Thursday, April 25, 2019

Some thoughts on babies and bathwater.

Even the gloomiest person has a general, Candide-ish view of the world. That is that as time goes on, progress (and the people behind progress) generally improve things. You might even say that much of our contemporary world abides by the notion that the old ways are often pretty stupid.

Certainly, you wouldn’t want a blood transfusion via the sharpened nib of a bird’s feather. You wouldn’t want to drive on the L.I.E. in a Model T. And who would want to watch Game of Thrones on a black-and-white Philco with a nine-inch screen?

Naturally, technology progresses over time. That’s why we buy a new iPhone when our old one works just fine. We inherently buy into the idea that newer must be better. Our consumption-driven society is, in fact, founded on that premise.

But what if that premise is wrong.

That in the words of Wordsworth, by “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”

What if modernity just plain sucks?

That Facebook is an invasion into your bloodstream that tracks your every action and sells it over and over, accumulating their billions according to the value of your clicks?

What if your beloved iPhone (the one you’re likely holding right now) has destroyed your attention-span and made you so susceptible to the serotonin rush we get from seeing a red-dot with a number inside it that we, as a society, can no longer think straight?

What if technology has ruined our democracy, weakened our brains and cost us our freedom?

Way back 2,500 years ago or so, the Greeks discovered that building curved fortifications was smarter than building forts with right angles. Spears, javelins and the ballista from catapults would do less damage to rounded walls than flat walls. A missile that hits obliquely and from an angle is not as powerful as a dead-on hit.

The Greeks conveyed that information to the Romans. And for about 1,000 years, curved fortresses were all the rage throughout the Roman world. This got carried over to a lot of the Medieval world, too. Look at the 13th Century Cathedral Basilica of Saint Cecilia in Albi, France and you get the general idea.

Except, people decided to stop building things that way. They forgot what the Greeks had discovered and the Romans had executed.

In Northern France they built new-style fortresses. With shear walls, facing projectiles head on.

There was no material reason for this architectural shift.

But it became the style.

The old way, rounded walls, though superior, was rejected because it was old.

I wonder as I look at the wasteland of modern marketing communications, if we have similarly rejected things that worked—that always worked—simply because they’re old. And as we all know, the old ways are dumb.

In my many rotations around the sun, I’ve read some of the oldest books in Western literature. Gilgamesh (the oldest), the Iliad, the Odyssey, most of Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles etc. I’ve read Virgil’s Aeneid. Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. Shakespeare. And Chaucer.

Today, 99% of all people reject those stories because they’re old. Just as we reject the simple logic of Bernbach. The myth-making archetypes of Leo Burnett. The unassailable logic of Ogilvy and Gossage. The punch in the face facts of McCabe and Gargano.

They’re old.

They wouldn’t work today.

Our consumer is different.

People won’t like them.

They’re old.

So we've decided that surveillance and microtargeting and small and insignificant and noisy and obnoxious and short and information-free will carry the day.

That's modern and the modern way.

And that has to be better, it's modern.


No comments: