The ‘Source’ in the Distance

Last week, my friend Kris Krug flew down to the Gulf of Mexico on the TEDxOilSpill Expedition, a week-long project to document the crisis in the Gulf and bring a first hand report back to the TEDxOilSpill event in Washington, D.C. on June 28. Kris, a photographer, web strategist, and self-described “cyberpunk anti-hero from the future“ (though, technically, from Vancouver) was there as part of the team of photographers, videographers, and writer traveling through Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana documenting the current situation in the coastal communities affected by the oil spill. (Kris’s shots from the expedition have also appeared in National Geographic photo essays: 1, 2, 3).

Talking with Kris — who has been one of the earliest and staunchest supporters of my writing here at Social-Creature (the header image on this site is one of his photos) — he suggested that while it’s not my usual ‘beat,’ if I felt so inspired, I should write some words about this situation.

Early morning thunderstorm off the coast of Grand Isle, Louisiana.

The truth is that there is something in this endlessly tragic mire which I’ve kept thinking about over and over during the course of the now 69 days since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. And that recurring thought — beyond how devastating and heartbreaking this entire situation is — is how utterly foreign and disturbing it feels to be this completely powerless to do anything about it.

As a generation, mine has not known powerlessness. We have known no great war. No great depression. We were born a decade after the last U.S. draft ended. Our childhoods were filled with images like these:

We were weaned on the sense that something could be done. A single person could stand up to a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. People could tear the Berlin wall down. People could undo the totalitarian Soviet regime. By the time we got to high school, the Internet had arrived, followed quickly by college and the birth of the social web. The digital revolution added an unprecedented amplification to this sense of our own personal agency. Just over the past few short years we have experienced how sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook have offered platforms for us to do something.

Last summer, the Washington Post called the aftermath of the Iran election a “A Twitter Revolution.” As police tried to suppress demonstrators who took to the streets to protest the declared results of the presidential elections in a place halfway around the planet, Twitter let the world know exactly what was going on, on the ground in Iran even as outside journalists were barred from the country. It was instantaneous, unfiltered, real, and it compelled our attention. The U.S. State Department even asked Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance on the site at the time in order avoid disrupting communications among tweeting Iranian citizens and the rest of the world. Ordinary voices of dissent had never had access to such mass media before, and just bearing witness, just knowing their struggle, just retweeting and communicating was an act of solidarity with those citizens of Iran who were protesting, and an act of defiance against the forces that would have them silenced. It was doing something.

Six months ago, after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti, a place of no real political or economic importance, these digital tools helped mobilize the aid and compassion of the entire world almost instantly. Within just a few hours a text-based donation service was set up for the American Red Cross’s relief efforts. In just 2 days of the earthquake the program had raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users. Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation, also running its own text donation drive, raised another $1 million. It was a watershed moment. Never had so much money been raised for relief so quickly after a disaster. The digital tools facilitated this, but what drove people to make those donations was the desire to do something even if it was just giving a few dollars to help alleviate suffering.

We humans have such a deep need to feel like we’ve got any sense of agency in our lives, we’ll happily trick ourselves into perceiving we’re in control — or at the very least, that control over chaos is attainable. This proclivity is a large part of why God exists — or rather, why we believe he does. In a 2007 New York Times article exploring possible answers from evolutionary biology as to how we have come to believe in God, Robin Marantz Henig wrote:

Our brains are primed for [belief in the supernatural], ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic.

We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.” The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose cancer treatment works despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to explain her survival. It fits better with her causal-reasoning tool for her recovery to be a miracle, or a reward for prayer, than for it to be just a lucky roll of the dice.

Oil coming on shore.

As an alternative to these external supernatural forces it’s become increasingly popular to reclaim a sense of power in the face of chaos or tragedy by elevating control of our inner selves to this transcendent status of godliness. In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America Barbara Ehrenreich recounts, in a chapter titled, “Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer,” how getting diagnosed with breast cancer led to her first introduction with the cult of “positive thinking.” The “Pink Ribbon Culture,” she writes, is defined by a mantra of “positive thinking” that is so extreme, at times it paints cancer as a “gift, deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude:”

In the mainstream of breast cancer culture there is very little anger, no mention of possible environmental causes, and few comments about the fact that in all but the most advanced, metastasized cases, it is the “treatments,” not the disease, that cause the immediate illness and pain. In fact, the overall tone is almost universally upbeat. The Best Friends Web site, for example, featured a series of inspirational quotes: “Don’t cry over anything that can’t cry over you,” “I cant stop the birds of sorrow from circling my head, but I can stop them from building a nest in my hair,” “When life hands out lemons, squeeze out a smile,” “Don’t wait for your ship to come in… swim out to meet it,” and much more of that ilk.

The cheerfulness of breast cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease. As “Mary” reports, on the Bosom Buds message board: “I really believe I am a much more sensitive and thoughtful person now. I was a real worrier before. Now I don’t want to waste my energy on worrying. I enjoy life so much more now and in a lot of aspects I am much happier now.” [Another] such testimony to the redemptive powers of the disease: “I can honestly say I am happier now than I have ever been in my life — even before the breast cancer.

One survivor turned author credits it with revelatory powers, writing in her book The Gift of Cancer: A Call to Awakening that “cancer is your ticket to your real life. Cancer is your passport to the life you were truly meant to live. Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say that again. Cancer is your connection to the Divine.”

The effect of all this positive thinking is to transform breast cancer [from] an injustice or tragedy to rail against.

There was, I learned, an urgent medical reason to embrace cancer with a smile: a “positive attitude” is supposedly essential to recovery. It remains almost axiomatic, within the breast cancer culture, that survival hinges on “attitude”…. [the belief] that a positive attitude boosts the immune system, empowering it to battle cancer more effectively.

You’ve probably read that assertion so often, in one form or another, that it glides by without a moment’s thought about what the immune system is, how it might be affected by emotions, and what, if anything, it could do to fight cancer. The business of the immune system is to defend the body against foreign intruders, such as microbes, and it does so with a a huge onslaught of cells and whole cascades of different molecular weapons.

In 1970, the famed Australian medical researcher McFarlane Burnet had proposed that the immune system is engaged in constant “surveillance” for cancer cells, which, supposedly, it would destroy upon detection. Presumably, the immune system was engaged in busily destroying cancer cells — until the day came when it was too exhausted (for example, by stress) to eliminate the renegades. There was at least one a priori problem with this hypothesis: unlike microbes, cancer cells are not “foreign”; they are ordinary tissue cells that have mutated and are not necessarily recognizable as enemy cells. As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: “What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid our own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.”

More to the point, there is no consistent evidence that the immune system fights cancers, with the exception of those cancers caused by viruses, which may be more truly “foreign.” People whose immune systems have been depleted by HIV or animals rendered immunodeficient are not especially susceptible to cancers, as the “immune surveillance” theory would predict. Nor would it make much sense to treat cancer with chemotherapy, which suppresses the immune system, if the latter were truly crucial to fighting the disease. Furthermore, no one has found a way to cure cancer by boosting the immune system with chemical or biological agents.

But despite all the evidence to the contrary, you can see the appeal of believing in the power of “positive thinking” anyway, can’t you? Instead of waiting passively for the treatments to kick in, breast cancer patients can now “work on themselves;” monitor their moods and “psychic energies.” In other words, the idea of a link between subjective feelings and the disease, fabricated though it may be, gives cancer patient something to do.

And this applies far beyond cancer, to any kind of overpowering misfortune. “We’re always being told that looking on the bright side is good for us,” writes Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, in a review on the back cover of Bright-Sided, “But now we see that it’s a great way to brush off poverty, disease, and unemployment, to rationalize an order where all the rewards go to those on top. The people who are sick or jobless — why, they just aren’t thinking positively. They have no one to blame but themselves.”

It’s not that we’re assholes. It’s just that we desperately want to believe the world is a far more just place than it actually is. As David McRaney, journalist, and author of You Are Not So Smart, a blog about the workings of self-delusion, writes in a post about The Just World Fallacy, humans have “a tendency to react to horrible misfortune, like homelessness or drug addiction, by believing the people stuck in horrible situations must have done something to deserve it.” Here is the Just World fallacy in action:

Oh, wait. Actually, THAT guy IS an asshole. As is Rhonda Byrne, creator of “The Secret,” who, in the wake of the 2006 tsunami, citing the law of attraction, announced that disasters like that can happen only to those who are “on the same frequency as the event.”

A flock of Brown Pelicans on some rocks in Alabama.

While, clearly, suggesting that the poor little pelicans (or anyone else) signed a deal with the devil or somehow attracted the oil spill upon themselves is just waaaay the fuck further out in looney-land than anyone who is not an asshole cares to travel, at their base, all these delusions are simply coping mechanisms. A way to synthesize a sense of being less powerless than you really are; a way to deal in the face of extreme evidence to the contrary. Because the reality is that feeling like we have NO control whatsoever, like our lives are simply dried up leaves in the autumn winds of chaos, like any choices we make are utterly meaningless and futile is actually terrible for our mental well-being and our health. Note: this is not the same as saying “thinking positive will cure your cancer,” it’s saying that extreme stress factors are, indeed, bad for you. Duh. “Torture a lab animal long enough,” Ehrenreich writes, “as the famous stress investigator Hans Selye did in the 1930s, and it becomes less healthy and resistant to disease.” In a post on Learned Helplessness — McRaney writes:

If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you learn over time there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act – you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.

