#except corporations profit off of insecurities so every time I feel it I say no I’m not doing this today

[petrichara]

Actually I’m not going to listen to you describe a feature of my body like a problem while trying to sell me your product

[rfadaydreaming]

boyfriend jumin headcanons

theres no way hes been in a relationship before, never even kissed someone before. you best believe hes going to go all in hes so starved for love

he needs to hear every single thing about your life, even the littlest things. he will remember it all, and asks so many questions too. could listen to you talk for hours and never get bored. your life is so different from his, he finds it fascinating. always wants to know more.

at the beginning of the relationship he has an extremely hard time controlling himself and finding whats right and wrong in a romantic relationship. you have to be very open with your boundaries or he’ll treat you like a doll, he cant help himself hes just so enamored.

does SO much research on relationships, he doesnt like the advice he finds but hes looking in all the wrong places. seven gives him links for real advice from real people reddit instead of mens magazines because those all suck. jumin starts to ask him for help whenever hes curious about something and seven will find a link for him to read. it helps bridge their relationship a bit more. seven is one of those friends thats amazing at relationship advice but for some reason desperately single.

even though he’s new to relationships and still trying to figure it out, that does not mean hes bad at it. no sir. this man was raised on romantic novels and cheesy soap operas. he knows his way into your heart easy peasy

the most beautiful arrangements of flowers delivered to your doorstep, your favorite foods from the most gourmet restaurants in seoul sent right to your work, hand written love letters sealed in wax sent to you while he’s away on business. declares his undying love for you over the phone almost daily.

hes never been around women much before, rikas the exception but he wasnt around around her like you would be with a lover. so hes interested finding out about your habits, routines, likes. the way you cook breakfast in the morning, the way you do your bedtime routine, your afterwork routine. always finding something new to love about you every new day.

he really adores anything and everything you think is a flaw. he prefers you with your quirks rather than aiming for perfection. theres nothing wrong with being “plastic” but the majority of those types of women he’s been around are the rich snobby type more than every day women. he prefers you. again hes never been close to many women so its kind of amazing but sad the things you can find to think harshly about. things he absolutely would never imagine someone being insecure about in the first place. he loves this body, it makes him upset when youre so critical to it.

he’ll explain to you what goes on behind the scenes of corporations and how exactly they make you insecure about those odd little things just to profit off of it, theres nothing wrong with you to begin with but if you believed that then they would be out of business, you see. knowing that aspect of things is why hes understanding but still saddened by your insecurities.

hes a very possessive man and is unashamed about it. hes never had anything as important as you to protect before so he doesnt care how ridiculous he may be sometimes, as long as youre safe. body guards, frequent calls, locations on, always wanting to be with you if he can. if that all bothers you i feel like that would be a bit of a disagreement area. his personality is naturally possessive and he does it out of love so bear with him please. he would definitely tone down as time progressed but for now he doesn’t want to let you out of his sight. trusts you, not other people.

he likes to observe you a lot, your day to day. it’s interesting to him even though it can be a little annoying to you sometimes. asks questions constantly. hes so curious. jumin let me go to the bathroom in peace hes literally a child

it makes him so happy when you laugh at his jokes. everyone else thinks they’re not funny but he doesnt care, as long as you laugh hes happy.

if you wear make-up it’s literally amazing for him to watch. he’ll stand in the bathroom and just observe. you can GLUE eyelashes to your FACE?! and its common?! this is so shocking to him. he had no clue. its kind of embarrassing for you but hes just so interested. never watched someone put on makeup before. the process is so intricate and careful, hes so fascinated by this strange magic. youre so smart too, he doesnt know any of the names of the things you use but always asks so he can remember for gift giving purposes. shades you like, shades you dont like, companies you dont buy from, your favorite brands. somehow has a giant mental notepad and writes all this down for safe keeping

speaking of smart he thinks you are the smartest person on the face of this earth. hes so confused at certain aspects of life and you help him get it. why do people eat fried chicken when its not nutritionally dense or even healthy to consume? it doesn’t make sense. because its yummy, jumin. wow, youre so right...

always texts you little reminders throughout the day to show his love. dont forget to eat breakfast dear. dont forget to wear sunscreen before you go out love, its hot today. dont forget that i love you so much my darling ♥︎ SO CUTE hes so caring

this man is so so touch starved, he always wants to hold you or touch you in someway. if he could bring you everywhere with him he would. he starts to get anxious if he goes too long without your comfort, truly doesn’t know how he made it for so long without it

not the biggest fan of pda but it depends on the situation. he likes making others jealous but he doesn’t want anyone else to see the way you look after he kisses you in that one special way that only he can. thats for his eyes only

loves showering you in anything you desire. you are spoiled. he’d buy you a whole ass island if you wanted one. he never understood how his father could just give away so much to a woman but now he cannot say a THING. he’d go completely broke as long as it made you happy

if you dont like tons of store bought gifts he’ll spend more time on meaningful ones. picking you flowers from the rooftop garden and arranging them himself, he embroiders as a pastime so he’ll make you cute little cat decals and stuff like that

he likes to do things for you like paint your nails, wash your hair, put lotion on you after a bath etc. loves it so much, if youre not comfortable with him babying you its totally fine but if you are he’ll do it whenever you let him

he has very cold hands. never really thought about them until he met you, really hopes you dont mind. tries to warm his hands up where he can before he touches you, but secretly loves when he runs his cold fingertips down your skin and you get gooseflesh all over. thinks its cute.

gets insecure sometimes. not really about his looks, but his personality. luciel is funny, zen is handsome and suave. yoosung is sweet and open with his emotions. he wonders frequently why you chose him out of anyone else.

all in all jumin is someone you need to get used to being in a relationship with, hes not the average joe and has a lot going on with himself that he needs to work through. but if you help him, love him for him, he’ll be the sweetest lover you could ever ask for.

[forestwater87]

A moment to chat about “The Butterfinger Effect” (obv spoilers for S4e17)

Wow, so a lot of people fucking haaaaaated this episode. And since I’m addicted to That Discourse, I had to say something because I think they’re super wrong. (And this isn’t me just being a total Camp Camp fangirl here; like, the pee episode was bad. That was bad tv and bad for all the senses. There have been mediocre and even shitty episodes of this show; this just wasn’t one of them.)

There are a couple different points of criticism aimed at this episode, and while there’s one I’d like to take a deep dive into in particular I might as well take some shots at the others real fast:

The moral was too obvious: god, you guys whine all day and night that you wanna see Max show character growth and whenever he displays it you hate how it’s done. This show has never been one for subtlety. I mean, the climate change ep? This is how the show works; it’s part of its twisted-Saturday-morning-cartoons charm, it’s the most efficient way to get a point across in a short runtime, and it was the set up for the joke at the end of the episode.

It didn’t advance the plot: bitch what plot are you talking about???

Not enough dad//vid: listen I’ve made my thoughts about the fandom’s idea of dad//vid incredibly clear at this point, so let’s just:

The most common argument, though, is that it’s all so very “unrealistic” and “out of character.”

Considering the show’s concept of “realistic” involves squirrel armies (hey, another mediocre episode! See, I can call them when I see them) and a universe-destroying space octopus, I’m not sure how to rebut that without another Bianca del Rio gif. So, the out-of-character accusation. 

Listen, characterization is hard as balls. Everyone fucks it up sometimes, and not every characterization in every episode is gonna work for you. 

But you know who nailed it this time? Eddy Goddamn Rivas, the writer for this episode, that’s who.

In fact, I’d argue that the entire point of the episode is that it’s not Space/Race Kid’s new interest that caused the majority of the changes, or some sort of mystical “butterfly/finger effect,” but Nurf’s attempt to put things back to “normal.” He caused the thing he was trying to prevent -- which happens to dovetail perfectly with the moral of accepting change and not letting it freak you out.

This episode is brilliant, and plays with the canon characterizations of all our campers while staying true to them, and I’m gonna show you how.

Under a cut, because not everyone has time for that shit. But first, a juicy preview of the sexy discourse to come:

Space Kid

This one is the easiest to defend, because Space Kid is just . . . Race Kid. Aside from maybe having an idea that he’s cooler than he used to believe he was -- which makes sense, because why do people buy fancy sports cars except that they think it makes them look cool? -- we’ve seen his tendency to latch onto an interest and go 110%. 

Reasonable, hilarious, and adorable. I actually don’t think anyone has any problem with Race Kid, so this is a quickie. 

As for why he dropped it so fast: I mean, hasn’t everyone gotten really into something before deciding it wasn’t as fun as an old hyperfixation? I’ve been coming back to the Camp Camp well since 2016 because it’s just so much fun.

Nurf

Nurf is the one I think people are sleeping on. All the time, always, but especially in this episode. The summary hints that Max is the one unable to handle the idea of change -- something this entire season has been working towards, and I literally just realized change has been a thematic thread throughout several of the episodes and that’s really cool -- but it’s actually Nurf who can’t stand the thought of things being different.

And, in trying to prevent the “butterfinger effect,” he sets it in motion. The irony is delicious, and his head in a fishbowl makes me laugh every goddamn time.

(Also, “A battle of wits is not my strong suit” was just hysterical. Nurf is full of great lines and y’all need to stop ignoring what a comedic goldmine this kid is.)

Preston

Oh, I’m sorry, are we shocked that Preston would jump at the chance to be admired by people, even if it means doing something he doesn’t particularly enjoy?

Were we all in comas during the episode this very season that was literally only about this exact thing?

As to why he’d pick football: he’s a theater kid addicted to the corniest, most cliche tropes. When he got a taste of power by bullying Nurf -- which was also totally in character, because honestly, Preston is not a very nice kid -- of course he went to the thing that in every 80s teen movie meant “cool bully who’s super popular”: the sports jock.

Add to that getting positive recognition from Campbell -- who we’ll get to -- and this swap is totally in-character, and entirely kicked off by the power rush he got from finally getting to be the one who bullies instead of being bullied. 

Nurf created his own worst nightmare by being afraid of change. This episode is fucking brilliant.

Harrison

To nobody’s surprise, Harrison is a sadist who thinks he’s hot shit.

He’s emotionally traumatized Neil to win an argument, he’s made Max vomit up, just, like, so many things and shown zero remorse, and got an unflappable sense of self-worth that skates right off the edge into total egotism.

These are the things we love about him. (And yes, obviously his arrogance comes from a deep well of insecurity, but that only exacerbates why he’d absolutely refuse to help Nurf, because it gives him a chance to be better than someone.)

As for why he’d choose to model himself after goth!Max . . . 

Honestly, this one doesn’t entirely make sense to me. He’s never shown any particular interest in Max. The only thing I can assume is that . . . well, actually Max was right, and at least in Harrison’s eyes, he is at the top of the social hierarchy. And he got there by giving zero fucks about what anyone thinks of him.

Which is what Harrison did, by refusing to help Nurf. We come full circle!

(WAIT: When Max asks why he’s acting like . . . you know, him, Harrison’s response is, “Why? It’s not making you insecure, is it?” While we could take this as “I’m coming for your shtick,” it could also imply that Max’s general Maxyness makes Harrison feel insecure about who he is. Which explains why, as soon as he’s offered a chance to emulate someone who makes him feel insecure, he chooses Max.)

Ered

Nerris and Ered have established themselves as friends, and she at least has expressed a token interest in playing DnD before. She’s listened to Nerris talk about this stuff enough to repeat it at times -- albeit incorrectly -- and so, when there’s “nothing better to do,” she tries something her friend is super into and finds it really fun and embraces it.

I can attest that DnD totally turns you into a massive, shameless nerd. It’s just that awesome.

Plus, she’s too cool to give a shit if people think she’s being nerdy, so of course she’s not embarrassed about being seen dressed like a Viking; in “Ered Loses Her Cool,” she had that moment of growth where she decided that her coolness comes from her happily choosing to be herself. 

Also, she gets to carry an axe around. So like, extra cool points for that.

Nerris

Nerris is gonna grow up to be a band geek, and she’ll especially enjoy the theatricality of marching around in parades while dressed like a Christmas Nutcracker. It’s like being a real-life bard.

This is the only one that really has a “supernatural” level to its change, except maybe the counselors (yes, I’ve come around on Neil; I’ll defend him at the end). While everyone else can be explained by psychological and in-character reasons, I have no idea what caused her to suddenly have this whole getup. I’d chalk it down to her seeing everyone else trying something new and being interested in upping her LARPing game, except she explicitly says she doesn’t know where it came from.

It’s one of the few that doesn’t make perfect sense, but I don’t really mind it because it’s such a top-tier episode otherwise.

Dolph

This is another one with questionable backing in the rest of the canon. However, I think it works less on a characterization basis than on an archetypical one. 

Hear me out: how many artists actually make it professionally? And how many of them end up falling back on something solid and lucrative and artistically unfulfilling to pay the bills? Some people are of course lucky enough to land their dream job, and others are lucky enough to find something close enough to that dream job to make money while still doing something creative and adjacent to their interests (becoming an art teacher, for example).

But in Hollywood, at least, the idea is that you’re either a professional artist who Makes It, a starving artist who’s sacrificing for their dream, or a total corporate sellout who abandons their soul for the sake of profit. A child, especially one with a father so unsupportive of his artistic interests, would only have the Hollywood idea of success to fall back on, which means if Dolph was tying to think of a way to “grow up” and stop wasting his time on being an artist, of course he’d jump straight into the most famously corrupt, artistically soulless type of job possible.

