A Rite of Passage.

One of the meanest effects of working under an ageist regime while at an ad agency isn't people calling you "grandpa." It's the people who run the agency who think that because you're old, you've run out of ambition.

They think you've run out of ambition.

When ambition--chasing dreams, challenging yourself, doing something new, better, different is what makes us alive and human.

If an institution thinks you've run out of ambition, they think you're dead. 

Likewise, if they think you can't keep up, or aren't somehow cool, that's they're way of regarding you as dead. When you regard someone as dead, it's easier to pass them over for big assignments, give them the grunt work, and make sure they never get a raise. 

Why should they? 

You've run out of ambition. (And you don't know the latest music, as if that were the sine qua non of advertising.)

Lately, in about the past two weeks, I've had half-a-dozen calls from people who after 15 years, or 25 years, or 35 years in the business, have run out of rope. 

They've been shit-canned. They're scared. They might not know me, but because of my seeming after-life success, they feel they can talk to me. Talking to them is my obligation, if not privilege. Talking to younger people has always been the biological imperative--a reason for being--of older people.

Here's what I've learned from these many conversations. Grab a pencil.

Most people think "Rites of Passage," leaving one period of youth, like hanging with your friends to dating, or leaving high school for college, or getting a proper office job, or getting married or starting a family, is a young person's game. 

Getting your haircut by yourself, or going to the movies alone--those of Rites of Passage. Most people think you're done-finished with them at 23 or something.

Let me tell you something, 67-year-olds go through Rites of Passage too.

And they're just as challenging as the first time you called a pretty girl on the telephone and asked her to the movies.

Rites of Passage are also an old person's game.

When after 40 years of being given assignments, you have to get an assignment--that's a Rite of Passage.

When you have to look at the prevailing industry dayrate and tell your prospective client you're asking for twice that, or three times--that's a Rite of Passage.

When you get that twice or three-times--that's a Rite of Passage.

The first time a client tries to stiff you--that's a Rite of Passage.

When you work alone and realize you've gone four days without laughing with a friend--that's a Rite of Passage.

When you win a major award on work you've done completely on your own--from getting the client, to selling the work, to producing it, to entering the award show--that's a Rite of Passage.

The reality is, if you've not 'hung up your cleats,' if you keep growing and learning and striving, Rites of Passage are to your right, your left, your front, your back. They're everywhere, every day.

But the biggest Rite of Passage is one of self-definition. 

So much of our careers, we're defined by the agency we work at. I liked being regarded as "the youngest Creative Group Head in the history of Ally & Gargano." Or "the oldest creative fuckface at R\GA." Or, simply, "the head of copy at the world's greatest copy-driven agency, Ogilvy."

Those extrinsic definitions are gone when you leave those places.

Now what?
Who are you?
What makes you want-able?
What do you do?
What makes you special?

Why should someone pick you?
Not someone cooler, younger, better looking?
Cheaper?

That's a Rite of Passage.

Answering those questions and a thousand more is where the people who call me often start to cry. 

Yes--that's a Rite of Passage.

You decide what's right--that's a Rite of Passage.

Wriggling. Wriggling. Wriggling.

I suppose it's as human as farting.

As a species, we find ways to focus on everything but what's important.

Agencies announce, seemingly weekly, their triumph as Network of the Year, seldom paying attention to the fact that they lose 20-percent of their revenue and 30-percent of their people annually. As Yogi Berra is said to have said, "sure we're lost. But we're making good time." 

That might be a good epigram for our species.

The religious wars that have destroyed the world many times over and wiped out hundreds of millions of people, were usually about some peculiarity of interpretation of some obscure point of debate. The nature of the Trinity. They were rarely about doing unto others. 

The examples are countless. And they continue to accumulate. Like snowflakes in Frost's woods. Or lies from Washington.

Paul Fussell in "The Great War and Modern Memory," widely regarded as one of the greatest histories ever written, wrote about such "ironies."