Studies of the clinically depressed show that when they fail they often just give in to defeat and stop trying.

A study in 1976 by Langer and Rodin showed in nursing homes where conformity and passivity is encouraged and every whim is attended to, the health and wellbeing of the patients declines rapidly. If, instead, the people in these homes are given responsibilities and choices, they remain healthy and active.

This research was repeated in prisons. Sure enough, just letting prisoners move furniture and control the television kept them from developing health problems and staging revolts.

In homeless shelters where people can’t pick out their own beds or choose what to eat, the residents are less likely to try and get a job or find an apartment.

Perdido Beach, Alabama

The underlying thread here is always about control, or the loss of it. Chaos is unbelievably traumatizing — personally, and to us as a species. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have been studying the impact of the 9/11 attacks on male babies since 2005. Their just recently published findings reveal that in the aftermath of the 2001 tragedy pregnant women miscarried a disproportionate number of male fetuses. In September 2001, the death rate of male fetuses compared with female increased by 12 percent. That’s 120 extra losses in a single month. The theory behind this phenomenon is likely an evolutionary adaptation. Women have adapted to produce what, Tim Bruckner, the study’s lead author and a professor at UC Irvine, describes as “the alpha male.” Which could explain why male fetuses are more sensitive to their mothers’ stress hormones than female ones. When a pregnant woman experiences some sort of crisis — whether personal or not — her male baby is more vulnerable to be miscarried. In times of prosperity and security, male fetuses are more likely to be brought to term, because there’s a greater chance that they’ll be healthy and robust. During periods of scarcity, however, male miscarriages are much more common. Indeed, the phenomenon reported by Bruckner & Co. has been observed before — reduced male birth rates have been reported during other instances of national stress or suffering, like economic recessions or natural disasters.

Surface oil burns in the Gulf of Mexico as part of the oil spill clean-up.

Which brings us back to the Gulf of Mexico and the worst environmental disaster in US history; the cold, strange, numbing sense of a profound national powerlessness seeping in as we see sickening photos of helpless animals drowning in oil. Just thinking about how you can’t do anything about it for too long will make you want to check the fuck out of this whole story. I know. I want, as much as anyone else, to have something to be able to do to make all of this stop.

To a large extent this is completely new territory for my generation. Nationally, we have never been faced with something we couldn’t “do” something about. As the child of parents who lived through WWII, Refuseniks, no less — the 1 and a half million Russian Jews who were trapped in the Soviet Union, denied permission by the government to leave the country, in my parents’ case, for a decade — I know, personally, just how sheltered my generation’s childhood has been in contrast. It’s unprecedented for us. We’ve had so little practice at facing situations where we couldn’t just do something, at fighting them, at living through them. Not 9/11, not the financial crisis, not the wars in between, it’s this oil spill that is my generation’s unfortunate turn to figure out how to stand in the face of powerlessness.

In a Huffington Post piece a few weeks ago on why he “Co-opted BP’s Twitter Presence,” Leroy Stick, the alleged name behind the anonymous @BPGlobalPR twitter account, which posts ingeniously scathing commentary on BP with satire so black as to befit the disaster the company has wrought, wrote:

I started @BPGlobalPR because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements. No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing. That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them.  I started off just making jokes at their expense with a few friends, but now it has turned into something of a movement. As I write this, we have 100,000 followers and counting. [Currently, almost 179,000]. People are sharing billboards, music, graphic art, videos and most importantly information.

If you are angry, speak up.  Don’t let people forget what has happened here.  Don’t let the prolonged nature of this tragedy numb you to its severity. Re-branding doesn’t work if we don’t let it, so let’s hold BP’s feet to the fire.  Let’s make them own up to and fix their mistakes NOW and most importantly, let’s make sure we don’t let them do this again.

Right now, PR is all about brand protection. All I’m suggesting is that we use that energy to work on human progression.  Until then, I guess we’ve still got jokes.