The problem here, of course, is that I don’t know what triggered it; like Nerris, I don’t really see a clear line from motivation to new hobby. However, it works really well at poking fun of the “artist to sellout” pipeline portrayed in popular media, so I certainly can’t be mad at it.

Also, look at these credit scores:

David’s score is either astoundingly good -- 825 out of 850 -- or astoundingly bad -- 325 out of 850 -- depending on what that first number is. Gwen’s credit is pretty bad, which isn’t surprising considering she’s working at Camp Campbell, but I’m still proud of her for being either the second- or third-highest person at the camp.

None of the campers should have credit, so these numbers are just goofy, but I’m as shocked by Nikki’s “exceptional” credit as I am by Nurf’s “literally not on the chart by 298 numbers” rating. Assuming Dolph made at least the campers’ scores up, and we know he’s pretty good friends with Nikki, I assume he gave her a higher score because he likes her, Max’s is trash because their relationship is rocky at best, and Nurf’s is just petty and spiteful because he bullies Dolph, and I just love it. 

(I assume Mr. Campbell’s credit is in negative numbers, and QM doesn’t exist on any official records.)

Counselors & Campbell

Campbell, I’m going to argue, makes sense.

This? Not so much.

I have no idea what Gwen’s talking about -- “I need her showing. We all agreed to it”???? -- and literally none of this makes sense in any understanding of characterization or anything, but my counterpoint would be:

Look how cute Gwen looks dressed up like David.

“Mumble, grumble, aliens!” and something about Mormons in David’s cheery voice adds 5 years to my life.

David’s floof is now beard.

David is wearing plaid.

QM. Just . . . QM.

Did I mention that Gwen looks so fucking good here? I swoon. So hot. Babe. Step on me, mommy.

Anyway. Campbell. 

He’s not what you’d call . . . nurturing, by any means, so at first this weird dad!swap is totally out of left field. However, he has proven himself to be . . . well, not a great caretaker, but someone who does put in the effort when he has to, and is surprisingly good at dealing with the kiddos when forced.

He’s also proven himself to be remarkably introspective, starting back in Season 3. He does to an extent feel bad about what he’s done, and to varying extents wants to make amends for it. So when he starts talking about legacy, and what a man leaves behind -- 

-- I can’t say I’d be all that surprised if he stumbled upon Preston trying to be “cool” with sports camp and decided (probably with the help of whatever supernatural strangeness came over the other counselors) that he wants to have a better impact on this camp than a bunch of broken-down equipment, a pile of debts, and a “son” who’s disappointed in him. 

Listen, what I’m trying to say is that I will die defending my Trash Grandpa and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. There’s good in him!!!! I CAN SEE IT!!!!!!!!!!

On a less “Campbell is my dad” note, as a rather stereotypical Manly Man(TM), he’d be best served helping some weedy little brat become more traditionally masculine. i’m saying Campbell was great at football in high school and is in part reliving his glory days, okay?

Nikki

Oh, come on. Nikki’s always shown an interest in science, and particularly in the mayhem it causes. When Neil is out of commission, and she sees that everyone else is doing major hobby swaps -- including Ered, who I believe she still sees as her idol -- why wouldn’t she want to join in on the fun in the most destructive way possible?

The show didn’t say she was a good scientist, after all. 

Neil

Remember when I said I couldn’t defend Neil? WELL SURPRISE BITCHES, TURNS OUT I CAN! 

(I didn’t realize it until halfway through writing this post, to be fair.)

But think about it: the boy does not respond well to his mind being freaked. We have observed this.

This is not a good reaction to an unsolvable logical problem.

I’m just saying, there’s not a huge difference between these pictures. Neil doesn’t do well when his brain is overloaded with things he doesn’t understand, and everyone around him turning into different people -- which is how it must look from their perspective, even if I can sit here and explain it in ways that make sense at least to me -- broke the poor boy’s brain.

He’s a very fragile ecosystem, our little Neil. You must protect him from thinking too many thinks and getting overheated.

So . . . yeah. This episode is rad, way more of it makes sense in terms of the characters’ motivations than people are giving it credit for, and the ones that don’t make a ton of sense are at least funny and clever enough to be overlooked, at least in this broad’s humble opinion.

[diveronarpg]

Congratulations, RICCI! You’ve been accepted for the role of MACBETH. Admin Rosey:  How is it possible that you had me laughing and crying in the same breath? You went from “... he’s a sad, kinda pathetic, almost self-sabotaging man who can’t enjoy the fruits of his own cruel ambition” to describing him as a Scottom (please read the app to figure out what that is). But you didn’t stop there, no, you added a whole layer to his backround that had me grinning from ear to ear. There is no other person I could possibly trust more to take up our beloved Mikael and do him justice. Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character Alias | Ricci

Age | Nineteen

Preferred Pronouns | she/ her

Activity Level | I don’t think I can be active everyday — I’m a super slow writer and am busy with college, but don’t doubt my ability to dedicate myself to a good RP. I won’t be on often, but I promise to be consistent, and I strive for quality whenever I do have the time to write. Overall, I’d say 6-7 out of 10 depending on my workload!

Timezone | GMT+8

Current/Past RP Accounts | wariest.tumblr.com & disquieters.tumblr.com

In Character Character

♚ Macbeth

What drew you to this character?

♚ Stage actors HATE him. Whenever I write men, one of my favourite aspects of their character is their relationship with masculinity, and I think I have Macbeth to blame for that, or at least partially. I’ve loved his story ever since I read it at fourteen, — and the questions that come with Macbeth’s tragic development are some I carry with when I write male characters, namely: what happens to men when you tie their worth to their masculinity, and what happens when society has tied masculinity to cruelty, violence, and power? I see Mikael as someone that could have been good, because at his core he knows what is right, but because of his insecurities, and because and the environment he grew up in, he ignores his conscience in favor of attaining power. I love morally grey characters. Macbeth isn’t a mustache twirling villain that revels in his own crimes, he’s a sad, kinda pathetic, almost self-sabotaging man who can’t enjoy the fruits of his own cruel ambition. He’s someone who is very aware of his own atrociousness and feels bad about it, but despite his guilt, never once strives toward self-improvement, and while that doesn’t make him wholly redeemable, self-awareness without change is an ugliness that’s jarringly recognizable, an ugliness that I want to explore further. His actions are so monstrous, but his motivations are so incredibly human.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character?

♚ SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES:  I want Mikael’s development to follow Macbeth’s and take him from mildness and reluctance to full-on ruthless ambition. I think part of the reason why Mikael has remained a soldier is because he has yet to prove he’s capable of real cruelty — his businesses make a lot of profit, but making money hasn’t quite tested his loyalty and how far he’s actually willing to go for the Capulets ( or for his own ambition ), and thus his morals have yet to be challenged. But his capacity for monstrosity is as immense as his capacity for greatness, and with unchecked ambition, he might abandon his conscience and soon become a more threatening player in the games. If an unhinged Macbeth can slaughter a man’s entire family, so can Mikael.

I think for now he’ll want to finally start doing more for the mob because with Alvise’s death, tensions are rising and soldiers like Mikael are expendable. Paranoia will drive him to want protection, for which Mikael will do horrifying acts to attain, and with every triumph, he’ll learn care less about loyalty and more about his own power and individual potential.

Mikael absolutely despises himself, and ambition he sets out to achieve exists because he thinks accomplishing goals would make him hate himself less. Except as his actions stain his conscience, the opposite happens, and with the extreme amounts of self-loathing he’ll soon possess, his mental health will deteriorate, making him increasingly erratic and unstable.

♚ SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING: Macbeth is a paradox — his constant attempts at chasing fulfillment only serve to make him feel emptier. In the same way, Mikael exists in a default state of hunger, so unused to being satisfied that he always finds something else to chase after once he attains what he originally wanted. Nothing he does can assuage the feeling of emptiness. After committing more and more atrocities he may come to the realization that he’s the problem — that perhaps nothing will ever make him happy. Once he gets everything he wants, I think he’ll resign to nihilism and come to terms with the meaninglessness of existence.

♚ THE INNOCENT FLOWER:  I want to see someone act as a sort of morality pet. Whether actively or by just being themselves, this character will remind Mikael of the existing good in him, and he will want to change for them. Of course, change, for Mikael, will be short-lived, because in the cutthroat world of mobster Verona, people might place less value on morality, and ultimately Mikael will keep choosing uglier paths to further his own ambitions. ♚ THE SERPENT UNDER’T: In the original text, Macbeth’s nihilistic outlook is finally revealed after Lady Macbeth dies, so perhaps, in this universe, Mikael truly sees no meaning in anything— except his wife. Though he won’t admit it, and maybe he doesn’t realize it, but he’s wholly dependent on her “love” to feel like life has value. Lucrezia is another one of Mikael’s attempts at chasing fulfillment; he thinks he’ll stop hating himself if he can get someone so unattainable to love him, which it why it maddens him that she doesn’t. He wants her with all the desperation of Arctic Monkeys song, but none of the dignity. He pours all of his devotion to her in hopes that he might get something in return, and though part of him understands that all his efforts are pathetic and fruitless, his desire for Lucrezia’s love and approval transcends all reason. Mikael constantly shaping himself into a man Lucrezia might like, or the man Lucrezia wants him to be.

At the same time, wanting Lucrezia is a testament to Mikael’s own masochism. Mikael is never satisfied, so in a twisted way, having someone who never gives in to what he wants is perfect for him, and it’s possibly why they’ve lasted so long. It’s apparent that he’s not enough for her, but he’ll never stop trying to be.

Their relationship is just so unhealthy and damaging on his end, and it’s mostly Mikael’s own  fault for putting her on a pedestal and placing so many expectations on her that he at least partially knows she’ll never fulfill. All I really want to explore is what lengths he’s willing to go to get her to stay, especially now that there’s a deeper wedge and newfound tensions between them with Lucrezia having been promoted to emissary. There are so many directions for their dysfunctional marriage to go and I’m willing to explore all the possibilities. He’s already ruined, but keep ruining him!

♚ MY BLACK AND DEEP DESIRES: The old-fashioned monogamist fool he is, Mikael has never considered cheating on his wife. Except things have changed now, and for as much as he denies it, his marriage is failing. He’s empty, and when he comes to terms with the fact that his wife may never really love him, he’ll find some other way to assuage his deep loneliness, stray to the path of infidelity and disrupt the dynamic the Falcos have, for years, maintained.

♚ THE WAY TO DUSTY DEATH ( trigger warnings: drug abuse ): Mikael’s fall is inevitable. It’s less question of if and more a question of how. Being as overworked as he is, and as desperate for fulfillment, and with his future actions potentially damaging his pysche,  Mikael is extremely susceptible to drug addiction. At the moment, he still carries much self-control, but in the future with his increasing nihilism and self-hatred he might just crumble — more so if someone finds that weakness and exploits it.

♚ BE BLOODY, BOLD, AND RESOLUTE: Being the absolute masochist he is, as a teenager and young adult, Mikael would frequent Measure for Measure for a taste of thrill and triumph. He frequents it less now that he’s older and married and working full time, but part of him still craves being in the ring. With all that stress and anger, who can blame him?

Are you comfortable with killing off your character?

♚ None of woman born shall harm Macbeth. ( Just kidding, yes, but it would be preferable to have someone born of C-section kill him just because it would be so FUNNY. )

In Depth

( trigger warnings: violence )

What is your favorite place in Verona?

Mikael knit his brows together. “What the hell is this for? Buzzfeed” Dark rings hung around tired eyes, which locked their gaze onto the journalist, betraying both exhaustion and annoyance. “When you told me this was for an article, I didn’t realize you were writing Top Ten Travel Destinations For the Overworked Italian,” he snapped, voice high and honeyed with derision. “Okay, edit that out. Try to make sure I don’t sound like a goddamn elementary student. I know I’m not Winston Churchill, but I can pay you good money to make me sound like I am. You’re a writer, you can do that, right?” A sigh escaped him. Mikael rested his elbows on the surface of his desk and hung his head low, thumbs massaging his temples. “I need coffee.”

What does your typical day look like?

“I get up,” he said, ripping open a sachet of Nescafe. “I jack myself stupid.” A surge of self-hatred shot through him as he poured hot water into the lid of his thermos. No sensible Italian would continue to respect Mikael if they discovered his liking to instant coffee, but single-handedly running a corporation left Mikael very little time for himself, much less time to brew himself his own cappuccino. Thus, begrudgingly, he took the sachet and dumped its content straight into the cup, but not before catching his own slip of tongue.

Mikael ran his hands through his hair, frustration simmering within. He sighed to himself. “Sorry, that was just the first thing that came into my head. I don’t know how to be alive before ten in the morning.” Dark eyes fell to the paperwork before him, and Mikael sighed, already resentful at the amount of work that needed to be done. Mikael set the thermos lid aside, barely noticing how it lay almost perilously close to the edge of his desk. “I go to the office, make some calls, keep track of the progress of my transactions, check Cawdor Industries’ stock market value, read some articles about bitcoin to try and understand what the in God’s name a blockchain is, make some more transactions, go home, jack myself stupid because satisfying primal human instincts is the only shriveled flower of joy remaining in life  — don’t put that in the article — and then I tell my wife I love her, and wait for her to not say it back.” For a second, his eyes gleamed with a silent sort of wistfulness, but as he locked his gaze onto the journalist’s, their usual deadness returned. “It’s our thing.”