In advertising, individually and as an industry, we grasp at every new new thing. A new director. A new Adobe tool. A new AI protocol. A new way of slicing data. New generation. New "cultural" signpost, aka, fad.

We are so headlong in the pursuit of the new that we ignore the always been.

One of the most intelligent columns in any journal that's still standing, is the "Bartleby" column in "The Economist." There is usually more vim in a single Bartleby column than there are in a trillion Seth Godin blatherings. Not to mention a LinkedIn post from a holding company impotentate.

What's more the name of the column, after Melville's Scrivener--and perhaps history's first 'quiet quitter,' is so adroit it almost makes me angry. Oh well. As Melville wrote in Chapter 86, 'The Tail', of "Moby Dick," "In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority." As a species and as a tribute to Melville, we wriggle away from consistency.

This week's Bartleby column is about repetition. And how we ignore it to our own detriment. 

We certainly ignore repetition in advertising. Where we change campaigns way too often. As often as clients change agencies or agencies change teams. Or agencies replace C-suites.

As creatives and as an industry, we make the colossal mistake in believing something registers just because you said it once. Anyone who's ever been in a relationship with someone else knows that that idea is as stupid as a musk. As the old Henny Youngman joke goes, "I have to say everything to my wife three times. She ignores two-thirds of everything I say." 

What's extra dumb is that in response to the demise of the three network era when repetition ruled the airwaves (Two, two, two mints in one) rather than redoubling our single-mindedness as media became schizoid, we became schizoid along with it. You can't out fractal a fractal. You can only out-focus it.

The Economist writes:

In communications--in advertising--we've prioritized new (not news) over consistency. I think of a probably apocryphal story I attributed to Ted Bates of the old Ted Bates agency. He's showing a client around the agency and the client says, "We haven't changed our campaign in ten years. What do all these people do? Bates replied, "They keep you from changing it."

A Stanford University study (for those of you who still believe in facts) reports:

Much of my business comes to me because I have the temerity to ask clients "what do you do/make/sell? How is it different? What's your 'Ultimate Driving Machine.'?"

Realizing they can't answer me, they usually write me a check.

Luckily, I usually get repeat business.

Speaking of repetition, let me end with another Henny Youngman one-liner: Everytime I ask what time it is,
I get a different answer.

Downed. But Not Out.

Sometimes, I'll be candid, working essentially by yourself sucks.

You're out on a limb.

You have to find two new pieces of business a month.

You have to create the proposals.

Sell them.

Then do the work.

And sell it.

Then do it all again.

Then hope to be Net45'd.

Often you feel like you're arrayed against colossal forces that have the might and power to crush you like you're a nothing, which of course, you are. 

What's more, the big guys are big. They have the power to control, to a fair degree, prices and deliverables. So you have to, in a sense, get in line. 

You have to follow their rules.

Just now, I read the obituary of the last RAF fighter who defeated the Nazis in the Battle of Britain. "Paddy" Hemingway died earlier this week in Dublin at the age of 105. You can read the obituary here.

I can't help but think he didn't follow the rules of the game.

Churchill said of this band of flying brothers “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” 

If you need convincing, here's some data. 

Just 749 RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes faced off against 2,550 German fighters and bombers. Data is numbers. Numbers don't know how account for soul.

Further, most of those Germans had had more practice. They had flown scores of combat missions in eastern Europe, Poland and during the war in Spain.

Actually reading Hemingway's obituary is astounding. He was downed four different times by the Germans. One time he described it this way. It almost sounds nonchalant. 

“Somebody clobbered me. They hit me in the engine. It covered the inside of the cockpit with oil, and things got very smelly and hot. I had no hope of getting to England, so I bailed out and landed in the sea.

"There were jellyfish everywhere, I started swimming. Two hours later, a rowboat from a lightship bumped into me.”

Hemingway grabbed an oar and helped row the small boat back to Blighty.

