The World Domination Summit even with its ultra-modern army surplus graphics seemed really glib, superficial, and ultimately stupid, awash in a self-referential bath of social media boosterism contrived by ad men.
We're not supposed to call those new hipster agencies that help you "have a conversation about your brand" or "connect with your conmunity" or do some other vague thing actually about marketing, but they are indeed ad men.
I like CC Chapman, he seems a pleasant and interesting guy and I always click "like" on whatever brand or project he is hustling just because it's sort of interesting. I have less respect for Chris Brogan, who I see as more overtly political and manipulative.
But even with CCC, I remember an unpleasant moment I had at the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago several years ago. I looked up, and suddenly saw CC and his sidekick, whose name I'm forgetting now, sitting in the lobby by the piano.
It was because I realized he was there not because he was an SL true believer, but because he had believed, at least, until maybe that very meeting, that that the SL user base was an audience that was the Next Big Thing in social media marketing and all the big brands had flocked to it for a time.
And it wasn't even that that bothered me, because that was perfectly legitimate work, perfectly normal activity trying to chase around the fickle public and the companies through the social media storm to make a consulting living. It's all good.
It was that suddenly, I realized that this series of gonzo journalism episodes that had appeared in the Aphaville Herald, and also a cartoon of a rolicking good times of this wierdo dude who partied and doped and womanized his way through all these SL virtual adventures, may have been in fact merely a dressed-up marketing exercise. It may have even been paid for -- Pixeleen and Uri may have taken ad money for this, or may have simply cooperated in giving CC and co visibility and a stage to do their thing. SL isn't real but it has a certain versimilitude, if you will, to real life. But the smack-talk articles and gonzo adventure thing, I suddenly realized, were likely fake. And I felt highly manipulated, for not realizing that right away.
There was a whole running series of stuff like this -- Uri's call-out of other ad agencies as "fucktards" for not getting it -- involving Crayon, which was the name of the agency CC was in at the time. The Crayonistas were the good guys for "getting it" -- others were retarded for not. Uri was craven although he turned critical as the Crayonistas had their last gasp and were no more. I don't know what to believe. But CC and a bunch of other people like Neville Hobson left the Crayon thing and now I don't even know if it exists.
Chris Brogan I followed through his medicine show for Coke (or was it Pepsi) at SXSW, including his meeting with Gov. Perry and photo opp with him, which I'm sure he'd prefer to forget now.
In any event, the WDS isn't about the sort of world domination that Mitch Kapor plans while seemingly merely sponsoring open source projects. It's more banal and anodyne but therefore, perhaps may spread more.
It's about getting a whole bunch of mainly white people, although there are a fair share of black, Indian, and other minority speakers to make it look like a rainbow coalition, and having talks about things like "vulnerability" or "empowerment". Then they all go off to posture in their cut-offs and boots and hard-hats building a Habitat for Humanity house for...a day.
The most sick-making feature of the jamboree this year was that the organizer, another PR guy named Chris Guillebeau, author of a book on $100 start-ups or something, gave everyone $100, apparently out of a gift he had received from a donor. So while they had paid some fee to come and had expenses to come, they got this $100 for a "$100 start-up" and were supposed to "go out and make a better world" or such. Like an app. Or something.
Jonathan Feldman was right to wonder if he was going into a "multi-level marketing morass of mumbo-jumbo." That is indeed what it is. A marketing ploy where the attendees are the product. It's the self-help camp show, where people pay money to hear motivational speakers who make their living...giving motivational talks to people who buy their books...telling others how they can make a business...that might involve giving motivational talks to others... It's terribly recursive...
Usually some "real guy" is thrown in who has climbed Everest or -- in this case -- couch-surfed around the world without paying rent or hotel fees LOL. Achievements!
It's all part of celebrating the sort of wired hipster world for which Portlandia is known -- the satire of the hippie/yuppie town Portland, Oregon.
Unfortunately, Feldman didn't get it because then he started writing this sort of nonsense:
I can also already tell that there will be learnings to be had about digital lifestyle. For example, one attendee tells how she runs two companies and raises three children by being a digital entrepreneur. At large enterprises, we like to think that we can lure the best and brightest. But can we? Only the other day, a woman at a large consumer products company was telling me how they don't allow people to work from home until they've worked for the company for at least a year. "You've got to earn the privilege," she said. Translation: "We assume that you're stupid and lazy until proven otherwise, and we judge people by the hours that your butt is in the seat instead of your productivity.
After I got done barfing over that awful term "learnings" which arch edu-punks began to use in SL and now it's everywhere, I had to wonder why a new hire completely untested in a company should be allowed to work at home, or why a normal business would have to be guilt-tripped into thinking that they were doing something wrong in waiting a year on that.
I'd love to learn what these two companies produce and Where's Dad and if he is really the one bringing home the bacon. Is this a company to overganize meetings to give motivational talks about how you can make a company to organize meetings to give motivational talks? Or is it just consulting with scared businesses that are afraid of Facebook and Twitter and what people might be saying about them on those slam-books?