What has been your biggest mistake thus far?

“Allowing myself to get ejected from the womb,” he deadpanned. “Everything’s gone a little downhill from there.”

Mistakes? Every day was a constant cycle of second-guessing and self-doubt. He’d couldn’t make a single decision without hindsight telling him he could have chosen a better path. Vacant eyes glanced over to the side of his desk, where Lucrezia’s photo sat, and Mikael’s heart rose to his throat. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful. I got to go to college. I made a name for myself. The business is booming, and I’m married. I have a wife, yes, she’s a real person, and yes, maybe it’s hard to believe but a human female woman took a look at me and agreed to live with my pathetic ass, and according to the law and what she said at the altar, she’s supposed to be in love with me. Sort of. So that’s going great. I’m grateful. I just don’t think I’m…” Happy.

Misfortune gripped the moment within a split second — as Mikael leaned over to reach for the photograph, his elbow struck the metal thermos and knocked it over, scalding water spilling from its mouth.  “SON OF A BITCH — ” Mikael rose from his seat, sending the swivel chair sliding outward, and as fury overtook him, his leg swung forward to kick the side of his desk, but as his foot collided with wood, the thermos lid toppled from the surface and spilt Mikael’s instant coffee onto his velvet office chair.

Almost all at once, his feature cycled through every existing expression, every existing emotion. Grief. Frustration. Resignation. Mikael palmed his forehead. “I’ll send you an email when my shit brain finds a better answer.”

What has been the most difficult task asked of you?

It was possible to believe that Mikael was as honest as he was crass. But his apparent tactlessness drew one’s attention away from much realer vulgarities: the truths Mikael kept within. Kneeling before his office chair, he took a wet rag and scrubbed at the stubborn coffee stain. Not meeting the journalist’s gaze, he mumbled, “Hell if I know.”

Everything was difficult. If anything worthwhile came easy, nothing would feel rewarding. The Falcos had clawed their way into the top, not resting for even a single second. And Cawdor Industries was born of their strife and struggle, but Mikael didn’t feel right merely inheriting it. No path felt valid if it hadn’t come with hardship; he moved mountains to turn the business what it was today. His parents gave him a kingdom. Mikael built an empire.

Except it had been thirty years and Mikael had yet to know what rewarding should have felt like. Every accomplishment only lent him a fleeting sense of triumph, and the satisfaction was quick to dissipate. What remained, instead, was poison. Cawdor Industries didn’t just design weapons — it sold them, less often legitimately than not, and most of the time, Mikael had turned a blind eye on all the casualties his business caused. Until he couldn’t.

Once, he could not recall how long ago, an anonymous sender delivered a video into Mikael’s inbox. It was apparent at first sight that it came from a protester, one that didn’t agree with Mikael’s line of work. At times, Mikael wished he had stopped himself from going further once that realization had been made, but curiosity was a hunger that begged to be sated.

“The most difficult task?” Mikael laughed, low and derisive. The video remained in his mind — the broken bodies of his weapons’ victims, lives destroyed for the business Mikael had worked to hard to build. He flung the rag, and it slammed hard against his desk. “Getting rid of this stain.”

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues? Mikael was a soldier. Just a soldier. That meant even for all the profit he produced the Capulet family, he was not entitled to their protection, nor could he rely on it. If Mikael had a choice, he would leave them be.

But there were stronger forces at bay. Was it unreasonable to question an outsider’s motives when Mikael himself was being interrogated and probed? If it were, it hardly mattered. Distrust was his birthright. The Falcos found wealth, but they never lost the beggars’ nature. What they passed down to their son was more than riches; Mikael inherited his mother’s relentless hunger, and his father’s habit of sleeping with one eye open.

Mikael leaned forward, dark gaze locking into the journalist’s, eyes leering with quiet hostility. “That’s none of your business,” he said, low and furious. “Get out of my fucking office.”

In character para sample:

Lights illuminated the waters, the gold of the street gleaming bright against the black of the river Danube. Perhaps, once, Mikael would have said Budapest at night was the captivating sight he’d ever witnessed, but that was before he met Lucrezia. Mikael hardly believed in magic, but in this moment, he thought it perhaps it existed, and it was this moment, an undeserving man standing by a river under the stars, blessed enough to witness the best of God’s creations. It was a type of awe that nearly brought him down on his knees. He knelt, one hand scrounging his pocket for the ultimate sign of his devotion, the promise of surrender. “Lucrezia.” The softness with which he spoke her name betrayed how unworthy he felt of it, like he doubted it could ever belong to him. “I’m not good with words. I’m not good with a lot of things, and sometimes that makes me scared to try anything new.” His heart skittered against his ribs. You’re rambling. Stop wasting her time.  “And I don’t know if I’ll be good at this, at,” the words his lips wished to form felt so foreign to his tongue. “At loving you.” Mikael took Lucrezia’s hand and pressed it gently between a palm and closed fist. Every selfish ache surged through his body. Guilt followed, for the hunger of his heart could barely be restrained, and nothing of him was worthy of this, nothing of him deserved the light Lucrezia radiated. “But for the first time, I don’t think I’m scared to try. I want —” Mikael paused. What did it matter what he wanted? What right did he have to ask anything of her? “I want to be good to you. Please,” Mikael’s voice remained soft, slow, but all deep longing and desperation was evident in the way his words cracked through his throat. He unfolded his palm, and the ring resting on it caught the light of the moon. “Let me be good to you.”

Eyes fluttered open. His phone buzzed against the bedside table, and the jarring sound of its vibrations sent a wave of annoyance surging through Mikael’s skin. As the real world reformed around him, the dream-memory shattered, leaving a bittersweet taste in its wake.

Nothing much had changed. Same life, same woman, same relentless emptiness. Legs slid off the bed, and Mikael sat upright, palms on either side of him. With one slow, lethargic motion, his hand reached for the buzzing phone on his bedside table, the faint glow of its screen bright against his tired, barely woken eyes. His face contorted into a scowl upon reading his alarm label: WAKE UP YOU USELESS PIECE OF SHIT. Mikael groaned. He shut it off, slammed the thing lightly against the table, but as he turned away, his eyes caught sight of his wife’s sleeping figure. He looked at her, and his anger quieted.

The sheets had shifted when he woke himself, so Mikael pulled them over her body, willfully gentle as not to wake her. “I love you,” he said under his breath, and a certain sort of sadness consumed him. His heart rose to his throat. It ached with a stupid, childish fantasy: that if he said and breathed and lived those three words enough, he would one day deserve to hear them returned.  

Mikael did not blame Lucrezia for not wanting him. How could she? When he looked at the mirror, there was no part of himself that he did not despise. Men like him and the monster blood they carried — they were hard to love, hardly worthy of love. This was the routine he deserved: to every day pray that their hearts’ hunger be sated, to every day have their prayers met with suffocating silence.

If emotions governed people, what a tyrant love must have been.

Extras:

♚ Mock Blog: regicidios.tumblr.com

♚ Cawdor Industries is a mix of several businesses, namely transportation, construction, and weapons manufacturing, which are all a legitimate front for Mikael’s Dirty Mobster businesses: smuggling, money laundering, and arms trafficking. Like the capitalist pigs they are, they’re primarily concerned with making money and use their close connections with the Capulets for networking and intimidation purposes.

♚ I read a lot on Riz Ahmed before writing this app, and out of love for him I just want to respect his background as a second-generation immigrant and write Mikael as a second generation immigrant as well. Falco isn’t a Pakistani surname, so I headcanon that his parents had their blatantly Muslim Pakistani surname changed in order to be recognized with more legitimacy in the Italian business ( and mobster ) world. Isn’t their background a little like the immigrant narrative anyway? People who came from nothing build themselves a better future with nothing but unbridled ambition and determination to forge a better life for their children. And of course, they’re typical Parents Of Colour, who constantly remind their child of how much they’d sacrificed as a way of saying: you owe us. That, and the generational gap between them, with Mikael no longer being familiar with Pakistani customs and traditions as a result of growing up in Diverse-But-Decidedly-Not-South-Asian Verona, drive a wedge between Mikael and his parents, and them not fully connecting is one of the many contributing factors to Mikael’s decision to send them away.

♚ This is me rambling but maybe a crass, clinically-depressed, overworked, caffeine-addicted hopeless ‘romantic’ nihilist-in-the-making is a little far off from how you originally envisioned Mikael but I’m going to stand by my portrayal because I firmly believe that the Thane of Cawdor Who Shall be King Hereafter is whatever the hell the polar opposite of Big Dick Energy is and m a n  he’s literature’s finest and funniest example of just how AWFUL toxic masculinity can get… I mean there’s an actual scene where Lady M tells her MacBitch he sucks at sex and then Macbeth proceeds to go on a murder-regicide rampage for four whole acts to redeem his manhood,  do you think someone that insecure will ever have the cool, self-assured swagger of ( the disgustingand horrible ) Michael Fassbender of Macbeth 2015 dir Justin Kurzel? No! Riz Ahmed is the love of my life but all his resources have him look like he’s either paranoid or dead inside or both, which is perfect, because that’s just quintessential Macbeth, everyone’s favourite Scottom ( Scottish Bottom ).

♚ That all aside, he’s an irredeemable bastard and I love him, please take us both.

[violetsystems]

#personal

I still haven't gotten my passport back yet. Old or new. I'm sure it's on the way but taking its sweet time. It hasn't been that big of a deal though it's a heavy inconvenience not being able to legally identify yourself. I have an expired driver's license and a lot of paperwork but that's not really good enough for most of Illinois. Work or leisure. I don't drink and don't really frequent bars anymore. I work for myself though I haven't paid myself yet this year. You have to have valid ID to be gainfully employed by someone else here. If I didn't have my life together already it would be more than annoying. I have health insurance still under a subsidy. I had my teeth cleaned earlier this week. No cavities. Mostly due to the electric toothbrush. I bought a waterpik right after. I've been so bored that I've started attacking problems I wanted to solve years ago. There's still drawers full of crap that needs to be thrown out. Lifetimes of shit do pile up if you are focused on other things like a dead end job or selfish personal relationships. I don't have either of those these days. So there really isn't any excuse for dirty drawers. I'm not planning to shit myself anytime soon to revisit the past. Which leaves the present and the future wide open. Much of that is dictated by my love of computers. I figured out how to mine finally. The open source way. I spent a lot of time in a terminal trying to apply the right definitions to scan my phone for the Pegasus spyware. I do think the results were negative so I'd rather not dwell on the past. Being a technological professional I have definitely spent a lot on electricity. That same idea of dirty drawers applies. You turn things on believing that they are ecologically friendly. It says so on the package. You don't dig enough to gather factual data to know it for sure. You get distracted by real life. Headlines. Drama. Nosy neighbors. The list goes on. And all the while, it just keeps bleeding out. I bought these smart plugs. Half of them monitor energy. The other half I didn't read the description close enough when I bought them. The ones that do measure electrical usage, I've set up in high power rooms. Both those and the low power rooms I can kill switch from my phone or whisper to my smart assistant to power off. I pay the electricity for the unit below me as well but that's more the agreement I have with my landlord. The biggest expense for me is always the AC and the heat. The appliances and everything else are just the icing on the cake. My rent has been affordable enough that with a little care and attention I can stay on budget. I never had that freedom or time to feel motivated enough to try. Now I know my razer laptop draws less than my rice cooker. Not that I'm the twelve hour rice in the rice cooker kind of guy. I have cooked chicken in it. What can I say I've had a lot of time on my hands. This happens when you can't identify yourself.

Sometimes you don't want to be identified. My past is so far behind me that it's a broken narrative. I've written about this narrative for years on this platform. I think it's a great place to write. This morning I saw a Tor books ad that looked like a regular blog post. Soon you'll be able to charge a subscription for your content if you wish. I'm not really here for that but I do think it's a great tool for creators. Bandcamp is still the easiest way for me to release music and shirts when I'm super fucking bored. But somehow five or six people always seem to support it when I do. I sold a shirt all the way out on the Ukraine once out of nowhere. I personally find it easier to mine and watch my electric bill right now then to fight to be seen as an artist. But situations do evolve over time under the right circumstances. And community is something I have never complained about Tumblr not having. Real life? Yes I have a lot of room to complain about the lack of community or respect for individual rights and will. But control over things is something I do have. And I've learned how to do that through setting boundaries for myself. I've learned a lot of those boundaries from being part of the culture down here. Unassuming. Anonymous. Hellbent on keeping it real. Chicago can sometimes be the same. It hasn't always been in the past. The fact that I'm completely disconnected from it is a large clue. The past. Not Chicago. I live here. Just like I do on Tumblr. That's a joke. But being able to write and stand my ground has given me a voice here and sometimes in the real world. Sometimes the wrong people listen. Or people get the wrong idea and make it more about them than me. But life goes on. If anything is true from what I wrote about a year ago, it's that I've both changed and stayed the same. There's things I can't escape about myself. Even if I can't prove to the state of Illinois I'm real enough to buy legal weed. Or how I've been fully vaccinated since April. Or how I can just leisurely set up a mining rig for research in my home office. How I can write here and challenge the status quo just by being the exception. Tumblr probably isn't going anywhere, anytime soon. I can't unlock any of my other social media from the past due to unfortunate circumstances related to identity and email. Not that I'm really complaining anymore. I was. As invisible as I am it feels more like a cloaking device than anything. Chicago in the news can be very dangerous and very wild. And yet, if anyone knows anything about me, I walk everywhere. Slow enough for people to follow you for blocks on end. Wanting to be seen. Worried about my safety. Worried about their safety because I left the house for once. Worried about everything. I'm not really that worried. Annoyed? Beyond annoyed. But as angry as I get, negativity does nothing for me to foster. It makes me look like every other secretly insecure white man here and just makes the turbulence around here worse.