A small quote of inspiration to the affected fishing community at a bait and tackle in Dauphin Island, Alabama

In the introduction to Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich writes:

Americans did not start out as positive thinkers…. In the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers pledged to one another “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” They knew that they had no certainty of winning the war for independence and that they were taking a mortal risk. Just the act of signing the declaration made them all traitors to the crown, and treason was a crime punishable by execution. The point is, they fought anyway. There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

We must find that courage now. To keep paying attention. To not tune out the story of this tragedy. To not let futility or apathy or simple delusion take over. We must have the courage to see things as they really are, to bear witness to what’s happening in the gulf, and we must have the courage to fight for answers, to fight for institutional change in the policies that have lead to this disaster, and to work for new solutions. The TEDxOilSpill event I mentioned at the beginning of this post, which is bringing together researchers and leaders to explore new ideas for our energy future, and how we can mitigate the crisis in the Gulf, is a start. There are also currently 126 local Meetups happening in conjunction with the event in 30 countries around the globe. We have to have the courage to do what we can, until we can actually do what we must.

That courage is, literally, what America was founded on, and I hope my generation discovers we too possess a reserve of it.

I’ve been thinking about this, the third in what’s evidently become a series of posts inspired by Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, by Rob Walker, since I read the section in the book (it’s also been reprinted as a Fast Company article) where Walker writes about American Apparel changing its brand messaging. Initially the company’s identity hinged on its “Sweatshop Free” production, but sex, surprise surprise, turned out to be a much better sell than good labor practices. Walker writes:

American Apparel seemed to me to be a marquee example of a business that had positioned itself to respond to a rising tide of ethical, antibrand consumers. At a moment when practically every clothes maker was offshoring to cut costs, American Apparel made its wares at a U.S. factory in which the average industrial worker (usually a Latino immigrant) was paid between $12 and $13 an hour and got medical benefits. The company had taken out ads in little arty magazines, noting that it was “sweatshop free.”

[But] Another self-consciously ethical clothing brand, SweatX, had just gone out of business. The lesson of SweatX, [American Apparel CEO Dov] Charney said, was that building a brand solely around a company’s ethical practices was not a good strategy for reaching masses of consumers. The ethical sell was too limiting. It was a niche strategy, at best. Which was why American Apparel was moving away from the ethical sell to something very different.

Charney pulled out a copy of a book called The 48 Laws of Power and read me No. 13, which suggested that to get what you want, you must appeal to people’s self-interest, not to their mercy. “That’s the problem with the anti-sweatshop movement. You’re not going to get customers walking into stores by asking for mercy and gratitude.” If you want to sell something, ethical or otherwise, he said, snapping the book closed, “appeal to people’s self-interest.”

By the time I visited American Apparel’s headquarters and factory in Los Angeles to meet with Charney a second time, the company had transitioned to an image soaked in youth and sex. This was apparent in its stores — where the decor often included things such as Penthouse covers — and in its print ads. Yes, some of these ads mentioned quality and the sweatshop-free angle, but usually in small type, under a photograph of a half-naked young woman.

The company was producing 32,000 pieces a day and struggling to keep up with orders. In months, [the company's] system was churning out 90,000 pieces a day and would eventually reach 250,000. While the company was projecting an air of almost reckless decadence in its ads, it was quietly building a thriving made-in-America business model.

All of which, of course, made me wonder–and perhaps might make you wonder, too: Does good matter?

Good itself, I mean, without a gloss of sex covering it over, does it matter as a selling point to us as consumers?

Researchers Remi Trudel and June Cotte were trying to figure out the same thing in their studies for the May 2008 Wall Street Journal piece Does Being Ethical Pay?

For corporations, social responsibility has become a big business. Companies spend billions of dollars doing good works — everything from boosting diversity in their ranks to developing eco-friendly technology — and then trumpeting those efforts to the public.

But does it pay off?

To find out, we conducted a series of experiments. We showed consumers the same products — coffee and T-shirts — but told one group the items had been made using high ethical standards and another group that low standards had been used. A control group got no information.

In all of our tests, consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods. But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount.

Our first experiment asked two questions. How much more will people pay for an ethically produced product? And how much less are they willing to spend for one they think is unethical?

To test these questions, we gathered a random group of 97 adult coffee drinkers and asked them how much they would pay for a pound of beans from a certain company. We used a brand that’s not available in North America, so none of the participants would be familiar with it.

But before the people answered, we asked them to read some information about the company’s production standards. One group got positive ethical information, and one group negative; the control group got neutral information, similar to what shoppers would typically know in a store.

After reading about the company and its coffee, the people told us the price they were willing to pay on an 11-point scale, from $5 to $15. The results? The mean price for the ethical group ($9.71 per pound) was significantly higher than that of the control group ($8.31) or the unethical group ($5.89).

Meanwhile, as the numbers show, the unethical group was demanding to pay significantly less for the product than the control group. In fact, the unethical group punished the coffee company’s bad behavior more than the ethical group rewarded its good behavior. The unethical group’s mean price was $2.42 below the control group’s, while the ethical group’s mean price was $1.40 above. So, negative information had almost twice the impact of positive information on the participants’ willingness to pay.

