The Q understands that, like duped natives, we were given a few trinkets in exchange for our privacy. Shiny cell phone with digital calendar and free magazines and circulars and Sears-like catalogs that fit in your pocket!!! For a contact list there, a shopping history, location, interests, hang-ups, dirty laundry, destroyed reputations, porn addictions, keyword searches by government agencies...
The advertising industry - the clever propaganda machine that controls our very beings - still can't believe how easy it's all been. And now they're gloating! A colleague got this in the mail, and if it doesn't creep you out then it's true, the body snatchers already have you in their slimy little pods.
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| Yes, I know it's a joke. I don't find it so funny. |
4 comments:
That's actually an ad that Advertising Age puts on the outside of the real cover. It's like a meta-ad. I know this because we actually get it in my office. The actual cover of the Oct 21 issue asks how Google will sell their boring looking self driving car. "Ok, Google. How do you sell this thing?"
Oh yeah, I too find the Conversant ad very creepy.
"Ignorance Is Strength."
"Freedom Is Slavery."
"War Is Peace."
We're living 1984 on HGH my friend. We don't hide from our telescreens to have private conversations like Winston did, They're in our hands/pockets/immediate vicinity at ALL TIMES! SO seductive and beguiling with "apps" to cater to our every infantalized desire, We gleeful share all our business with them... It really has been frightfully easy, how we've given up our privacy and personal freedom. Fear and desire are powerful motivators. I saw an ad on the Q for a while that said "The NSA is bored with your song choices" or something like that. It was for NPR. It was supposed to be a joke. Our surveillance is ubiquitous and it's basically been normalized. And god forbid if you live in a bad neighborhood. Big Brother is always watching you. They call it "omnipresence". MADNESS!
http://www.vice.com/read/omnipresence-is-the-newest-nypd-tactic-youve-never-heard-of-1020
Huh; you'd think an all-powerful propaganda machine would be able to shutup all of the 'freedom fighters' like yourself, or really almost everyone, from broadcasting their constant negative sentiments about them.
I mean, it's almost like they're critiquing themselves with their creepy cover, instead of, as you write, gloating.
And jeez, it's almost like you're buying what they're peddling (amongst themselves) in that one's buying habits are one's most important characteristics. I can understand why advertisers might think that – and they're probably right, for themselves, in their professional capacities – but why exactly are you playing along uncritically?
K: Your comment is even more meta than that cover. They ARE gloating, but pretending to joke about it, showing that they are even more smug. They must legitimize their careers, and calling it an art form is the best way to do that. You should see the pictures of the "creatives" at the various firms. You will surely wretch, and the sick part is that they'll LOVE your vomit.
My read on the utter success of post-Edward Bernays marketing is not that we have buying habits so much as predispositions to buy. In other words, we are buying identity and lifestyle which has been created as an offspring of our interests, which have essentially been predetermined. Thus, I find myself wanting to buy things that I think I want, but actually I was a byte in the program that created the version of myself that believes he wants those things. Notice the use of the word "he." It's now interchangeable with the word "I." I want to be him, and he has certain things that I must have too.
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