If you have time enough to measure the difference in wattage between your rice cooker and your 6700xt gpu on full blast, you probably have time to pay attention to nuance. I pick up on the little things these days. I get that I share a porch with my neighbors and a cat. I get that I share a neighborhood too. I get that as a cis heterosexual white male I operate with privilege. It's not that hard to understand how to humble yourself in the presence of others. It's not hard to see how people have fought for rights harder than yourself. We're all fighting for the same thing. Freedom. I am understanding where I control the narrative and where I'm a guest. Where I don't have a say over other people's bodies, souls, or thoughts. I'm just as frightened by abuses or power and authority and yet they come as no surprise. I deleted everything Blizzard on my systems and am never looking back. I walk anywhere I choose freely with only a few annoyances. Jesus freaks and right wing antagonists are always up in my face trying to get a rise out of me. People think I'm a demon or haunted by some pirate ghosts. I have pretty good intuition and timing. I was a dj for like two decades. Beatmatching and pattern recognition. I get that I scare people and intimidate them just by breathing. Men are scary. Even to me. "Not all men!" Part of the reason people keep their distance from me is something I have to understand. I think we all have to understand who we are and what we can become when we live without care or intention. A lot of people just sleepwalk through this and blame the victims. They feel it's a weakness to share power. Sharing power is what cultivates freedom. But sharing power is almost pure chaos. It takes a lot of responsibility. And a lot of questioning of authority while asking the right questions and not just pinning a tail on a donkey. It's in the nuances and the people where freedom blossoms. Not in the polls or the pundits. We the people signifies something about America we ourselves have lost sight of. People buy their way into office at the behest of corporate and special interest money. The people are out there suffering while the profits guide the government. And it's really only the people who can turn this thing around. Here in Chicago, we know with our heart of hearts what to do. We have done it for so long. We survive together. We may not always like each other. We may feel like people are breathing down our necks and judging our every turn. But we always know where each other stands. We can stand to treat each other better. At least respecting that people have walls built up for protection more often than to hide something criminal. At least give people the space they need to grow. I have a lot of space to mine and play games. If I stay inside, it's so I don't rock the boat. If I go outside, just remember I have feelings too. We all could do better not to get caught up in them because we're overwhelmed by the bullshit. The bullshit we're in together. Respect is what is going to get us through. And I identify as down for the culture. As an ally you have my word. Love is the future. And the future is for everyone. <3 Tim

[secular-vernacular]

Bullshit Jobs - Terrible psychic wound running across our society - Huge swathes of people spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound - Over the course of the last century, professional, managerial, clerical, sales and service workers have tripled, growing from one quarter to three quarters of all employment - FS, tele-marketing etc: and a those industries that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones - According to economic theory, a profit-seeking firm wouldn’t employ pointless people: yet through some alchemy the number of paper pushers seems to increase - What does it say about our species that it sees to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (If a small percentage of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important) - This is profound psychological violence; how can you talk about dignity in labour when you feel your job shouldn’t exist? - The more obviously one’s work benefits others, the less it is paid - Free market ideology a political project dressed up as an economic one - The overall effect of free market policies has been that rates of economic growth have slowed pretty much everywhere except India and China: scientific and technological advance has stagnated; and in most wealthy countries, the younger generations can expect to live less prosperous lives than their parents - Qui bono (Roman) - who benefits? - Creating an insecure and overworked workforce destroys the basis for organised challenges to power - How did such a large proportion of our workforce find themselves in bullshit jobs, and why do so may consider this state of affairs to be normal? - When and how did we come to believe that creativity was supposed to be painful, or how did we come up with the notion that you can sell your time? - We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. - A bullshit job: one so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day can not convince himself there’s a good reason for him to be doing it - Work has become an end in itself - Socrates: when our own definitions produce results that seem intuitively wrong to us - it’s because we’re not aware of what we really think - There is social value apart from market value and no-one has ever really bothered to measure the difference between the two - Many of them haunted by the knowledge that nothing of value would be lost to the world were their jobs simply to disappear - Bullshit jobs are different to shit jobs; shit jobs actually need to be done but the workers are usually paid little and treated badly - Private & public bureaucracies have become so entangled it’s almost difficult to tell them apart - If you complain about getting a run-around from your bank, officials will tell you it’s regulation - but regulations were written by the bank - USSR: had full employment policy so made up jobs in the public sector - may be part of the misconception of wasteful public sector - If you wear a uniform, you’re likely to b hard pressed. It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming fat on the shop floors to add layers of upper management - Could certainly make the argument that there’s a deep structural affinity between wasteful extravagance and bullshit - Something terribly wrong with a society that tells its female population they are worth more dancing on boxes than they will be at any subsequent point in their lives, whatever their talents or accomplishments - The process of bullshitization is highly inconsistent: has affected middle more than the working class (e.g. nurses vs brick-layers) - Flunkies - make someone else look or feel important - Giving people a useless task to keep them busy / happy enough to prevent them from uprising (e.g. vagabonds outside castle) - Badge of seriousness; if they don’t do this, what else that I expect won’t they do? (E.g. receptionist) - Cold caller for a broker to make them see important - too busy making money to speak to you - Managers off-loading their work to give the impression they were too busy to do it themselves - Sometimes, flunkies do nothing - sometimes they do their boss’s job - Tomb of famous noble men always had slaves - to be an aristocrat meant the power to order others around. Same in a company - three levels of command - Goons: have an aggressive element. E.g. armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries do. Have a largely negative impact on society - Distinction between honest & dishonest illusions - when you subtly change appearance, you are changing viewers’ unconscious assumptions about what everyday reality ought to be like, to create an uncomfortable feeling that their lived reality is an inadequate subtitle for the real thing - What irks is the aggression and the deception - Duct tapers: jobs that exist due to a glitch or fault in the business - Coders are often happy to perform the interesting and rewarding work on core technologies for free at night but since that mess they have less incentive to think about how it’d be compatible, coders reduced during the day to tedious (but paid) work of making them fit together - It’s a full time job cleaning up after someone - The moral agony of the duct taper: to be forced to organise one’s life around caring about a certain value (e.g. cleanliness) because more important people can’t be bothered - Duct taping has traditionally been women’s work, and working class - Box Tickers: employees who exist primarily to allow an organisation to say they are doing something they’re not - Not only does it not accomplish the goal, it actively undermines it - Government fact finding commission - 1) implies that apart from a small group, no-one knew what was happening (hardly ever true) 2) a way of implying someone will do something about it - On some level, all bureaucracies work on this principle: once you introduce formal measures of success, reality for the organisation becomes that which exists on paper, and the human reality that lies behind it becomes secondary at best - Immediate material manifestation of power and prestige (emblem) is visual quality of reports - Taskmasters - two subcategories - those who assign work to others and bullshit generators - Coming up with statistical measures that your underlings can falsify - Strategic leadership - inserting quantifiable methods for assessing performance, forcing teachers & scholars to spend more time assessing their performance and less time doing it - Dealing with underperformance - Imaginary friends - people hired ostensibly to humanise an inhuman corporate environment - make-work student employment was a way of ‘preparing and training’ students for their future bullshit jobs - The more jobs becoming suffused in bullshit, the more pressure is put on college students to to learn about the real world by dedicating less of their time to self-organised and goal-directed activity - Tesla: I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heat like that felt by the inventor as he seems some creation of the brain unfolding to success - Rational economics: minimax (minimise cost, maximise benefit) - Much of our public discourse about work starts from the assumption that the economists’ model is correct. People have to be compelled to work. - People would rather work than have nothing useful to do - In prison, it’s a punishment to be given nothing to do - Infants express extraordinary happiness when they figure out they can cause predictable effects in the world - Play - the pleasure at being the cause - Children come to understand that they exist, that they are discrete entities separate from the world around them, largely by coming to understand that ‘they’ are the thing which just caused something to happen - the proof of which is that they can make it happen again - Our sense of self is grounded in action: when we are truly engrossed in doing something - we tend to forget that we exist - Broucek: ‘trauma of failed influence’ - first show them the delight of creation, then deny them it - Groos: freedom as exercise of our powers as as end in themselves - If make-believe play is the purest expression of freedom, make-believe work imposed by others is the purest expression of lack of freedom - In feudal times, work was largely unsupervised - A worker’s time is not their own; it belongs to the person who bought it - idleness is theft. Most human societies would never have conceived of such a thing - E.g. with pottery - in old times; you could buy the pot and the potter (Slave) but not the potter’s time (implies their labour power distinct from them) - Majority of wage labour in the ancient world from people who are already slaves - Simultaneous moral & technological changes. By 14th century, most European towns had clock towers, usually encouraged by local merchant guild - Merchants placed human skulls on their desk as memento mori to remind themselves that they should make good use of their time because each chime of the clock brought them closer to death - As it spread to commercial use, everyone was encouraged to see it as a finite property to be carefully budgeted and disposed of. Went from passing time to ‘spending’ or ‘wasting’ it - Preachers began speaking of the ‘husbandry of time’ - careful budgeting of time the essence of morality - Link between education and workforce; preparation for the labour force - Went from a technological problem to a moral one - particularly puritan - middle classes came to be seen as poor because they lacked time discipline - You learn your lesson - don’t be too efficient - you won’t be rewarded, you’ll be given more meaningless busywork - There is a religious element: dutiful submission even to meaningless work under another’s authority is a form of moral self-discipline that makes you a better person - Humans are social beings that begin to atrophy if they are denied regular contact with other humans; insofar as they do have a sense of being an autonomous entity separate from the world and from others, it is largely from conceiving themselves as capable of acting on the world and others in predictable ways. Deny humans this sense of agency, and they are nothing - Who is forcing pretend work? The employer? Society? - Many middle class people now have little social ties outside of work which makes much of the day-to-day drama of gossip and intrigue confined to office - Airlie Russell Hochschild: emotional labour - become haunted by depression, emptiness and confusion - Ambiguity where the rules are never quite clear - Particularly in larger companies where managers don’t have much of a proprietary feeling and don’t have reason to believe they’ll get in much trouble with their own supervisors - Not being challenged / not being able to exercise your powers - Psychologists refer to it as ‘scriptlessness’ - codes of behaviour are ambiguous, no ons is sure what they are supposed to say or feel about the situation - Most people in the world are still taught to see their work as their principal way of having an impact on the world - A transaction everyone knows is pointless - a ritual of humiliation - Fromm: nonsexual forms of sadism and necrophilia tend to pervade everyday affairs in highly puritanical and hierarchical environments - Physical & mental health impacts exacerbated, not mitigated, by generous compensation - To become the face of the machine you despise; it has not escaped my notice that most horrible monsters don’t kill you, but turn you into a monster yourself - Workers who are hired for a certain skill, but who are not then really allowed to exercise it, rarely end up exercising that skill in a covert way when they discover they have free time on their hands - One might imagine that leaving millions of well educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet (the repository of all knowledge) might spark some form of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place - Social media - basically forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else - It’s astonishingly difficult to repurpose time for which you’re paid - particularly if you know they’re entirely futile - European universities spend roughly 1.4 billion euros a year in failed grant applications - money that would obviously have been available to fund actual research - How much of your time you spend vying with one another to convince potential donors you already know what you’re going to discover - Seemingly endless accrual of layer upon layer of unnecessary administrative and managerial positions resulting from the aggressive application of market principals - Only in the 1970s that the financial sector and executive classes - upper echelons of of corporate bureaucracies - effectively fused - Intrinsic connection between the financialisation of the economy, the blossoming of information industries, and the proliferation of bullshit jobs - Economists measure value in utility - the degree to which it’s satisfying a want or need - Any utility ultimately ends up in the subjective territory of ‘taste’ (e.g. why one dress satisfies your preferences more than another) - To a large degree, needs are just other people’s expectations - So most economics conclude there’s no point sitting in judgment about what people should want; better to just accept that they do want, and then sit in judgment about how effectively (rationally) they set about pursuing their desires - The market can get it wrong: doing nothing is not worth £40,000 to them - So many people acknowledge the inverse relation between social benefit and level of compensation - and think this is how things ought to be. That virtue, as the ancient stoics used to argue, should be its own reward. You wouldn’t want people motivated by greed to do those jobs - Those who choose to benefit society and know that shouldn’t also expect middle class salaries - those who suffer from the knowledge they do pointless or harmful work should be compensated for it - There seems to be a broad consensus not so much that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone not slaving away harder than they’d like at something they don’t enjoy is a bad person - Labour theory of value reigned supreme until 1890s - that labour is the sole source of wealth - Then, concerted effort by capitalists to change message: capital, not labour creates wealth & prosperity - the productivity of ‘concentrated’ capital would so lower the prices of commodities the workers of tomorrow could live as well as kings of the past - Promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution - Labour theory of value based on production, deeply theological and patriarchal - Most working-class labour, whether carried out by men or women, actually more resembles what we archetypically think of as women’s work, looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, maintaining, looking after and maintaining plants, animals, machines, etc. - The world we made is something we made collectively as a society and could be made different - based on what we thought people would like - Caring for others requires a world that’s relatively predictable as the grounds on which caring can take place - Northern European notion that paid labour under a master’s discipline is the only way to become a genuine adult - Paradox of work: - 1) most people’s sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living - 2) most people hate their jobs - Denied the ability to define and respect oneself - Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large party because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economies - but to an increased degree, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value - Moral envy & virtue signalling - Automation will mean we shift even more from productive to caring labour - First wave of managerial feudalism reaction to the 60s counterculture - When faced with a social problem my impulse is not to imagine myself in charge and ponder what sort of solutions I would then impose, but to look for a movement already out there, already trying to address the problem and create its own solutions - 60% of those eligible for benefits don’t receive them - Universal basic income as a solution

Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

[oovitus]

Can We Have an Honest Conversation About Advertisements?

