Thursday, May 24, 2012

___________________ are dead.

Yesterday a friend from another agency passed along a resignation note to me. The note contained these pearls of "wisdom."


Mostly the usual bushwa, or folderol, or out and out nonsense.

That, you know, ideas are dead.

That it's all about the fucking experience.

Blow it out your unshaven hipster sphincter.

What shocks me about this is how removed it all is from the reality of the world we live in. Virtually everything we come into contact with in the world works or fails according to the idea it is founded upon.

Many of us gravitated toward Obama because of the way he coalesced the idea of "change." We adore Apple because they have cornered the market on thinking "different." Many move to Brooklyn because its resurgence has been anchored to the idea of "cool."

Undoubtedly many ideas fall flat. Many commercials blow. Most ads are hardly suited to wrap fish in.
However in an increasingly noisy world, a world full of distractions and warring pixels, it's only natural and normal for humans to try to filter and organize the mayhem. We do this based on the ideas brands present. The ideas that make things stand for something in our lives.

All these pseudo-pundits who seem to be endlessly proclaiming that ideas are dead forget that that in and of itself is an idea. Though a stupid one.

What they really are is patricides. Most of these experiences they trumpet are made possible because of the necessary preconditions established by a foundational idea. They are killing, or trying to, the father who birthed them.

As Faulkner spat in his "Requiem for a Nun," "The past isn't dead; it's not even past."

1 comment:

Tore Claesson said...

a brilliant line:
"However in an increasingly noisy world, a world full of distractions and warring pixels, it's only natural and normal for humans to try to filter and organize the mayhem. We do this based on the ideas brands present. The ideas that make things stand for something in our lives."