Trudel and Cotte also researched just how ethical companies really need to be in order to reap marketplace rewards, that is, are consumers willing to pay more for a product that is 100% ethically produced versus one that is 50% or 25% ethically produced? Their findings showed that there is a certain “ethical threshold” beyond which any ethical acts might reinforce the company’s image, but don’t induce people to pay more. And lastly, they examined the effect of pre-existing consumer attitudes, and found that people with high expectations about how companies should behave doled out bigger rewards and punishments than those with low expectations.

For companies, the implications of this study — albeit limited — are apparent. Efforts to move toward ethical production, and promote that behavior, appear to be a wise investment. In other words, if you act in a socially responsible manner, and advertise that fact, you may be able to charge slightly more for your products.

Not an overwhelming rallying cry to assert that good is here, it matters, and we should get used to it, exactly, but clearly an opportunity to explore a new ethical “market segment.” As Walker writes:

Perhaps this is why many big companies and brands are not so much changing their products as adding new alternatives to their existing product mixes, or carving a small donation to charity out of their profit margins. Pepsi-Cola is testing an all-natural version of its flagship drink called Pepsi Raw, and Clorox has launched an eco-friendly line of cleaning products. The Bono-promoted (Product) Red initiative brands existing products that dedicate a portion of the purchase price to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. There’s even a (Product) Red version of the iPod.

A whopping majority of American shoppers may consider themselves environmentalists, but, according to the Journal of Industrial Ecology, only 10% to 12% “actually go out of their way to purchase environmentally sound products.” Similarly, Brandweek reported on a survey that found that even among consumers who called themselves “environmentally conscious,” more than half could not name a single green brand.

Ask most people whether they care about the environment, and it’s not particularly surprising that many would say yes. Ask whether they would back that up by “buying green” if they had the chance, and again, it’s likely that very few would admit to being hypocrites by saying no. What we do in the marketplace is another matter.

There is a real-world overload of factors that confront consumers in the marketplace — price, quality, convenience, pleasure, plus the countless number of symbols that provide us with rationales to buy. The Yale Center for Customer Insights designed an experiment to test this phenomenon. It divided 108 subjects into two groups. Members of one group were presented with a straightforward consumer choice. Would they prefer to buy a vacuum cleaner (a utilitarian object) or a pair of jeans (a bit of a luxury), each of which was assigned the same price, $50? About 72% chose the vacuum cleaner. Members of the other group were told to imagine they had volunteered to spend three hours a week either teaching children in a homeless shelter or “improving the environment.” They were asked to explain their choice, a process meant to prod them into engaging with the idea. Then they faced the vacuum-cleaner-or-jeans choice. In this group, a majority (57%) opted for the jeans.

Although very few of the subjects made the connection, the researchers concluded that “the opportunity to appear altruistic by committing to a charitable act in a prior task” gives us license to choose a luxury item. A similar set of studies indicates that subjects are more likely to splurge on fancier sunglasses or pricier concert tickets after giving to charity. If you buy ecological or green products or consume alternative health care or practice yoga, it’s easy to conclude, “Hey, I’ve done my part.”

These efforts [by big companies] add just enough options to the miles of retail shelves to give us all an ethical fix — to do our one good shopping deed. Then we can push our basket a little farther down the aisle, letting other rationales take over: Here’s a bargain, here’s a great product, here’s something that I could probably get cheaper elsewhere, but as long as I’m here, I’ll just get it — and here, yes, here is something ethical. I’ll take one of those, too.

Trudel and Cotte concluded at the end of their research: “The lessons are clear. Companies should segment their market and make a particular effort to reach out to buyers with high ethical standards, because those are the customers who can deliver the biggest potential profits on ethically produced goods.”

Rather than marketing ethical products to a mainstream audience, big companies can simply create a separate ethical brand or product line, repackage it as a luxury “good,” and sell it at a premium to the niche, conscientious consumer demographic–which may be willing to pay more for ethical products, but couldn’t scale to support a company like SweatX, or to motivate the big companies to change their practices overall.

Is that the fate of good, then? Is the extent of it’s significance as a selling point simply the justification for a reverse “ethical tax”?

At the PSFK conference in San Francisco last week, GOOD Magazine co-founder Max Schorr’s presentation, “Aligning Interests,” (echoing that 13th law of power) was subtitled: “When cynical people admit they’re idealistic you might be on to something.” At the beginning of his presentation Schorr asked a room full of marketers how many of us wanted to make a positive impact. Pretty much everyone raised their hands. When he asked how many of us wanted to make money, the same hands shot up. The idea then is that to effect real positive change these kinds of interests have to align. Doing good has to be separated from the bleak, unprofitable, un-fun, self-righteous, and ultimately ineffectual idea lf altruism, and the “triple bottom line” of sustainability, profit, and positive impact, needs to become a single bottom line. Schorr’s presentation was the most loudly applauded of the whole day, and thereafter the most frequently referenced. There is no doubt that marketers–well, those of us that raised our hands anyway–we WANT good to matter. We WANT consumer demand for ethics and sustainability to affect the substance of what the market supplies. We want good to succeed.