By Joshua Fields Millburn · Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+

If the following screed were a peer-reviewed journal article, its abstract would be brief: advertisements suck.

Well, at least most of them do.

That’s not to say that all advertising is inherently evil, or even bad, because not all advertisements are created equal—they run the gamut from informative to downright destructive.

To understand the inherent problems with advertisements, it’s important to first point out that advertising isn’t the same thing as marketing. Though these two terms are often used interchangeably, they are different in practice.

Advertisements

Advertisements are paid announcements via a public medium—mattress commercials, “infomercials” for the latest exercise fad, and seemingly harmless adverts for harmful prescription drugs—and they are generally not an endorsement by the platform on which they are displayed.

In Latin, advertere means “to turn toward,” and that’s the exact aim of today’s ad agencies: they’re willing to pay heaps of money to turn your eyes toward their products and services. And if the demand for a product isn’t as high as the supply, no problem! Advertising can create a false demand if the budget is high enough.

In recent years, worldwide spending on advertising has topped half a trillion dollars a year. Even writing the full number—500,000,000,000.00, commas and all—doesn’t come close to truly understanding its depth.

So let’s put it into perspective: If you leave your home today and begin spending one dollar every single second, it will take you more than 15,000 years to spend half a trillion dollars. In fact, if you’d’ve spent a million dollars every single day since the fall of Rome, you still wouldn’t’ve spent half a trillion dollars by now.

And we’re spending more than that every year on advertising. Which isn’t so bad in and of itself. After all, it’s just money being spent on informing people about useful stuff, right?

Yes, that sort of used to be true.

A Brief History of Modern Advertising

Before the twentieth century, advertising largely connected the producers of goods with consumers who genuinely needed those goods.

But then, as Stuart Ewen describes in his book Captains of Consciousness, “Advertising increased dramatically in the United States as industrialization expanded the supply of manufactured products. In order to profit from this higher rate of production, industry needed to recruit workers as consumers of factory products. It did so through the invention of [advertising] designed to influence the population’s economic behavior on a larger scale.”

By the Roaring Twenties, thanks to Edward Bernays, who’s sometimes referred to as the founder of modern advertising and public relations, advertisers in the U.S. adopted the doctrine that “human instincts could be targeted and harnessed.”

Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, realized that appealing to the rational minds of customers, which had been the mainstream method advertisers had used to sell products, was far less effective than selling products based on the unconscious desires that he felt were the “true motivators of human action.” Since then, we’ve witnessed ten decades of advertising agencies reaching—and overreaching—into the depths of the human psyche.

Overreach of Advertisers

Fast forward to the present day.

One of the most obvious examples of advertisers’ rapacious (over)reach in recent years is the drug Sildenafil, which was created as a treatment for hypertension. When clinical trials revealed the drug wasn’t effective, that should have been the end of its life cycle.

But then advertisers stepped in.

After discovering several male test subjects experienced prolonged erections during clinical trials, the makers of Sildenafil had a solution that desperately needed a problem. So they hired an ad agency who coined the term “erectile dysfunction,” and Viagra was born. This campaign took a relatively flaccid problem and created a ragging $2-billion-per-year blue pill.

Of course, Viagra is a rather anodyne example. There are many pharmaceuticals whose side effects are so expansive that their commercials are forced to use gratuitous green pastures, yearbook smiles, and handholding actors to conceal the terror of “rectal bleeding,” “amnesia,” and “suicidal ideation.”

In a sane world, misleadingly selling harmful prescription drugs would be a criminal act. Actually, it is: it’s illegal in every country in the world—except the United States and New Zealand—to advertise drugs to consumers.

But we let the almighty dollar get in the way.

In 1976, Henry Gadsden, then CEO of Merck & Co., told Fortune magazine that he’d rather sell drugs to healthy people because that’s where the most money was.

We’ve been sold new “cures” ever since.

But please don’t think this is an anti-boner-pill diatribe. According to the research, Viagra seems to be a relatively benign drug. Thereby, there’s little wrong with the pill itself. It’s the paid advertisements that are troublesome.

Many ad agencies employ writers, demographers, statisticians, analysts, and even psychologists in an effort to divorce us from the money in our checking accounts. With the help of a fine-tuned agency, even the “disclaimer” is part of the sales pitch: “Consult your doctor if your erection lasts longer than four hours.” I don’t know about you, but I’d rather consult my partner with my everlasting hard-on.

Viagra isn’t the only product pushed beyond its initial conception. Did you know Listerine was previously used as a floor cleaner, Coca-Cola was invented as an alternative to morphine, and the graham cracker was created to stop you from masturbating?

Hmm. If at first your product doesn’t succeed, hire an ad agency!

Selling Insecurity

Making men believe their erections aren’t firm enough isn’t the first time corporations have capitalized on human insecurity.

For decades, women have been sold an inferiority complex. Our glowing screens would have the average female believe her waist isn’t skinny enough, her breasts aren’t big enough, and her eyelashes aren’t lush enough. Don’t worry, though, whatever your ailment, consumerism has the cure.

In Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk prophesied of a dystopia in which a cunning con man could sell our own fat back to us after extracting it from our bodies. He was only half right, however.

In the book, the fat is repackaged as soap—a metaphor for cleansing ourselves by way of consumerism—but in the real world we’re sold our fat in the form of autologous-fat transfer (butt injections) so we can look like our favorite reality-television stars.

In a Kafkaesque bait-and-switch, advertisers sell us the food that makes us obese because we “deserve a treat,” and then they sell us the diet plans and exercise equipment to combat our gluttony.

The sleight of hand doesn’t end with “male enhancers” and weight-loss remedies. Advertisers go much further, capitalizing on our fear (and greed) with radically overpriced timeshare properties, precious metals, and end-times survival kits. You may not’ve known the world was ending, but now that you do, there’s a product you can purchase to prepare.

Selling Scarcity

Speaking of the end of the world, why does it seem like the ads we experience are always taking place in a state of perpetual emergency?

Act now! Limited time only! While supplies last!

These advertiser-induced artificial limits are almost always imaginary. The truth is that if you “miss out” on a so-called sale, you’ll be just fine because corporations are always looking for a new opportunity to sell you something today. I mean, what’s the alternative? “Sorry, Mrs. Customer, you’re screwed—you waited an extra day to make your decision, so we no longer want your money!”

Why, then, does almost every company inject urgency into their ads? Because, as Bernays recognized a century ago, this tactic takes advantage of our primal nature: humans make quick—often rash—decisions in times of perceived scarcity.

This made sense when our number one concern was starvation; it makes much less sense when we think we’ll never be able to own that big-screen television, video-game console, or clutch purse unless we get in on this weekend’s doorbuster bonanza.

Selling Nonessentials

Advertisers have gotten so skilled that they can even sell us trash and tell us it’s good for us. Literally.

Since American farmers are faced with unprecedented hoards of soybean and corn crops, and thus unprecedented waste products from those crops, advertisers have found a way not to safely dispose of that waste but to repackage it and sell it to you as hydrogenated oil, a supposed “alternative” to healthier oils from olives, avocados, and almonds.

Inferior cooking oils are just the start of the garbage that’s sold by the food industry. The amount of junk food that is peddled to us is so immense and so dangerous that there isn’t room in this essay to meaningfully explore the sugar and processed foods vended by America’s largest corporations, but it can be summed up in a single stat: in 2018, you are more likely to die from obesity than of a violent crime, terrorism, war, starvation, or a car crash.

Junk foods aren’t the only junk we buy. Unbeknown to us, advertisers have helped turn our homes into mausoleums of trash. To justify our clinging, we’ve invented cute nicknames for our junk—trinket, knickknack, novelty, doohickey, tchotchke, collector’s item, memento—as if what we call our trash increases its importance.

But in the real world, the cheap plastic things we purchase at gift shops aren’t of importance, which might be fine if they made us happier or improved our lives, but they don’t.

Instead, we experience a dull high that wears off soon after the cash register dings its quiet victory, and we sit in the aftermath of consumption with an unusable artifact. Then, in time, we feel icky because we’re too ashamed to let go, so we purchase plastic storage containers to hide—ahem, organize—our past mistakes.

Each year, Americans spend $1.2 trillion on nonessential goods. In contrast, we contribute less than $200 billion to charities every year. In other words, we spend a trillion dollars more on shit we don’t need than on helping people in need.

Advertising to Children

Advertisers have found perhaps the easiest way to flood our homes with nonessentials: by advertising to our children. Not only do kids lack the critical thinking skills to say no to the foods that are killing us, but if they develop brand loyalty early, then Ronald McDonald has a lifetime customer.

According to the American Psychology Association, commercial appeals to children became commonplace with the advent and widespread adoption of television, and they grew exponentially with the proliferation of cable television, which allowed programmers to develop entire channels of child-oriented programming and advertising.

It is estimated that advertisers spend more than $12 billion each year to reach the youth, and children view more than 40,000 television commercials each year—an exponential increase from decades past.

The American Academy of Pediatrics believes this targeting occurs because advertising in the U.S. alone is a $250 billion a year industry with 900,000 brands to sell, and children and adolescents are attractive consumers: teenagers spend $155 billion each year, children younger than 12 spend another $25 billion, and both groups influence another $200 billion of their parents’ spending every year.

Perhaps the solution is to follow Sweden, Norway, and Quebec, and completely bar advertising to children under the age of 12. But more than likely it’s up to us as parents to develop the systems and communities that will better influence our kids’ viewing habits.

The Upside of Advertising

When done carefully, however, as rare as that might be, advertising can help fulfill an existing need. In fact, a hundred years ago, many ads did just that: they connected potential customers with a product that would improve their lives.

I myself have benefited from informative advertisements. Living in Los Angeles, I’m exposed to more billboards than most of the world’s population. Even though they’re a horrendous eyesore, I can honestly say that I’m more informed about the available media—movies, music, television series—than if these advertisements didn’t exist.

The same is true for the tailored ads of the Internet. Google does a great job matching their content with my perceived needs. If a website is going to clutter their sidebar with banner ads, I would rather be served messages that are geared toward my interests: the bookshelf I’ve been considering instead of a cosmetics display, the socks I need instead of an automobile pitch, the concert I want to attend instead of a beer commercial.

It would be hard for me to claim that ads don’t occasionally provide some quantifiable good to my life. I’m simply not sure whether the pros outweigh the cons.

True, the ads are “better” than ever, but maybe I’m more likely to spend my money irresponsibly when I’m constantly presented ads that match my precise interests. And while L.A.’s billboards are more informative than, say, the ambulance chasers who fill the outdoor displays in most American cities, they’re still intrusive, and I’d prefer they didn’t exist at all—and I’m not alone.

The People’s Preference

While I was driving from Burlington to Boston last year, something felt off. The rolling emerald landscape was unsullied, not unlike a tranquil screensaver, and I felt an unnameable calm as the mile markers ticked away.

Then I crossed the Massachusetts state line, and it became obvious: the trip’s serenity was produced largely by its lack of billboards, which are illegal in the state of Vermont.

Currently, four states—Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont—prohibit billboards. And more than 1,500 cities and towns have banned them throughout the world, including one of the largest cities on Earth—Sao Paulo.

When Sao Paulo introduced its “Clean City Law” in 2007, more than 15,000 billboards were taken down. To boot, an additional 300,000 intrusive signs—pylons, posters, bus and taxi ads—had to go.

The strangest result of ridding the world’s third largest city of these advertisements? In a poll done after the removal, a majority of Paulistanos actually preferred the change. What a novel idea: ask people what they like instead of letting profitability dictate the cityview.

From Good to Great Profit

If all ads were unobtrusive and informative, it would be hard to have anything bad to say about them. But many twenty-first century advertisers have figured out how to manipulate the system for maximum profit.

