to create new AI imagery that I could manipulate into the art that we used. I love halftones and have a bunch of different methods for converting images into line art. I use a lot of digital methods sometimes to try and strip as much of the digital-ness out of things as I can.

Kanji gets used in a lot of streetwear design and it’s also one of my favorite ways to hide messaging in a shirt. It’s easy enough for someone to point their camera at a shirt and have Google Translate translate the shirt for them, but the rest of the time, most of the rest of the world can ignore whatever it says.

I’ve always been fascinated by numbers stations. They’re these shortwave radio stations that just broadcast the same bits of repeated numbers and symbols. Anyone can hear them but they only make sense if you have the code book. It goes back to the idea of gnosis and seeing beneath the surface too. I could also just be reading too much into everything. 😂

This and the Hell is Just a Detour short were extensions of things I’d been exploring when I was working with Gothix. They’re partially where I imagine we could have went. I really liked working in the style. This was all about the idea of bravery and that we have the tools and strength to intentionally wander into the darkness ahead of us. It’s about trying to create something cool that’s also a little bit motivational.

This is a whole random assembly of weirdo things I’d been creating in Midjourney and other random bits. It’s got a bunch of silliness in it. “Happy! Fun! Nihilism!” is the title and those are the big words in it. It also says “no one escapes alive”, “defy!”, “There’s a difference between nihilism and fatalism. I’m a total fatalist. Death’s sweet embrace” and lastly “You have a lot more than you realize. Look under the surface.” Again, mostly just silly, but also darkly motivational?

You obviously have a background in the Christian faith world. Did you wrestle with how you as a follower of Jesus was to interact with the political world? You have some Christians that say that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and thus do nothing political. Then you have those on the conservative side that possibly make the American founders kinds of saints or apostles. Then there’s the progressive Christians that say we have to submit to whatever the Democratic Party is pushing that particular week. How do you parse all of that?

I believe a lot in the idea of vocation. I’m not always super open about it, but I think we’re saved for something and not just from something. I look at someone like my friend Steve who has gone from being a musician, to a label owner, to a filmmaker, to a professor and how his faith has impacted his work and life and while I wouldn’t ever put myself in the same category, he’s definitely a model for what I look up to.

While my faith informs my ideology, I can act on my ideology because it doesn’t conflict with my faith. I certainly wouldn’t call myself an ex-vangelical. I hate that term, but I would say that my relationship with the evangelical church is very different than it was when I was a kid. I want my work to be representative of my beliefs but not be preachy about them. I want to always offer a rabbit trail that encourages people to dig deeper into all sorts of things. If anything it’s me saying, “Hey, there’s interesting stuff. Dig deeper. Be bold.”

I was connected to a church when I lived in Colorado called Scum of the Earth. They would talk about themselves as a church for the left-out and the right-brained. It’s- ironically- a very Biblically named church. It comes out of a verse that says that as followers of Christ (since this is pretty early on) they had become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world. (1 Thessalonians). I feel like the scum of the earth a lot. I don’t fit in everywhere. I don’t agree with everyone on every single thing, but I can try and build bridges and maybe help someone not get quite as othered.

At the end of the day, I’m trying to build some of the community that I wish I would have had when I really needed it. A safe space for all of the people who are kind of weird like me, we may not all agree but we can work together on the things we do agree on.