Chris G. basically hopes to sell his book, his consulting services, and to "network" -- and help others to do the same because they make an audience for such books and services as a generic ecosystem. The list of writings about this content-free ecstatic social media experience will give you the idea -- but here's one summary that says it all -- it's a bunch of Norman Vincent Peale or Tony Robbins mantras dressed up for our cyber age that basically just say "do whatever you feel like doing and don't be guilty about it. There's no real self-sacrifice or kenosis or giving of the self or any sort of spiritual discipline as there would be in a real religion. There's no sense of God or a higher power or even another human being as in "I and Thou" -- it's more about feel-goods for the entitlement generation to help remove any traces of guilt they may still be feeling for not really doing a lot but whine.
As Chris Brogan, um, sagely told us, we must "embrace the persona of our inner superhero when putting ourselves out there."
What happened to "making a better world"? Oh, scrap that, I hate it when you guys go about makign a better world, it always involves coercion and taking away our freedoms in the end...
It reminds me of the way Marshall McLuhan used to say that the daily newspaper was like a warm bath for people. Now social media is an even warmer bath.
And it reminds me of what I read somewhere and can't attribute now, to the effect that people in the modern age are so unspiritual and so unused to religion and religious experience and a sense of the beyond and of the other world, that even a superficial reading of Carlos Castanada or some other pop spirituality book can give them an intense experience. Just being with other affluent wired white kids sprinkled with multi-culti kids or aging hipsters in a big field outdoors like a rock concert can be a rejuvenating and refreshing experience that gives their tiny lives meaning.
It's sad how much of this content-free stuff is around in the recession, but people have to live...
These pseudo-events concocted by ad men are the natural outgrowth of the social media consumer ethos and the "false consciousness" of the "concerned" movement, if you will, to turn a Marxist phrase in on itself -- concern about the environment, the third world, poor people, the planet, global warning, wars -- that converts into things like drinking bottled water that causes more impact to the earth than if you just turned on the tap, or involves buying expensive fairly-traded organic coffee or wearing shoes with the toes articulated and riding bicycles -- as if this was related to anything anywhere else on "the planet".
The theme of "vulnerability" is just one of those curious psycho fads -- the coolest people ever to be produced by civilization with the best teeth, education, and personally portable entertainment systems in the history of mankind are urged to be "less cool".
The story of Scott Harrison is one that inspires this me-generation:
He went from drinking, drugging, womanizing, and spending to serving, feeling, growing, and connecting. He went from club promoter to charity founder. He went from morally broke to founding one of the most inspirational and innovative charities known to man: Charity:Water.
Basically, what this over-hyped charity is about is taking all sorts of wired do-gooders on the Internet and trying to give them "something to do" by fashioning "stories" about "water projects" that will make them feel good. But most of the work is performed by their partner, Pump Aid, which itself grew up as a solution to the problem of all these much larger charities like Oxfam or Save the Children going through countries and putting in wells and water supplies, only to have the pumps break and yet not be able to go around and police just that issue -- either they were too preoccupied with other urgent issues, or they were even kicked out of countries. Pump Aid just chose this one service of making sure water pumps got spare parts and repairs and worked instead of sitting there as a emblem of first-world caring shortfalls.
This is all good but the reality of these countries is that they don't need endless charity, they need governance to change their kleptocratic or dysfunctional or even murderous regimes.
Malawi, for example, doesn't need just to keep getting hipster water projects, it needs a more free press and less corrupt government.
70% of the hospital beds are filled with AIDS patients not because the Catholic Church is somehow to blame -- only a small percentage of Africans are Catholics and don't listen to the Pope anyway about extramarital sex.
No, it's more about the refusal of men to take responsibility for their promiscuity and wear condoms-- which many do-gooders are happy to supply, especially now that the Obama Administration lifed the ban the Bush Administration had on supporting birth control in aid programs abroad. It's also about the usual problem of failing to educate girls, make conditions for girl's education, which can mean simple things like supplying water and sanitary napkins and security from rape on the long commute to school.
But Charity:Kotex would probably be a lot less popular or cool than Charity:Water.
Here's my more modest suggestion for "world domination":
1. Give your $100 to Doctors Without Borders, a reputable charitable group with low overhead that knows what they're doing and knows how to sort out the reality from the fraud in a place like Malawai.
2. Stay home and take care of your own family or neighbours or people in your city instead of the more self-aggrandizing feat of helping people overseas and building homes for people the government already provides shelter for if they have to.
3. Look around your own community to work on especially after-school programs and mentoring and "big brother" sort of work to try to save the teenagers from wreckage.
4. Stop travelling to ecstatic road shows to inflate your sagging Internet experiences and spending money on green tea, organic probiotic yoghurt and fairly-traded coffee and save it for something you really would gain advantage with -- foreign travel, a down payment on a house, the financing of a serious project.
This is not glamorous, but it will do. Stop being a product of ad men!
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