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.Berry’s sentiments, it would seem, have now become the modern “perception of advertising,” which is clearly not going down in this country.It’s going up.When Americans watch Super Bowl commercials, they analyze them as pieces of art; they think about the message the images imply and they blog about what those implications are supposed to prove about the nation as a whole.We assume that commercials are not just informing us about purchasable products, because that would be crude and ineffective.We’re smarter than that.But that understanding makes us more vulnerable.We’ve become the ideal audience for advertising—consumers who intellectually magnify commercials in order to make them more trenchant and clever than they actually are.Our fluency with the language and motives of the advertiser induces us to create new, better meanings for whatever they show us.We do most of the work for them.Like all people who pretend they’re smart, I want to feel immune to this.I avoid advertising.Since the advent of digital video recorders, I rarely watch2 TV commercials (even when they come on during live sporting events I immediately change the channel, usually to a different live sporting event).I wrote a column in Esquire for five years, yet I can’t think of one company who advertised alongside my work (I know they were there, but I can’t remember any of them).I’ve never read a pop-up or a banner ad on the web.Does anyone? Even if I watch Survivor at cbs.com, I check my e-mail during the uncloseable commercial that precedes the episode.Obviously, I’m not the only person who does this.Yet—somehow—I still know about new things that are available to purchase.I can sense when I’m a target market.I knew that Pepsi was focusing on optimism long before I saw any new logos or press releases.So how could this be? How is it that ideas I never think about still burrow into my head? Why do I understand an ad campaign I completely avoid?I enjoy Don Draper.He’s got a lot of quality suits.But I’m afraid I might be his employer, and I don’t even know it.1.The failure of which, it should be noted, helped Coca-Cola immensely.The introduction of New Coke was either the smartest or luckiest marketing scheme of the 1980s.2.When I first wrote this sentence, it read, “Since the advent of digital video recorders, I never see TV commercials.” But I suppose that isn’t accurate; I don’t watch commercials, but I do see them.I see them flicker across the screen at four times the normal speed, minus the audio.And maybe this is enough.Maybe all I need to do is see them, because I can figure out the rest on my own.FAIL1 There are certain rules I try to follow as a writer.One rule is to never place the word and directly following a semicolon.Another is not to write positively about diabolical mathematicians who murder people through the U.S.mail.As a consequence, I’m nervous about saying anything non-negative (or even neutral) about Ted Kaczynski, simply because there are always certain readers who manage to get the wrong idea about everything.For most of the world, the fact that Kaczynski killed three people and injured twenty-three others negates everything else about him.There is only one socially acceptable way to view the Unabomber: as a hairy, lumber-obsessed extremist whose icy brilliance was usurped only by a sinister lack of empathy.Writing about Kaczynski’s merits as a philosopher is kind of like writing about O.J.Simpson’s merits as a running back—at first it confuses people, and then it makes them mad.I would advise against it.You absolutely cannot win.But who wants to win?Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It’s the most important aspect of my life that I hate.The more central it becomes to how I live, the worse it seems for the world at large.I believe all technology has a positive short-term effect and a negative long-term impact, and—on balance—the exponential upsurge of technology’s social import has been detrimental to the human experience.Obviously and paradoxically, I’m writing these sentiments on a laptop computer.And because I’ve felt this way for years (and because I’ve e-mailed these same thoughts to other people), there are those who tell me I’m like Ted Kaczynski.1 The only thing everyone knows about Kaczynski (apart from the violence) is that he was an enraged hermitic technophobe who lived in the woods.His basic narrative has been established: He left academia for rural Montana, he spent seventeen years sending anonymous letter bombs to innocent people he’d never met, he demanded that his thirty-five-thousand-word manifesto be published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he was apprehended in 1996 after his brother and the FBI deduced that Kaczynski was the Unabomber.All of that is true.This is why the Unabomber matters to historians: He’s a fascinating, unique crime story.But the problem with that criminal fascination is how it’s essentially erased the content of his motives.Kaczynski believed he had to kill people in order to get his ideas into the public discourse.He was totally upfront about this: “If [I] had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted,” he plainly writes in Industrial Society and Its Future.“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.” On the most primitive level, this goal succeeded.But not the way he hoped.Because Kaczynski sent bombs to people, nobody takes anything he says seriously (they might in three hundred years, but they don’t right now).Despite the huge circulations of The New York Times and The Washington Post and its ever-present availability on the Internet, the “Unabomber Manifesto” is an unread, noninfluential document.And that’s regrettable, because every day, the content of Industrial Society and Its Future becomes more and more interesting.It’s like an artless, bookish version of the Kinks song “20th Century Man,” amplified by a madman who’s too smart to be reasonable.I will grant that it contains a lot of problematic fascist ideology (not surprising, considering that the author was a problematic fascist who shared both the good and bad qualities of Martin Heidegger).But it’s not nearly as insane as it should be, at least relative to how we view its author [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Berry’s sentiments, it would seem, have now become the modern “perception of advertising,” which is clearly not going down in this country.It’s going up.When Americans watch Super Bowl commercials, they analyze them as pieces of art; they think about the message the images imply and they blog about what those implications are supposed to prove about the nation as a whole.We assume that commercials are not just informing us about purchasable products, because that would be crude and ineffective.We’re smarter than that.But that understanding makes us more vulnerable.We’ve become the ideal audience for advertising—consumers who intellectually magnify commercials in order to make them more trenchant and clever than they actually are.Our fluency with the language and motives of the advertiser induces us to create new, better meanings for whatever they show us.We do most of the work for them.Like all people who pretend they’re smart, I want to feel immune to this.I avoid advertising.Since the advent of digital video recorders, I rarely watch2 TV commercials (even when they come on during live sporting events I immediately change the channel, usually to a different live sporting event).I wrote a column in Esquire for five years, yet I can’t think of one company who advertised alongside my work (I know they were there, but I can’t remember any of them).I’ve never read a pop-up or a banner ad on the web.Does anyone? Even if I watch Survivor at cbs.com, I check my e-mail during the uncloseable commercial that precedes the episode.Obviously, I’m not the only person who does this.Yet—somehow—I still know about new things that are available to purchase.I can sense when I’m a target market.I knew that Pepsi was focusing on optimism long before I saw any new logos or press releases.So how could this be? How is it that ideas I never think about still burrow into my head? Why do I understand an ad campaign I completely avoid?I enjoy Don Draper.He’s got a lot of quality suits.But I’m afraid I might be his employer, and I don’t even know it.1.The failure of which, it should be noted, helped Coca-Cola immensely.The introduction of New Coke was either the smartest or luckiest marketing scheme of the 1980s.2.When I first wrote this sentence, it read, “Since the advent of digital video recorders, I never see TV commercials.” But I suppose that isn’t accurate; I don’t watch commercials, but I do see them.I see them flicker across the screen at four times the normal speed, minus the audio.And maybe this is enough.Maybe all I need to do is see them, because I can figure out the rest on my own.FAIL1 There are certain rules I try to follow as a writer.One rule is to never place the word and directly following a semicolon.Another is not to write positively about diabolical mathematicians who murder people through the U.S.mail.As a consequence, I’m nervous about saying anything non-negative (or even neutral) about Ted Kaczynski, simply because there are always certain readers who manage to get the wrong idea about everything.For most of the world, the fact that Kaczynski killed three people and injured twenty-three others negates everything else about him.There is only one socially acceptable way to view the Unabomber: as a hairy, lumber-obsessed extremist whose icy brilliance was usurped only by a sinister lack of empathy.Writing about Kaczynski’s merits as a philosopher is kind of like writing about O.J.Simpson’s merits as a running back—at first it confuses people, and then it makes them mad.I would advise against it.You absolutely cannot win.But who wants to win?Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It’s the most important aspect of my life that I hate.The more central it becomes to how I live, the worse it seems for the world at large.I believe all technology has a positive short-term effect and a negative long-term impact, and—on balance—the exponential upsurge of technology’s social import has been detrimental to the human experience.Obviously and paradoxically, I’m writing these sentiments on a laptop computer.And because I’ve felt this way for years (and because I’ve e-mailed these same thoughts to other people), there are those who tell me I’m like Ted Kaczynski.1 The only thing everyone knows about Kaczynski (apart from the violence) is that he was an enraged hermitic technophobe who lived in the woods.His basic narrative has been established: He left academia for rural Montana, he spent seventeen years sending anonymous letter bombs to innocent people he’d never met, he demanded that his thirty-five-thousand-word manifesto be published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he was apprehended in 1996 after his brother and the FBI deduced that Kaczynski was the Unabomber.All of that is true.This is why the Unabomber matters to historians: He’s a fascinating, unique crime story.But the problem with that criminal fascination is how it’s essentially erased the content of his motives.Kaczynski believed he had to kill people in order to get his ideas into the public discourse.He was totally upfront about this: “If [I] had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted,” he plainly writes in Industrial Society and Its Future.“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.” On the most primitive level, this goal succeeded.But not the way he hoped.Because Kaczynski sent bombs to people, nobody takes anything he says seriously (they might in three hundred years, but they don’t right now).Despite the huge circulations of The New York Times and The Washington Post and its ever-present availability on the Internet, the “Unabomber Manifesto” is an unread, noninfluential document.And that’s regrettable, because every day, the content of Industrial Society and Its Future becomes more and more interesting.It’s like an artless, bookish version of the Kinks song “20th Century Man,” amplified by a madman who’s too smart to be reasonable.I will grant that it contains a lot of problematic fascist ideology (not surprising, considering that the author was a problematic fascist who shared both the good and bad qualities of Martin Heidegger).But it’s not nearly as insane as it should be, at least relative to how we view its author [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]