I find hope in obituaries and stories like Hemingway's. Today when almost everyday the little guy is being kicked in the arse by gigantic forces, people like Hemingway show that fighting back, and yes, winning is not an impossibility.

Hemingway, as you'd expect, sums things up well.

“Being the last of the Battle of Britain veterans has made me think of those times. Fate was not democratic. New pilots with just a few hours in Hurricanes did not have the instincts of us more experienced pilots and were very vulnerable in combat. Many did not last long.”

No, fate is not democratic.

Actually very little is.

If there's a lesson in all this, it's about survival. 

It's best told, of course, in by Hemingway.

“I am here because I had some staggering luck and fought alongside great pilots in magnificent aircraft with ground crew in the best air force in the world at that time. It was just a matter of taking each day at a time. Others write the history — we were doing our job.”

That's it.

In five words.

We were doing our job.

That's what you do. You ignore the odds. And buckle down.

Priest. And Desist.

Because I read widely and voraciously, and without supervision, or even people to discuss things with, I probably arrive at a lot of stupid conclusions. A result of my limited knowledge, limited intelligence and leaps of logic. That's ok. Sometimes the best starts are false starts. And at least I'm not merely parroting things I've heard some talking head somewhere say.

Lately I've been thinking about language and literacy. I'm thinking about it because in the era of AI, or Quantum, or whatever we want to call it next, the only people the potentates of government and industry will consider literate, or intelligent, are those who can read, write and think in AI.

I suppose we used to say that about HTML. Or English. Or before that, Latin or Greek, Mandarin or Aramaic.

From a long-history point of view, humankind, from our earliest permanent settlements about 12,000 years ago, has always had a priestly caste.

These are people, usually, who can see things, read things, understand things, decipher things that ordinary people can't. Again, 12,000 years ago, they might have been able to tell the populace what a red star in the skies meant, or a two-headed fish, or a white raven. These things were signs that resonated and had to be explained. Often they were used as metaphors for larger predictions. Like the Roman emperors who saw a cross in the sky and quickly said, "In Hoc Signo Vinces." 

In this sign, we will conquer.

We've always had people who could compel us to believe in the power of what they could see and we couldn't. When I was a little boy, Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ's Secretary of Defense, was able to look at rows of numbers and convince us that we were winning in Vietnam.

The priestly caste is alive and well. 

Today, many of them live in Silicon Valley, have private jets and islands and are helping ru(i)n the country. Their names are Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Cook.

They're priests.

They have the ear of the gods (technology) and can propitiate the gods--that is, placate them, because they have access to the gods that those of us not in the priestly caste don't.

From their digital pulpits they give their Sermons on the Mount. Their views that they in their enlightenment have and you in your darkness are too dumb to see.

The world has always been led by Priestly classes who have and keep power because they can read languages the rest of us can't. In most of Europe until the Reformation, or the King James Bible, or the Enlightenment, the word of god, the preaching of god was only available to the masses (that's you and me) through priests as conduits. The Christian Bible was written in Latin. And only priests and a few learned people could read Latin. That extra knowledge is how priests stay in power.  The minute knowledge becomes "democratized" they change what knowledge is important.

It's how the priests and the elite stay above the people. Like a banker at Goldman Sachs or a wily baseball coach. They know what moves to make because they see things we can't.

Right now, AI is the language of the gods. It's the language that will reveal the future and make it.

We know this because the people who invented AI tell us this about ten-thousand times a day. In advertising, data is the language of the gods. The few people and agencies who can read the future in the entrails of binary code will win the big pieces of business and become the head of a holding company.

But...Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or Quis custodiet ipsos datades? Who will guard the data?

False gods, prophets, leaders always have and always will be with us. The tablets from on high, Mao's Red Book, the Ten Commandments, the Tweets of rump, will be as off as often as they're on.

The uniforms change. The teams really don't.