But does it have to matter as a selling point to do that?

In his presentation, Schorr talked about how the magazine has stopped using the word “Green.” The reason behind this move being to stop presenting sustainable practices as some kind of distinct “alternative” from what should simply be the default standard. In a sense, this is what American Apparel did as well when they stopped trumpeting their ethical practices to distinguish their brand identity.

Maybe it’s all about thinking ahead. We shouldn’t confuse current consumer attitudes with what they’re likely to be in the future. No doubt a company’s environmental friendliness matters more now to the average consumer than it would have before the release of An Inconvenient Truth. And I’d be willing to bet that ethical production practices in general matter more to us now than they did before the wave of mass internet adoption hit, and access to information about a company’s practices became easily accessible to the average web surfer. Trudel and Cotte even acknowledged that if 100% ethically produced products become the expected norm, anything less may be punished by consumers. So perhaps good actually WILL matter quite a bit more in the future than it does now.

But will it ever matter more than sex?

Maybe that gloss on top won’t hurt anyway. Just…. you know….. in case.

i’ve been travelling for more of the past month than i’ve been at home, and just coming up with things to write about that i had no time to follow through on. so now that i’ve finally gotten to shower in my own shower, and sleep in my own bed, and the chance to unwind, there’s really so much else that i’d like to write about other than this.

like…. i’d like to give the ad age article, “Dove Viral Draws Heat From Critics” the “STOP SAYING THE WORD VIRAL!” award.

while i’m at it, i’d like to write about how “cool-hunting” ought to be stopped too. and not the thing where brands support emerging artists and underground communities to develop relevant, authentic consumer relationships, but that whole ridiculous concept that “cool” can exist out of context, like some kind creme to be skimmed off the top of one homogenized, pasteurized mass culture.

i’d like to write a post each for like a dozen different sound-bytes that come out of alex bogusky’s mouth during the course of these interviews: 1 + 2 (it’s like a full semester of jedi grad school in the course of an hour.) i’d like to thank john drake for turning me on the existence of these videos–thanks john!

i’d like to write alex bogusky an email asking if it’s by choice or by chance that he doesn’t have a wikipedia entry to hyperlink his name to. (altho i could maybe think of a couple of other questions i’d like to ask too.)

instead what i’m writing about now is NONE of that. i’m writing about the funniest thing i saw yesterday, which happens to have been on a party flyer:

“$15 at the door. 30 in costume. leave the playa in nevada.”

since apparel is one of the easiest mediums through which to fulfil burningman’s “radical self expression” tenet, it’s been a big deal among parties in the burningman scene to encourage attendees to dress up. for years party flyers have advertised that if you were down with costumery you’d get a discount, and if you arrived in “street clothes” you’d have to pay an exacerbated fee at the door. “playa” by the way, is the term used to refer to the dried up lake-bed in the nevada desert on which burningman is held.

the initial idea in encouraging “playa-wear,” i suppose, was about developing a certain immersive atmosphere at the events. it’s kind of like if you’re into society for creative anachronism type stuff, where you recreate medieval battles on the weekend or whatever, then it kind of kills the whole point if people don’t show up wearing period garb, wandering onto the battlefield in track suits or something. the (re)creation of that other time and place is what everyone is there for, and it only works if everyone participates in the process.

of course burningman, like any other subculture, has its own dress codes and aesthetic mores, and after a while what all those flyers were actually saying was that the admission was $15 higher if you weren’t wearing the UNIFORM rather than if you weren’t wearing a “costume.” to people that didn’t get the memo about what the burningman uniform is supposed to consist of, or for whom costumery is not really their mode of expression, the insistent empahsis on it is incredibly alienating, and to people that aren’t interested in uniforms in general (or this one in particular), it’s pretty frustrating.

the joke on this flyer is that it’s turned the whole thing around, and even come up with a brilliantly catchy slogan for the resistance.

which, of course, reminds me of something alex bogusky talked about in that interview….