In the era of mass media and Internet spamming, they’ve crossed a line: we went from connecting people with products they need; to creating a false desire for objects that add little value to our lives; to selling objects that get in the way of a richer, more fulfilling life.

Many of the things advertisements make us think we need are actually the source of our discontent. You see, the easiest way to sell us happiness is to first make us unhappy. It’s a painful cycle for us; it’s big business for them.

Unfortunately, we’ve accepted ads as part of our everyday life; we’ve been conditioned to think they are a regular part of “content delivery.” After all, advertisements are how we get all those TV shows, radio programs, online articles, and podcasts for free, right?

Alternatives to Advertisements

There’s no free lunch. Every hour of network television is peppered with nearly 20 minutes of interruptions, and the same is true for most other mediums, which one could argue is more costly than the “free” price tag because we’re giving up our two most precious resources—our time and attention—to receive the product.

If we don’t want ads storming our attention (or our children’s attention), then we must be willing to pay for the things we associate as “free.”

Netflix, Apple Music, and similar services are able to sidestep the traditional advertising model by providing a service people value. Other businesses and individuals—Wikipedia and Sam Harris come to mind—follow a variation of this ad-free model, frequently called a “freemium” model, where creators provide content for free, and a small portion of their audience supports their work monetarily. (By the way, this model is what keeps The Minimalists Podcast advertisement-free.)

When asked why he chooses not to run ads on his popular Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris responded, “I don’t feel I can credibly run ads on my podcast, even for products and services I love and use myself. The one ad I read for a while was for Audible, which I do use, but even in that case, I don’t feel entirely comfortable telling you that you should subscribe to Audible. I mean, should you? Perhaps you shouldn’t. I have no idea. And that would go down as the worst Audible ad ever.

“In any case, I’ve discovered that I don’t feel comfortable selling ads, which is fine because I hate what ads have done to digital media. The advertising model is responsible for almost everything that is wrong online. But not running ads puts me in a position of asking my audience for support. This is something I approached with real trepidation in the beginning. However, having done it, I’ve discovered it’s actually the most straightforward relationship I can have with my audience.”

No matter your feelings about Netflix, Apple Music, Wikipedia, Sam Harris, or similar companies and individuals, their approach undoubtedly improves their creations by making them interruption-free, and it increases trust since their audience knows these creators aren’t beholden to the desires of advertisers, which allows them to communicate directly with their audience in a way that strengthens the relationship because the customers are in control, not the ad buyers.

Moreover, as consumers, our willingness to exchange money for creations forces us to be more deliberate about what we consume. If we’re paying for it, we want to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth. It’s a mystery why we don’t do the same for so-called “free” programming, where we pay no money, but we rarely get our attention’s worth.

Whether your time is worth $10, $100, or $1,000 per hour, you likely spend tens of thousands of dollars every year consuming messages from advertisers. Think about that: in a very real way, you’re paying to be advertised to. And there are no refunds on your misspent attention.

Marketing

The flipside of advertising isn’t the absence of communication—it’s marketing.

In his book, The Mindset of Marketing Your Music, Derek Sivers writes, “Don’t confuse the word marketing with advertising, announcing, spamming, or giving away branded crap. Really, marketing just means being considerate. Marketing means making it easy for people to notice you, relate to you, remember you, and tell their friends about you.”

What Sivers is describing here is the most honest form of marketing: informing people without manipulating or bothering them. At its ethical zenith, marketing considers the needs and points of view of an audience and works hard to meet those needs by connecting the creators with consumers in an authentic way.

In neutral terms, marketing is an unpaid endorsement, often by the creator herself, communicated directly to an audience who’s eager to learn more about the product or service. When done well, this is what Seth Godin describes as Permission Marketing: “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”

It is possible to engage in world-class marketing without spending a penny on advertising. True, both advertising and marketing are forms of promotion—both allow creators to present their goods and services to a group of people—and when executed poorly, even well-intended marketing can be overkill. Like advertisements, not all marketing messages are created equal.

Bastardized Marketing

Unfortunately, not every marketer is a paragon of integrity. Just like the advertising world, marketing messages can be laced with misinformation, exaggerations, and propaganda.

When creators stray from their audience’s preferences—when they stop providing value and abuse their permission with over-marketing—they fail; they fall victim to vapid self-promotions, the most egregious examples of which include spam emails, website pop-ups, clickbait headlines, begging for followers, searching for “Likes.”

As “The Minimalists,” we provide loads of high-quality free creations—essays, podcasts, and quotes—and we occasionally use our platforms to promote a book, event, or service. And if we’re being forthright, even though we attempt to market with integrity, even we struggle to walk the line between informative and overkill.

While Ryan & I refuse spam, pop-ups, and salacious titles, and we strive to add value, we, too, have fallen victim to the “look at me” Internet culture—occasionally putting our preferences above our audience’s best interests. Whenever we catch ourselves straying, we course correct, and we work diligently to improve.

Marketing as Part of the Creation

Regardless of how you feel about marketing, it is the final step in the creative process. Marketing helps creators get their creations in front of people, and when approached delicately, it benefits their audience. But when creators focus more on promoting the creation than the act of creating, the product suffers and so does the audience, and trust is eroded.

Until recently, the only way a creator could effectively market her product was to plaster her message across television, radio, print, and billboards. Using jargon like “GRPs,” “TRPs,” and “frequency,” advertisers could guarantee their product would reach a particular audience via a robust advertising plan. Even though this shotgun approach was imprecise, it was the only way to get to a mass audience.

Today, the opposite is true. As a creator, you are your own marketing department; you can find an enthusiastic audience without the need to advertise. And because our tools are better than ever, your efforts can be more precise than the traditional approach of yesteryear, so you needn’t cast a wide net to be effective. In fact, a thousand true fans are enough.

Spending time marketing your creation doesn’t need to be tedious, either; it can be creative, artistic, and even fun. That’s why the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing: it feels like a conversation or entertainment or something the audience anticipates. Above all, it feels considerate—not salesy or forced.

Unavoidable Advertisements

All of this poses an interesting and prickly dilemma for us as “The Minimalists.” Because we don’t want to add to the noise, we personally don’t allow ads on our website, podcast, or any other medium we directly control.

However, we appear regularly on television and radio shows, as well as in newspapers and magazines, in which advertisements appear. And we’re honestly conflicted about this.

Even companies we respect and have partnered with—our tour promoter, Live Nation; our primary bookselling platform, Amazon; and the company behind our travel-bag project, Pakt—engage in various forms of advertising.

We could, of course, choose not to appear anywhere that participates in advertising in any form, but because ads are virtually everywhere—Americans see upwards of 5,000 each day—that would greatly limit the amount of people our message reaches.

So we’ve instead decided to ride the line: no, we won’t incorporate ads into our platforms, and we’ll continue to speak out against the innate problems with advertising, but we won’t hide in a cave to shield ourselves from every billboard.

Now maybe you don’t think advertisements are a big deal, but I believe they are one of the worst things to happen to our culture: they are the largest contributing factor toward rampant consumerism in the developed world, and they’re the biggest reason our political climate is where it is today.

Advertisements are much like the islands of plastic haunting our oceans—a giant problem people rarely think about. That doesn’t mean ads (or plastic) shouldn’t exist; I simply don’t feel good about producing either unless they contribute to the greater good.

Values over Money

That said, I’m not allergic to money. And this commentary isn’t meant to be a judgment on other people.

Many of my close friends incorporate advertisements into their creations, and I don’t necessary begrudge them for that. It likely wouldn’t do much good anyway because, as Upton Sinclair once wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The way I understand it, though, is simple: my values trump my ability to make money. And advertisements don’t align with my personal values.

Do I want to earn a living? Yes, of course I do. But I want to live a life that’s congruent with my values, and thus I don’t want money to be the primary driver of my creations. Just because I can advertise, that doesn’t mean I should.

True, money will always be an important part of the equation (everybody has to pay the bills, right?), but if we put creativity and our values first, then we can determine the role of money further down the line.

Conclusion

Suffice it to say, this disquisition wouldn’t see the light of day in any of today’s ad-driven organs. Nor would it find its way into a scholarly journal, because this isn’t a peer-reviewed article; it’s just one guy’s loosely connected thoughts about advertising.

It’s my hope that these musings start a conversation about the oft-ignored pernicious aspects of advertisements. And maybe—just maybe—our society can find a way to make advertisements that don’t suck.

Let’s not hold our breath, though. If we want to produce meaningful creations, we must rely on ourselves. Or, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari once wrote, “You cannot unite humanity by selling advertisements.” This is true even if those ads are for dick pills.

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Can We Have an Honest Conversation About Advertisements? published first on

[sonniquick]

Jamie’s son and Sonni’s grandson

 IF You Do The Crime You Should Pay With Appropriate Time

America is in denial. Instead of seeing us as the country that incarcerates more of is citizens than any country in the world – by a long shot – for corporate profit, many see America as this good Christian nation than benevolently lends a hand to countries who are aching for us to take over and teach them the kind of democracy we have; including teaching them how to set up a prison system that rapes it’s own country – literally – of any freedom or liberty people should be able to have.

America is about profit and if people’s lives need to be forfeited to get it – well, that is just the American way – unless it is your family that is affected.  Blindly, many Americans are sucked into “news” sites that are better at twisting the news than reporting it. People’s habits run deep. They don’t know how to understand an issue unless someone tells them how to understand it.The problem is, what they think they understand has been skewed to mean something other than the truth. This past year is a perfect example.  When people ignore the continual massive lies of our new leader(?) in chief, and want to give him a chance – to do what? Continue to lie and behave in embarrassing ways you would never accept from anyone else, what is the end result? We have a country that sees itself differently than the rest of the world sees us with a very twisted reasoning of right and wrong.

I have such a bad feeling about this because the writing is on the wall and has been for a long time. But this article is not about Donald Trump. I doubt his supporters are reading this anyway because the truth isn’t something they want to hear because it isn’t on Fox News. Their version of the truth and reality are two very different things.

I have read more articles on all facets of incarceration than I could ever count, trying to understand where we went wrong and why. How do we fix it? Can we fix it? We have a country that “wants” to think it’s a Christian nation yet doesn’t know how To apply it to their own lives. They are not devastated over the intentional ruination of an entire race of people where the only real difference is the color of skin. But somehow, because white people, and I am one of them, are often so insecure about their own worth they have the need to feel they are made of a high quality substance than people of color, missing the point that it makes them less, not more, than the people they put down.

Is this all white people? Of course not. But because people of color have been stomped down, and a high percentage treated unfairly by incarcerating them to keep them down, they have been kept from a decent education with good schools and good teachers. A vast amount have been kept from the very people who should have raised them and were instead sucked through the penal system from grade school on up through the juvenile detention system. This was the long range plan to hold down the black race since Nixon started the fictional  war on drugs so he could incarcerate blacks through the PR plan labeling blacks as heroin addicts on a war path to rape the white man’s daughters, along with all the pot smoking hippie war protesters.  It worked, and we’re still trying to undo that one.

I’m sick of hearing, “If you do the crime you have to do the time”, because you’d have to be a complete idiot or unable to read to not see the vast amount of information out there that talks about all of the innocent black people being freed from prison every year because they were falsely incarcerated. It often took 10-20-30 years to finally free them, now too damaged to pick up a life that was taken from them. They can’t go back to their wives or raise their children all over again. Their lives were destroyed. Their children’s lives were destroyed. My grandson’s life with his father was destroyed. Why?? Because they are black and you don’t like black people? Or because corporations run by rich white men have the power to keep slavery going in the prison system and their shareholders could make money off them by making them work for free? Or food or medical corporations could get rich from denying services while their families were made to pay fees so they could make a medical call and see a nurse on a computer screen who tells them to go drink more cruddy water that comes out of a spigot in their cell instead of actually treating their illnesses?

Our government, along with the Prison Industrial Complex – with your compliance, because you intentionally look the other way, has caused the suffering of an entire race – and America thinks it is a Christian nation? Is this what it means to be a Christian? I am sickened by the hate and I am astounded by the ignorance.

When it comes to incarceration there is a new problem beginning. Crime is down. No matter what our new leader tries to make you believe about how awful it is everywhere – Crime – Is – Down. But the prisons have to be fed. Our government has contracts with the prison corporations. If they aren’t kept full then your tax dollars has to pay them for empty beds. Did you miss those articles? Who will they fill the prisons with? With people who break the new laws. The are increasing the crimes your grade school children commit that will give the adult sentences. Michigan passed a law that went into affect on Jan 1st. Children as young as 5 will be prosecuted as adults if they are caught fighting.  Children. Just kids. So common. That’s what boys do. And now they can get sentenced and locked up for it. Think I’m kidding? Read. How many Detroit children will this affect? What color is Detroit?

N. Dakota is only one state that wants to make protesting a felony and if you kill someone by running them down with your car it’s okay. Is this sick? Do you want to be associated with this? How many haters would have a field day with this? Trump says he’s the “Law and Order President” but law and order has never been his strong suit. Ever.

Sentences will become longer. Approvals for parole will become less in order to fill the prisons still being built. It scares me. Too many people look the other way. Unless you are a family that has been affected by the draconian laws our prisons are run by, why should you care? Because it affects everyone. Nearly every day I read a message, usually by a mother, “My son, or daughter was arrested. What do I do?”