A lot of people ask me about AI. I was involved in it early on, participating heavily in the launch of IBM Watson. I derive most of my not inconsiderable income from companies selling or using AI. Since those heady IBM/Ogilvy days when it looked like conquering cancer, cleaning air, stopping crime etc etc were just around the corner, new and smarter AIs have been introduced by new and smarter priests. Deep Seek. ("That's not funny, it's seek.")

We're told how great it's all going to be, usually accompanied by a warning that AI could displace us and in some metaphorical way "eat our heads."

When people tell me this, how X will improve Y, how AI will make customer service better and AI-enabled chatbots will ease getting my cable-bill reduced and streamline everything I do (the same sort of things advertising people say about data) I usually get a glassy look on my face. Like Phyllis Diller about twelve-minutes after rigor-mortis takes hold.

Why haven't I seen it, I ask.
Why does everything suck?
Why, never in my life, have I never gotten the right message at the right time right how I want it?

If it's all so splendid, where the fuck is it.

Then I ask the priests, where's the EZ-Pass effect from AI? When EZ-Pass took hold, I kept no more change in my car's ash-tray, no more waiting at toll-booths, no more delays. It made things faster in reality, not just in promise.

Priests, if you're out there, where's mine?

I hear about seamless experiences.
I hear about my needs being anticipated and met before I realize I have a need.
I hear about a veritable heaven on earth.

You get that inside information and have told me so.

Just like Armageddon, or the Elysian Fields, or Valhalla, or tip-toeing through the tulips. It's all gonna be great--any day now.

This is not to say that all priests are false prophets or that no good has come from AI and other advanced technologies. In fact we need advanced tech to help us overcome the problems of advanced tech. And some people, I suppose, spread truth, light and joy--though I suppose all prophets are false prophets to someone. As Jagger pointed out, Every cop is a criminal/And all the sinners saints. Most things good/bad/peanut butter/jelly are open to interpretation.

But look before you leap and leap before you look.

Clip 'n Save (yourself).

Darkness at Noon.

Many people, especially people of my generation or older (if there are any) are familiar with the phrase "The Dark Ages." 

The Dark Ages were a historical notion that after the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, about 670 AD, things got bleak(er) on earth. That science, art, love, curiosity, discovery, even laughter disappeared on earth and people went around essentially rooting for grubs and twigs to eat. The Dark Ages were said to have lasted for six or seven or eight hundred years, until the Black Death passed and the first green-shoots of the Renaissance took root.

That's pretty heavy for a blog on advertising. 

There are many today during our sad crypto-authoritarian era who are quick to say we are facing the prospect of a new Dark Age.

There are times, in my darker moments (which are not inconsiderable) when I entertain that tranche of thinking. Frankly, when information is "banned" and language is eliminated and truths go unspoken, it's hard not to fall prey to such a line of thinking.

But.

But.

But.

While historically, people of my generation grew up with the idea of the Dark Ages (when life, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, was "nasty, brutish and short") most historians today decry the notion of darkness.

Or, put another way, as a species the lights didn't simply turn off. Things didn't all-of-a-sudden get dark. There were lights. There always are. Even in the darkness, there was laughter, science, joy and art. Love.

It's easy today, both in the world and in our advertising, to see only Darkness. 

But it's wrong. And I've been wrong. 

It's too easy to be as I have too often been: negative and cynical.

It's important during the Bleak to find the shafts of light, the peals of laughter, the tentative touch of love, and signs of ever-lasting hope and life. It's important to, yes, point out the bad, but it's equally important--maybe more important--to celebrate the good. The fighters, the creators, the designers, the writers, the whimsy-ers, the non-compliant, the insouciant and celebrate those who make a difference, who fight back, who say, in Latin (my preferred language) or English or German, Etiam Si Omnes Ego Non. Even if all others, Not I. Ich Nicht. Not I.

I will be doing that more in this space.

Celebrating the good, not decrying the bad.

Help me.

Send me things that give us hope. That push back. That say, as Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech in 1949, that man(kind) will not only endure, we will prevail.

We need to do this.
We need to smile.
We need to point out the roses through concrete,
the force that through green fuse drives the flower.