(oh, if you’d watched those videos you’d know there’s no way i could just spend a whole post not talking about anything he says in there.)

so at one point he talks about this mini cooper campaign that cpb did for the car’s US launch. they bought a bunch of billboards announcing, “the suv backlash officially starts now.”

except that this was 2002, this was pre-inconvenient truth, and there WAS no SUV backlash. they needed it in order to have a way to market a small car for being exactly what it was, a small car, so they created it!

and the crazy part is that then it became real!

whether it was sheer luck, or intense prescience, or some kind of more formal consumer insight investigation, that the message worked–and by “worked” i mean, that it really DID herald the start of the SUV backlash in addition to making mini coopers sell–is because there was indeed an anti gass-guzzler movement brewing. before al gore pushed “green” over the tipping point, however, even a relatively small message like this could speak for an audience that was ready for the backlash to start.

in the interview alex mentions that advertising, and, hey, lets be real, ad agencies, have the capacity to influence pop culture through brands. or…. wait, is it brands have the capacity to influence pop culture through advertising? or is it through ad agencies? well, whichever way it is, the bottom line is that the most powerful influence comes from the capacity to articulate something that is already brewing below the surface. it’s like how quantum particles can be affected through simply being observed, so pop culture movements can be influenced by being given expression…..

wow:

“quantum marketing.” (there’s a concept).

perhaps that flyer for the party on friday will herald the start of the costume-mandate backlash? i’ve been repeating “leave the playa in nevada” to everyone since i saw it. the wait for a clever slogan officially ends now (thanks, mike).

Over the past two years The Do LaB’s Lightning in a Bottle Music & Arts Festival has become one of the most beloved, exceptional events within the West Coast’s young, active, environmentally and health conscious, creative community. Powered almost entirely by “green” alternative energy and produced as a model for sustainable large-scale live entertainment, the event is renowned as a showcase featuring some of the most acclaimed and original musical and performance acts, as well as a nexus of community and green education.

In May 2008, Lighting in a Bottle once again returns to Santa Barbara with a stellar lineup on 3 major music stages, and a slew of other attractions that include a dynamic art gallery and large-scale art installations, workshops, interactive entertainment, and much more. With the success of the previous years The Do LaB is expanding LIB08 to 4 days over Memorial Day weekend.

As influencers and leaders within the community, The Do LaB is just as committed to creating an event with the highest caliber of entertainment and ambience as we are to promoting sustainability. We fuel or offset the energy needs of the festival with solar power, bio-diesel, and wind power, and implement sustainable production practices throughout the whole event.

The Do LaB aims not only to produce an unforgettable experience, but to set an example for the creative and sustainable lifestyle. We are currently seeking to build relationships with brands and organizations that share our green vision.

for more information on the sponsorship opportunities available at LIB08 contact: dede@thedolab.com

today on the website for the san francisco green festival conference i discovered a publication called what is enlightenment magazine, published by enligntennext, which is “defining the contours of a new revolution in human consciousness and culture.” (it’s essentially not doing anything different than any punk band or public enemy-era hiphop act professed to be doing. it’s just targeting a different audience.)

my first encounter with companies targeting this demo was when we were soliciting sponsors for LIB and were approached by the “enlightenment card”:

(in case you’re wondering, yes, the card IS real, no that ad is NOT a joke, and we said “no, thank you” to the offer.)

while on the one hand, i’m trying to think of where else do sheltered caucasian people get to evangelize a brand of appropriated cultural imperialism with such tactless self-righteousness and get away with it, on the other hand, from a technical standpoint, i’m completely impressed.

this is everything i preach about identity marketing in action.

in robotics, there is a theory of the “uncanny valley“:

The hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being’s, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely-human” and “fully human” entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

maybe there is an uncanny valley in the process of identity expression as well. the more a brand or a product makes it easier for people to express their identity the more palatable it is, until maybe it hits a certain point where it becomes so blatant that its appeal suddenly drops off. however, as this brand’s identity-expressing qualities continue to become more innate and nuanced, and less overt it once again becomes appealing. maybe it could be called the uncanny “wannabe valley,” the place in brand authenticity/relevance that will likewise “fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-brand interaction.” (cuz brands are robo–i mean, people too.)

one of the explanations for the uncanny valley phenomenon is that the robots stuck in no-man’s land elicit revulsion because they look “dead,” and biologically we’re wired to have an aversion to corpses, cuz stickin around doesn’t bode so well for the immune system. (makes you wonder tho if necrophiliacs collect weird lookin robots). but when it comes to identity, the brands (and people) stuck in the uncanny wannabe valley turn us off because they’re “fake.” in a similar sort of way, biology may have led us to respond with distaste to “fake” people (and by proxy brands now) because they are untrustworthy. from a social selection standpoint, they may even be community saboteurs.