Maybe they are guilty and maybe they aren’t, but the handing out of 20 year sentences for non violent “crimes” is very common, and their entire life is ruined for profit. Absolutely nothing of value is made except more money for the rich. Educate yourself. Don’t assume you and your children will be safe. Your family could be next. Teach your children how to interact with police the same way black parents train all their children from a young age. Assume they will be stopped. Teach them how interact with authority. Being white isn’t always the only protection needed.

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If You Do The Crime You Should Pay Time

Jamie’s son and Sonni’s grandson  IF You Do The Crime You Should Pay With Appropriate Time…

If You Do The Crime You Should Pay Time Jamie's son and Sonni's grandson  IF You Do The Crime You Should Pay With Appropriate Time…

[sonniq]

Jamie’s son and Sonni’s grandson

 IF You Do The Crime You Should Pay With Appropriate Time

America is in denial. Instead of seeing us as the country that incarcerates more of is citizens than any country in the world – by a long shot – for corporate profit, many see America as this good Christian nation than benevolently lends a hand to countries who are aching for us to take over and teach them the kind of democracy we have; including teaching them how to set up a prison system that rapes it’s own country – literally – of any freedom or liberty people should be able to have.

America is about profit and if people’s lives need to be forfeited to get it – well, that is just the American way – unless it is your family that is affected.  Blindly, many Americans are sucked into “news” sites that are better at twisting the news than reporting it. People’s habits run deep. They don’t know how to understand an issue unless someone tells them how to understand it.The problem is, what they think they understand has been skewed to mean something other than the truth. This past year is a perfect example.  When people ignore the continual massive lies of our new leader(?) in chief, and want to give him a chance – to do what? Continue to lie and behave in embarrassing ways you would never accept from anyone else, what is the end result? We have a country that sees itself differently than the rest of the world sees us with a very twisted reasoning of right and wrong.

I have such a bad feeling about this because the writing is on the wall and has been for a long time. But this article is not about Donald Trump. I doubt his supporters are reading this anyway because the truth isn’t something they want to hear because it isn’t on Fox News. Their version of the truth and reality are two very different things.

I have read more articles on all facets of incarceration than I could ever count, trying to understand where we went wrong and why. How do we fix it? Can we fix it? We have a country that “wants” to think it’s a Christian nation yet doesn’t know how To apply it to their own lives. They are not devastated over the intentional ruination of an entire race of people where the only real difference is the color of skin. But somehow, because white people, and I am one of them, are often so insecure about their own worth they have the need to feel they are made of a high quality substance than people of color, missing the point that it makes them less, not more, than the people they put down.

Is this all white people? Of course not. But because people of color have been stomped down, and a high percentage treated unfairly by incarcerating them to keep them down, they have been kept from a decent education with good schools and good teachers. A vast amount have been kept from the very people who should have raised them and were instead sucked through the penal system from grade school on up through the juvenile detention system. This was the long range plan to hold down the black race since Nixon started the fictional  war on drugs so he could incarcerate blacks through the PR plan labeling blacks as heroin addicts on a war path to rape the white man’s daughters, along with all the pot smoking hippie war protesters.  It worked, and we’re still trying to undo that one.

I’m sick of hearing, “If you do the crime you have to do the time”, because you’d have to be a complete idiot or unable to read to not see the vast amount of information out there that talks about all of the innocent black people being freed from prison every year because they were falsely incarcerated. It often took 10-20-30 years to finally free them, now too damaged to pick up a life that was taken from them. They can’t go back to their wives or raise their children all over again. Their lives were destroyed. Their children’s lives were destroyed. My grandson’s life with his father was destroyed. Why?? Because they are black and you don’t like black people? Or because corporations run by rich white men have the power to keep slavery going in the prison system and their shareholders could make money off them by making them work for free? Or food or medical corporations could get rich from denying services while their families were made to pay fees so they could make a medical call and see a nurse on a computer screen who tells them to go drink more cruddy water that comes out of a spigot in their cell instead of actually treating their illnesses?

Our government, along with the Prison Industrial Complex – with your compliance, because you intentionally look the other way, has caused the suffering of an entire race – and America thinks it is a Christian nation? Is this what it means to be a Christian? I am sickened by the hate and I am astounded by the ignorance.

When it comes to incarceration there is a new problem beginning. Crime is down. No matter what our new leader tries to make you believe about how awful it is everywhere – Crime – Is – Down. But the prisons have to be fed. Our government has contracts with the prison corporations. If they aren’t kept full then your tax dollars has to pay them for empty beds. Did you miss those articles? Who will they fill the prisons with? With people who break the new laws. The are increasing the crimes your grade school children commit that will give the adult sentences. Michigan passed a law that went into affect on Jan 1st. Children as young as 5 will be prosecuted as adults if they are caught fighting.  Children. Just kids. So common. That’s what boys do. And now they can get sentenced and locked up for it. Think I’m kidding? Read. How many Detroit children will this affect? What color is Detroit?

N. Dakota is only one state that wants to make protesting a felony and if you kill someone by running them down with your car it’s okay. Is this sick? Do you want to be associated with this? How many haters would have a field day with this? Trump says he’s the “Law and Order President” but law and order has never been his strong suit. Ever.

Sentences will become longer. Approvals for parole will become less in order to fill the prisons still being built. It scares me. Too many people look the other way. Unless you are a family that has been affected by the draconian laws our prisons are run by, why should you care? Because it affects everyone. Nearly every day I read a message, usually by a mother, “My son, or daughter was arrested. What do I do?”

Maybe they are guilty and maybe they aren’t, but the handing out of 20 year sentences for non violent “crimes” is very common, and their entire life is ruined for profit. Absolutely nothing of value is made except more money for the rich. Educate yourself. Don’t assume you and your children will be safe. Your family could be next. Teach your children how to interact with police the same way black parents train all their children from a young age. Assume they will be stopped. Teach them how interact with authority. Being white isn’t always the only protection needed.

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If You Do The Crime You Should Pay Time Jamie's son and Sonni's grandson  IF You Do The Crime You Should Pay With Appropriate Time…

[oovitus]

Can We Have an Honest Conversation About Advertisements?

By Joshua Fields Millburn · Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+

If the following screed were a peer-reviewed journal article, its abstract would be brief: advertisements suck.

Well, at least most of them do.

That’s not to say that all advertising is inherently evil, or even bad, because not all advertisements are created equal—they run the gamut from informative to downright destructive.

To understand the inherent problems with advertisements, it’s important to first point out that advertising isn’t the same thing as marketing. Though these two terms are often used interchangeably, they are different in practice.

Advertisements

Advertisements are paid announcements via a public medium—mattress commercials, “infomercials” for the latest exercise fad, and seemingly harmless adverts for harmful prescription drugs—and they are generally not an endorsement by the platform on which they are displayed.

In Latin, advertere means “to turn toward,” and that’s the exact aim of today’s ad agencies: they’re willing to pay heaps of money to turn your eyes toward their products and services. And if the demand for a product isn’t as high as the supply, no problem! Advertising can create a false demand if the budget is high enough.

In recent years, worldwide spending on advertising has topped half a trillion dollars a year. Even writing the full number—500,000,000,000.00, commas and all—doesn’t come close to truly understanding its depth.

So let’s put it into perspective: If you leave your home today and begin spending one dollar every single second, it will take you more than 15,000 years to spend half a trillion dollars. In fact, if you’d’ve spent a million dollars every single day since the fall of Rome, you still wouldn’t’ve spent half a trillion dollars by now.

And we’re spending more than that every year on advertising. Which isn’t so bad in and of itself. After all, it’s just money being spent on informing people about useful stuff, right?

Yes, that sort of used to be true.

A Brief History of Modern Advertising

Before the twentieth century, advertising largely connected the producers of goods with consumers who genuinely needed those goods.

But then, as Stuart Ewen describes in his book Captains of Consciousness, “Advertising increased dramatically in the United States as industrialization expanded the supply of manufactured products. In order to profit from this higher rate of production, industry needed to recruit workers as consumers of factory products. It did so through the invention of [advertising] designed to influence the population’s economic behavior on a larger scale.”

By the Roaring Twenties, thanks to Edward Bernays, who’s sometimes referred to as the founder of modern advertising and public relations, advertisers in the U.S. adopted the doctrine that “human instincts could be targeted and harnessed.”

Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, realized that appealing to the rational minds of customers, which had been the mainstream method advertisers had used to sell products, was far less effective than selling products based on the unconscious desires that he felt were the “true motivators of human action.” Since then, we’ve witnessed ten decades of advertising agencies reaching—and overreaching—into the depths of the human psyche.

Overreach of Advertisers

Fast forward to the present day.

One of the most obvious examples of advertisers’ rapacious (over)reach in recent years is the drug Sildenafil, which was created as a treatment for hypertension. When clinical trials revealed the drug wasn’t effective, that should have been the end of its life cycle.

But then advertisers stepped in.

After discovering several male test subjects experienced prolonged erections during clinical trials, the makers of Sildenafil had a solution that desperately needed a problem. So they hired an ad agency who coined the term “erectile dysfunction,” and Viagra was born. This campaign took a relatively flaccid problem and created a ragging $2-billion-per-year blue pill.

Of course, Viagra is a rather anodyne example. There are many pharmaceuticals whose side effects are so expansive that their commercials are forced to use gratuitous green pastures, yearbook smiles, and handholding actors to conceal the terror of “rectal bleeding,” “amnesia,” and “suicidal ideation.”

In a sane world, misleadingly selling harmful prescription drugs would be a criminal act. Actually, it is: it’s illegal in every country in the world—except the United States and New Zealand—to advertise drugs to consumers.

But we let the almighty dollar get in the way.

In 1976, Henry Gadsden, then CEO of Merck & Co., told Fortune magazine that he’d rather sell drugs to healthy people because that’s where the most money was.

We’ve been sold new “cures” ever since.

But please don’t think this is an anti-boner-pill diatribe. According to the research, Viagra seems to be a relatively benign drug. Thereby, there’s little wrong with the pill itself. It’s the paid advertisements that are troublesome.

Many ad agencies employ writers, demographers, statisticians, analysts, and even psychologists in an effort to divorce us from the money in our checking accounts. With the help of a fine-tuned agency, even the “disclaimer” is part of the sales pitch: “Consult your doctor if your erection lasts longer than four hours.” I don’t know about you, but I’d rather consult my partner with my everlasting hard-on.

Viagra isn’t the only product pushed beyond its initial conception. Did you know Listerine was previously used as a floor cleaner, Coca-Cola was invented as an alternative to morphine, and the graham cracker was created to stop you from masturbating?

Hmm. If at first your product doesn’t succeed, hire an ad agency!

Selling Insecurity

Making men believe their erections aren’t firm enough isn’t the first time corporations have capitalized on human insecurity.

For decades, women have been sold an inferiority complex. Our glowing screens would have the average female believe her waist isn’t skinny enough, her breasts aren’t big enough, and her eyelashes aren’t lush enough. Don’t worry, though, whatever your ailment, consumerism has the cure.

In Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk prophesied of a dystopia in which a cunning con man could sell our own fat back to us after extracting it from our bodies. He was only half right, however.

In the book, the fat is repackaged as soap—a metaphor for cleansing ourselves by way of consumerism—but in the real world we’re sold our fat in the form of autologous-fat transfer (butt injections) so we can look like our favorite reality-television stars.

In a Kafkaesque bait-and-switch, advertisers sell us the food that makes us obese because we “deserve a treat,” and then they sell us the diet plans and exercise equipment to combat our gluttony.

The sleight of hand doesn’t end with “male enhancers” and weight-loss remedies. Advertisers go much further, capitalizing on our fear (and greed) with radically overpriced timeshare properties, precious metals, and end-times survival kits. You may not’ve known the world was ending, but now that you do, there’s a product you can purchase to prepare.

Selling Scarcity

Speaking of the end of the world, why does it seem like the ads we experience are always taking place in a state of perpetual emergency?

Act now! Limited time only! While supplies last!

These advertiser-induced artificial limits are almost always imaginary. The truth is that if you “miss out” on a so-called sale, you’ll be just fine because corporations are always looking for a new opportunity to sell you something today. I mean, what’s the alternative? “Sorry, Mrs. Customer, you’re screwed—you waited an extra day to make your decision, so we no longer want your money!”

Why, then, does almost every company inject urgency into their ads? Because, as Bernays recognized a century ago, this tactic takes advantage of our primal nature: humans make quick—often rash—decisions in times of perceived scarcity.

This made sense when our number one concern was starvation; it makes much less sense when we think we’ll never be able to own that big-screen television, video-game console, or clutch purse unless we get in on this weekend’s doorbuster bonanza.

Selling Nonessentials

Advertisers have gotten so skilled that they can even sell us trash and tell us it’s good for us. Literally.

Since American farmers are faced with unprecedented hoards of soybean and corn crops, and thus unprecedented waste products from those crops, advertisers have found a way not to safely dispose of that waste but to repackage it and sell it to you as hydrogenated oil, a supposed “alternative” to healthier oils from olives, avocados, and almonds.