Together we can do more than not go gentle into that good night.

We can make more good days.

Let's not despair.

Let's get to work.

Eighty-Four Days. A Parable.

Many years ago, my elder daughter Sarah was invited to swim in the Maccabi Games in Israel. The Maccabi Games, for the uninitiated (and likely the uncircumcised) could colloquially be called "The Jewish Olympics." 

Jews from more than seventy countries meet and compete in scores of sports--from track and field, to swimming, to basketball, volleyball, baseball. The quality of competition is not, I'll concede, Olympian, but still it's an honor to be invited to play and a thrill to see. 

And for a people whose physicality and strength is often derided, the Maccabi are a testament--a thumb in the eye of ancient and virulent prejudice, a naysaying of the notion that the People of the Book can't be the people of the ballpark, or the swimming pool, or the pinochle table.

My wife and I flew to Tel Aviv near where my daughter's team was being housed. Before we were to see her swim, we went to visit she and her team mates at their run-down hotel.

When we got there, there were hundreds of kids cavorting about. These are kids enjoying the full-flower of their physicality. They're strong, they're fit, they're attractive and they all know it. As they should.

I saw my daughter sitting in a chair with a boy sitting on her lap. Not something I would have shown my parents when I was young. But ok. O tempore, O mores as Cicero bemoaned.

Finally, the young lap-bound man got up and introduced himself. He was slim and about 5'5", not much bigger than my daughter. I sternly looked him up him down--like New Yorker's do before we decide to push back on someone. You want to make sure he has no weapons and can't obviously beat the shit out of you.

"What do you do?" I Tourquemada'd.

"I wrestle at Northwestern. I'm wrestling here at 126." He polited.

I paused. I glared. I flared. 

"I'll kick you ass," I said.

Now it was his turn to look me up and down, to size me up. 

"You probably could," he assessed. "You have old man strength."

I had never heard that phrase, "Old Man Strength" before. 

I liked it, and I saved it.

Months later when two young men from a carpet cleaning place were in my home to pick up a carpet so it could be revivified, they struggled rolling it up. Impatient, I brushed them away and did it myself. It was a 9'x12' and I might have carried it to their panel truck like it was a passed-out damsel and I was a firefighter.

My wife asked, simply, "how."

"Old man strength," I said, like the Oracle of Delphi. I don't need to explain.

That was more than two-decades ago and I've been thinking about Old Man Strength since then. And about the unfairness of the term. It has nothing to do with being a man. And maybe nothing to do with being old.

Old Man Strength (since I work in advertising, hereafter referred to as OMS) is really just strength. It is has nothing to do with John Henry, born with a hammer in his hands, or even, as above, Tennessee Ernie Ford who was "born one morning when the sun didn't shine.[who] ..."picked up my shovel and walked to the mine. I loaded 16 tons of number nine coal and the straw boss said, 'well bless my soul.'"

OMS is strength.
Born from failure.
Born from no safety net.
Born of loss.
And more loss.
Born from bruises and scrapes and broken bones.
Born from tears and sweat and pain that pulsates and attacks.
Born of fear.
Born of every hardship but paralysis.

OMS is strength.
The strength of coming back.
The strength of trying again.
The strength of being knocked down and getting back up.
The strength of deciding to win when it's easier to lose.
The strength of standing when they say sit.

I am an old man now. I'm 67. Which feels older for me because my best friend died at 62 and my father died at just 73. 

Like Hemingway's Old Man, Santiago, I know what it means to go eighty-four days without a fish. I know well the flag of permanent defeat.

If you don't know what eighty-four days means, you don't have OMS.

I know there are tech trillionaires who pay no tax who say things like "young people are just smarter." It's true. They are. I no longer can read instructions and I haven't the patience to learn how to use our new LG washer-dryer, my television's remote or the My Charts app for my impending double-cataract surgery. When I have to sign up as a vendor for yet another new client I fairly feel like hurling my computer into the nearby sea.