the funny thing in all of this is that there’s nothing actually WRONG with the enlightenment card except its name. if you have to have a credit card, why NOT get one that’s gonna let you earn points towards, like, trips to spas in costa rican rain forests, right?

while no doubt one person’s fake is another person’s orgasm, it just feels like confusing a lifestyle for an expression of “enlightenment,” is kinda, um, you know…. BOGUS!

you ever have that feeling that you’re living in the future? like you’re driving on these strange elevated chutes, and whether or not to have kids is now a choice, and you have no need to think about WHERE food comes from, it just generally appears at the beckoning of a shopping cart.

it’s pretty strange, all this is.

all this that you take for granted because you’ve just never known any different, but every so often something will jolt you out of this haze of taking-for-grantability. it happened to me the other day in the checkout line at bed bath and beyond. there were a couple of people in front of me, so i had time to actually notice what was going on as i waited. standing on the checkout counter, just to the left of the cashier was was a 12-inch flat plasma-screen TV, and it was playing a scene from one of those “relaxing” dvd compilations that were on sale in the impulse-buy section of the store right below the counter. it was a scene of tropical fish swimming around a reef. it was uncanny how much the 2-d fish looked like they could be real life, non-pixel based lifeforms just swimming around inside the frame of this plasma fishtank as cashiers made change, and customers sighed in line.

the thought ocurred to me: this is what the future looks like. or rather… this is what the future was going to look like. it was as if i’d experienced a vision of this moment in the past, before it happened, and was now living through its fulfillment. like…future de ja vu.

i think about that as i watch these crazy videos my friends keep shoving at me:

like:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html
or
http://www.devilducky.com/media/62817

looking backwards, from the future where every surface has become a computer, and every photo anyone has ever taken is part of wiki-map of the universe, on today’s present, it already feels like we’re living through the dark ages right now.

which, of course, raises that inevitable question as old as the concept of time itself: when the future arrives, are you going to be glad you made it through, or not so much?

i mean, for the people born then it won’t matter. they won’t know any different. like how my generation doesn’t know a concept of sex without aids being attached to it somehow. i bet the older generations pity how much worse it is for us, but since we don’t really have anything else to compare it to, it’s just all we know.

i feel like i’m already starting to pity younger generations.

like…. how for kids that were too young to be in high school when tupac was shot, they don’t really have the same understanding when you say “hip hop” to them that older generations do. and that already includes mine!

explaining to them what hiphop used to be like is like explaining how michael jackson used to be black. which is, of course, another big one all unto itself.

i think porn is probably the biggest point of lament. like what’s happened in the course of porn going from hidden and inaccessible to mainstream and expected. i remember reading a statistic somewhere that it’s like 7 out of 10 elementary school kids have already seen graphic porn on the internet when they weren’t even looking for it. whatever that must mean in terms of the kind of inescapable message that’s being passed along to kids about the expected standard for sexual behavior is kinda disheartening.

food is a huge one too. from obesity to anorexia we have more disorders around food now than ever before. either we don’t think about what we’re eating enough, or we obsessively overthink it–is this the consequence of not having to think about getting it in the first place?

and while we’re on the topic of overthinking things, there’s of course that little narcissism epidemic thing. the rise of the creative class is, of course, not doing any of us any favors here, since narcissism is a side effect of self expression, unfortunately.

there’s openmindedness, i guess. we’re definitely getting exposed to a greater assortment of lifestyles than an average person would have been able to encounter before, and it’s making us more tolerant as we come to realize that our default, may not be the universal default we thought it was. a none too shabby outcome of the world getting all smaller and way too crowded like.

but it’s interesting, you know… we’re openminded…. yet no more empathic than ever before.

i wonder how that happened…

maybe openmindedness is a “nurture” thing…. but empathy is a nature one? requiring actual genetic change vs. cultural? we “know” we shouldn’t do bad stuff to people over there, but it’s not like we are more prone to feel bad if we do. (in fact, all these horrifyingly gruesome movies about torture and mutilation oozing out of hollywood these days only seem to indicate we may be getting a greater kick out of it than ever). the real issue is that the proximity of “over there” is getting increasingly closer and closer to us, so in effect, our restraint is still just us thinking about OUR own asses.

jeez… this is making me depressed…

the only good change i can even think of is in terms of sustainability. here’s a concept that was barely even in the common dialogue just a few years ago, and now it’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue. finally, environmental consciousness has been emancipated from the hippie ball-and-chain, so now it can actually be hip for EVERYONE to care about sustainability instead of just the counterculturals.

but this one good bit of future de ja vu, isn’t enough. i’m still pretty heartbroken about the whole michael jackson becoming white thing.

and don’t get me started about hip hop.

there’s gotta me something more, right?

anyone got any bright future forecasts?