Inferior cooking oils are just the start of the garbage that’s sold by the food industry. The amount of junk food that is peddled to us is so immense and so dangerous that there isn’t room in this essay to meaningfully explore the sugar and processed foods vended by America’s largest corporations, but it can be summed up in a single stat: in 2018, you are more likely to die from obesity than of a violent crime, terrorism, war, starvation, or a car crash.

Junk foods aren’t the only junk we buy. Unbeknown to us, advertisers have helped turn our homes into mausoleums of trash. To justify our clinging, we’ve invented cute nicknames for our junk—trinket, knickknack, novelty, doohickey, tchotchke, collector’s item, memento—as if what we call our trash increases its importance.

But in the real world, the cheap plastic things we purchase at gift shops aren’t of importance, which might be fine if they made us happier or improved our lives, but they don’t.

Instead, we experience a dull high that wears off soon after the cash register dings its quiet victory, and we sit in the aftermath of consumption with an unusable artifact. Then, in time, we feel icky because we’re too ashamed to let go, so we purchase plastic storage containers to hide—ahem, organize—our past mistakes.

Each year, Americans spend $1.2 trillion on nonessential goods. In contrast, we contribute less than $200 billion to charities every year. In other words, we spend a trillion dollars more on shit we don’t need than on helping people in need.

Advertising to Children

Advertisers have found perhaps the easiest way to flood our homes with nonessentials: by advertising to our children. Not only do kids lack the critical thinking skills to say no to the foods that are killing us, but if they develop brand loyalty early, then Ronald McDonald has a lifetime customer.

According to the American Psychology Association, commercial appeals to children became commonplace with the advent and widespread adoption of television, and they grew exponentially with the proliferation of cable television, which allowed programmers to develop entire channels of child-oriented programming and advertising.

It is estimated that advertisers spend more than $12 billion each year to reach the youth, and children view more than 40,000 television commercials each year—an exponential increase from decades past.

The American Academy of Pediatrics believes this targeting occurs because advertising in the U.S. alone is a $250 billion a year industry with 900,000 brands to sell, and children and adolescents are attractive consumers: teenagers spend $155 billion each year, children younger than 12 spend another $25 billion, and both groups influence another $200 billion of their parents’ spending every year.

Perhaps the solution is to follow Sweden, Norway, and Quebec, and completely bar advertising to children under the age of 12. But more than likely it’s up to us as parents to develop the systems and communities that will better influence our kids’ viewing habits.

The Upside of Advertising

When done carefully, however, as rare as that might be, advertising can help fulfill an existing need. In fact, a hundred years ago, many ads did just that: they connected potential customers with a product that would improve their lives.

I myself have benefited from informative advertisements. Living in Los Angeles, I’m exposed to more billboards than most of the world’s population. Even though they’re a horrendous eyesore, I can honestly say that I’m more informed about the available media—movies, music, television series—than if these advertisements didn’t exist.

The same is true for the tailored ads of the Internet. Google does a great job matching their content with my perceived needs. If a website is going to clutter their sidebar with banner ads, I would rather be served messages that are geared toward my interests: the bookshelf I’ve been considering instead of a cosmetics display, the socks I need instead of an automobile pitch, the concert I want to attend instead of a beer commercial.

It would be hard for me to claim that ads don’t occasionally provide some quantifiable good to my life. I’m simply not sure whether the pros outweigh the cons.

True, the ads are “better” than ever, but maybe I’m more likely to spend my money irresponsibly when I’m constantly presented ads that match my precise interests. And while L.A.’s billboards are more informative than, say, the ambulance chasers who fill the outdoor displays in most American cities, they’re still intrusive, and I’d prefer they didn’t exist at all—and I’m not alone.

The People’s Preference

While I was driving from Burlington to Boston last year, something felt off. The rolling emerald landscape was unsullied, not unlike a tranquil screensaver, and I felt an unnameable calm as the mile markers ticked away.

Then I crossed the Massachusetts state line, and it became obvious: the trip’s serenity was produced largely by its lack of billboards, which are illegal in the state of Vermont.

Currently, four states—Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont—prohibit billboards. And more than 1,500 cities and towns have banned them throughout the world, including one of the largest cities on Earth—Sao Paulo.

When Sao Paulo introduced its “Clean City Law” in 2007, more than 15,000 billboards were taken down. To boot, an additional 300,000 intrusive signs—pylons, posters, bus and taxi ads—had to go.

The strangest result of ridding the world’s third largest city of these advertisements? In a poll done after the removal, a majority of Paulistanos actually preferred the change. What a novel idea: ask people what they like instead of letting profitability dictate the cityview.

From Good to Great Profit

If all ads were unobtrusive and informative, it would be hard to have anything bad to say about them. But many twenty-first century advertisers have figured out how to manipulate the system for maximum profit.

In the era of mass media and Internet spamming, they’ve crossed a line: we went from connecting people with products they need; to creating a false desire for objects that add little value to our lives; to selling objects that get in the way of a richer, more fulfilling life.

Many of the things advertisements make us think we need are actually the source of our discontent. You see, the easiest way to sell us happiness is to first make us unhappy. It’s a painful cycle for us; it’s big business for them.

Unfortunately, we’ve accepted ads as part of our everyday life; we’ve been conditioned to think they are a regular part of “content delivery.” After all, advertisements are how we get all those TV shows, radio programs, online articles, and podcasts for free, right?

Alternatives to Advertisements

There’s no free lunch. Every hour of network television is peppered with nearly 20 minutes of interruptions, and the same is true for most other mediums, which one could argue is more costly than the “free” price tag because we’re giving up our two most precious resources—our time and attention—to receive the product.

If we don’t want ads storming our attention (or our children’s attention), then we must be willing to pay for the things we associate as “free.”

Netflix, Apple Music, and similar services are able to sidestep the traditional advertising model by providing a service people value. Other businesses and individuals—Wikipedia and Sam Harris come to mind—follow a variation of this ad-free model, frequently called a “freemium” model, where creators provide content for free, and a small portion of their audience supports their work monetarily. (By the way, this model is what keeps The Minimalists Podcast advertisement-free.)

When asked why he chooses not to run ads on his popular Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris responded, “I don’t feel I can credibly run ads on my podcast, even for products and services I love and use myself. The one ad I read for a while was for Audible, which I do use, but even in that case, I don’t feel entirely comfortable telling you that you should subscribe to Audible. I mean, should you? Perhaps you shouldn’t. I have no idea. And that would go down as the worst Audible ad ever.

“In any case, I’ve discovered that I don’t feel comfortable selling ads, which is fine because I hate what ads have done to digital media. The advertising model is responsible for almost everything that is wrong online. But not running ads puts me in a position of asking my audience for support. This is something I approached with real trepidation in the beginning. However, having done it, I’ve discovered it’s actually the most straightforward relationship I can have with my audience.”

No matter your feelings about Netflix, Apple Music, Wikipedia, Sam Harris, or similar companies and individuals, their approach undoubtedly improves their creations by making them interruption-free, and it increases trust since their audience knows these creators aren’t beholden to the desires of advertisers, which allows them to communicate directly with their audience in a way that strengthens the relationship because the customers are in control, not the ad buyers.

Moreover, as consumers, our willingness to exchange money for creations forces us to be more deliberate about what we consume. If we’re paying for it, we want to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth. It’s a mystery why we don’t do the same for so-called “free” programming, where we pay no money, but we rarely get our attention’s worth.

Whether your time is worth $10, $100, or $1,000 per hour, you likely spend tens of thousands of dollars every year consuming messages from advertisers. Think about that: in a very real way, you’re paying to be advertised to. And there are no refunds on your misspent attention.

Marketing

The flipside of advertising isn’t the absence of communication—it’s marketing.

In his book, The Mindset of Marketing Your Music, Derek Sivers writes, “Don’t confuse the word marketing with advertising, announcing, spamming, or giving away branded crap. Really, marketing just means being considerate. Marketing means making it easy for people to notice you, relate to you, remember you, and tell their friends about you.”

What Sivers is describing here is the most honest form of marketing: informing people without manipulating or bothering them. At its ethical zenith, marketing considers the needs and points of view of an audience and works hard to meet those needs by connecting the creators with consumers in an authentic way.

In neutral terms, marketing is an unpaid endorsement, often by the creator herself, communicated directly to an audience who’s eager to learn more about the product or service. When done well, this is what Seth Godin describes as Permission Marketing: “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”

It is possible to engage in world-class marketing without spending a penny on advertising. True, both advertising and marketing are forms of promotion—both allow creators to present their goods and services to a group of people—and when executed poorly, even well-intended marketing can be overkill. Like advertisements, not all marketing messages are created equal.

Bastardized Marketing

Unfortunately, not every marketer is a paragon of integrity. Just like the advertising world, marketing messages can be laced with misinformation, exaggerations, and propaganda.

When creators stray from their audience’s preferences—when they stop providing value and abuse their permission with over-marketing—they fail; they fall victim to vapid self-promotions, the most egregious examples of which include spam emails, website pop-ups, clickbait headlines, begging for followers, searching for “Likes.”

As “The Minimalists,” we provide loads of high-quality free creations—essays, podcasts, and quotes—and we occasionally use our platforms to promote a book, event, or service. And if we’re being forthright, even though we attempt to market with integrity, even we struggle to walk the line between informative and overkill.

While Ryan & I refuse spam, pop-ups, and salacious titles, and we strive to add value, we, too, have fallen victim to the “look at me” Internet culture—occasionally putting our preferences above our audience’s best interests. Whenever we catch ourselves straying, we course correct, and we work diligently to improve.

Marketing as Part of the Creation

Regardless of how you feel about marketing, it is the final step in the creative process. Marketing helps creators get their creations in front of people, and when approached delicately, it benefits their audience. But when creators focus more on promoting the creation than the act of creating, the product suffers and so does the audience, and trust is eroded.

Until recently, the only way a creator could effectively market her product was to plaster her message across television, radio, print, and billboards. Using jargon like “GRPs,” “TRPs,” and “frequency,” advertisers could guarantee their product would reach a particular audience via a robust advertising plan. Even though this shotgun approach was imprecise, it was the only way to get to a mass audience.

Today, the opposite is true. As a creator, you are your own marketing department; you can find an enthusiastic audience without the need to advertise. And because our tools are better than ever, your efforts can be more precise than the traditional approach of yesteryear, so you needn’t cast a wide net to be effective. In fact, a thousand true fans are enough.

Spending time marketing your creation doesn’t need to be tedious, either; it can be creative, artistic, and even fun. That’s why the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing: it feels like a conversation or entertainment or something the audience anticipates. Above all, it feels considerate—not salesy or forced.

Unavoidable Advertisements

All of this poses an interesting and prickly dilemma for us as “The Minimalists.” Because we don’t want to add to the noise, we personally don’t allow ads on our website, podcast, or any other medium we directly control.

However, we appear regularly on television and radio shows, as well as in newspapers and magazines, in which advertisements appear. And we’re honestly conflicted about this.

Even companies we respect and have partnered with—our tour promoter, Live Nation; our primary bookselling platform, Amazon; and the company behind our travel-bag project, Pakt—engage in various forms of advertising.

We could, of course, choose not to appear anywhere that participates in advertising in any form, but because ads are virtually everywhere—Americans see upwards of 5,000 each day—that would greatly limit the amount of people our message reaches.

So we’ve instead decided to ride the line: no, we won’t incorporate ads into our platforms, and we’ll continue to speak out against the innate problems with advertising, but we won’t hide in a cave to shield ourselves from every billboard.

Now maybe you don’t think advertisements are a big deal, but I believe they are one of the worst things to happen to our culture: they are the largest contributing factor toward rampant consumerism in the developed world, and they’re the biggest reason our political climate is where it is today.

Advertisements are much like the islands of plastic haunting our oceans—a giant problem people rarely think about. That doesn’t mean ads (or plastic) shouldn’t exist; I simply don’t feel good about producing either unless they contribute to the greater good.

Values over Money

That said, I’m not allergic to money. And this commentary isn’t meant to be a judgment on other people.

Many of my close friends incorporate advertisements into their creations, and I don’t necessary begrudge them for that. It likely wouldn’t do much good anyway because, as Upton Sinclair once wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The way I understand it, though, is simple: my values trump my ability to make money. And advertisements don’t align with my personal values.

Do I want to earn a living? Yes, of course I do. But I want to live a life that’s congruent with my values, and thus I don’t want money to be the primary driver of my creations. Just because I can advertise, that doesn’t mean I should.

True, money will always be an important part of the equation (everybody has to pay the bills, right?), but if we put creativity and our values first, then we can determine the role of money further down the line.

Conclusion

Suffice it to say, this disquisition wouldn’t see the light of day in any of today’s ad-driven organs. Nor would it find its way into a scholarly journal, because this isn’t a peer-reviewed article; it’s just one guy’s loosely connected thoughts about advertising.

It’s my hope that these musings start a conversation about the oft-ignored pernicious aspects of advertisements. And maybe—just maybe—our society can find a way to make advertisements that don’t suck.

Let’s not hold our breath, though. If we want to produce meaningful creations, we must rely on ourselves. Or, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari once wrote, “You cannot unite humanity by selling advertisements.” This is true even if those ads are for dick pills.

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Can We Have an Honest Conversation About Advertisements? published first on https://storeseapharmacy.tumblr.com