Just one word for you; “Sriracha.”
It’s possible to make it in today’s world without a Facebook page and a Twitter handle. The gurus will deny this and insist that it’s not true. They tell us incessantly that we must all bow down before social media, or at least social media’s self-appointed royalty.
So much noise about what we all must do to be successful.
You know what I say to that?
BULLSH*T!! (actually, Brad Frost says that, I’m riffing off it, and I learned all this from the Mark Baumer).
Every time you see a bottle of Sriracha Sauce is a reminder to run away from the herd and find your own beat to march to.
Well, it’s worked well for the Kardashians, and Paris, and Snooki, and all those others I should be ashamed to even be able to name. Peddling BS is profitable. How do I get my cut?
Now that video, twenty minutes I’ll never get back. He could have done it in two or three, but then he probably wouldn’t have gotten paid as much. He was peddling a little of it, too. Where was his craftmanship?
What was saddest about his presentation, though, was remembering the days when an ad on the internetz was a genuinely rare and unusual thing. All the debates about how advertising was going to have to be accepted to make the net a viable business model, etc. So not only do we get mined for data and made little profit centers that way, but we get shellacked with ads as well.
I used to think the role of the “critic” was one that deserved to disappear and that with so much information available to men and women everywhere, we would become discriminating consumers of information. In fact, I thought we might all grow brighter and smarter. This young man tells us that 90% of everything is crap.
The future is about focus? I look forward to see where this thread leads. Perhaps we need a “web critic” to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, with a Tom Brady laser-like focus.
@Loosehead and @ JAB-
Both of your comments reminded me that America’s always been about hustling, and a hustling we will continue to go.
We can blame technology for the hustling if we want, but we’ve been about bullsh*t dating back to the Pilgrims landing, and even before (some guys named Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, all in search of gold and riches).
In fact, the confiscated gold, the slaves and other resources, these helped pull the European economy out of feudalism, what Marx later called this “the primitive accumulation of capital.” These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.’ (and set America’s urge to hustle in motion)- See more at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/11/27/why-i-hate-thanksgiving/
Steal the land, rape and pillage, kill the Native people, etc, etc, etc.
Now, there’s not even a pretense that it’s anything but a con, as you aptly noted @LP by ticking off that heralded, hustling trifecta of [the] “…Kardashians, and Paris, and Snooki.”
Jim, you might want to look up Chris Hedges writing on his recent experience teaching Zinn’s book in prison. It explained a lot to the prisoners, who per Hedges found every class and chapter an eye-opening experience. I remember living in DC when Zinn was still a prominent academic, and casually discarding him. I still regularly amaze myself when I recognize how effectively conventional schooling made me so stupid, and yet so sure of my knowledge.
As repugnant as it is to us in our fat and happy times, though, slavery has always been a part of human existence. Historically, only Christianity has ever taken any solid, principled stand against it for any length of time. But in reality, slavery only receded in the West when coal and oil took its place as the primary sources of energy. When coal and oil recede, contemporary wage slavery will adapt to more conventional indentured servitude (work for corporation on a salary and see how far off you are these days, constantly on an electronic tether), and finally outright slavery again.
As for all those stories of Indian uprisings and English horrors, well, the English have a long track record of this. Ask the Irish and the Scots. They’re very good at it. But when we grew up there was still a popular novel, “A Light in the Forest,” about a colonial boy who became native and lived as an Indian among Indians. I think it’s disappeared from school reading lists entirely now. The Maine Historical Society used to print newsletters full of researches into colonial ancestors who were taken hostage by the Indians between the coast and the French settlements along the St Lawrence, and of Indians who were captured and converted into good Christians as well. Even fifty years ago, schoolchildren could be captivated and intrigued by these stories, and drawn into the real effort of history: understanding our past and how we got to be who we are.
In the age of glittering Snookis, only homeschoolers have a chance.