I don't understand Megan Thee Stallion, Tik Tok, or Matcha. 

But I've gone eighty-four days without a fish eighty-four times times eighty-four times times eighty-four times.

That's taught me.

OMS.

Quiet, Please.

About twenty years ago, I shot a package of spots with the great director Errol Morris.

I wrote the spots by myself--I was working solo, like I have through so much of my career. My agency assigned me an art director for the shoot because naturally on a shoot you have to have an art director.

Working with Errol, I quickly noticed something about how he worked. Often he found his shot by shooting. By trying something and adjusting and improving.

That might be a nice way of saying Errol's first shot of a scene usually sucked.

My art director didn't notice what I noticed. In fact, the moment a shot was shot he was usually up in Errol's grill saying what he didn't like. After three or four instances of this, Errol yelled as loud as anyone I ever heard. In front of everyone, he excoriated my art partner. He was essentially castrated for the rest of our week of shooting.

It's hard to return from that. I've seen it a lot on shoots.

What I learned from that is something I wish more people realized. When they're looking at work, when they're being presented to, when they're talking to someone.

There's a river in Turkey called the Menderes. It's where we get our word meander. Meander is the name of this famous architectural feature that you'll see a lot of if you're looking. Especially in an older city. 

You'll even find it on the coffee cups from old Greek diners. If you can find an old Greek or a diner. Or something not Starbucks.

Most people meander their ways to a point. Probably like I did on this post. It's respectful, kind, to give people some time. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But that's not always the most human distance.

To that end, some years ago when I still worked at an agency, I realized that no one knew how to write or record radio. I was asked to help the 87% of the creatives and account people who were under 27 years of age. So, I wrote the presentation below to help them. Rather than bemoan I be-wrote.

It's all about giving people time to succeed. And not jumping down anyone's throat. And maybe holding some hands along the way.

Un-Complicationizationability.

I read something just now in The Wall Street Journal which was as "zaggy" as BBH's Black Sheep for Levi's. 

It's why I read the Journal, in fact. Despite their oligarchic proclivities--as often as not, the Journal gives you a point of view that you don't find anywhere else. 

I read one of those just now--from a WSJ newsletter I read called "WSJ Pro Sustainable Business reports." In it, I read about Yishan Wong, the former CEO of Reddit, director of engineering at Facebook and the founder of a reforestation company called Terraformation.

In trying to combat the fact of catastrophic climate change, many companies are turning to tech. Tech is where we usually turn when we have a problem. But Yong is looking at our climate problem differently.

He points out, "Silicon Valley is great at marketing, and they make it sound like new tech is awesome, but really no one hates technology more than a technologist because in the lab when it is half formed it breaks all the time. So you want a very low-tech, reliable solution,” he said.

My goodness. 

Substitute Madison Avenue for Silicon Valley, I thunk to myself, and you might have yourself a blog post.

Wong continues, "I’ve worked on a lot of large-scale tech and there’s this subtle rule you learn: To solve a big problem, you want as little tech as possible. When it comes to fixing the climate, you want to keep it simple."

In other words, Wong recommends not some Quantum-derived, AI-powered pixelized miracle. He wants to defeat climate change by planting, around the world, one-trillion trees.

Again, a simple, easy-to-understand solution to a complex problem.

To my cataracted-eyes, it seems that many in the advertising business follow those leaders in the tech industry. 

Every problem must have a technology solution.

Every problem must have a technology solution.

The more dire the problem, the more wired the solution.

So, if people stop looking at your ads, buy another data company. Find another way to infiltrate messaging into a viewer's neural network, use sonic technology and algorithms that find the optimal language to break through to viewers who no longer look up. Primarily because our industry has spend 75 years boring the dirndls off of people.

I suppose from a shareholder-value POV, it's a lot easier to rationalize the purchase of another data company, or tracking company, or something company than it is to assert something like "people like to laugh. So, we're recommending doing funny ads that people like to watch." Or telling people something they don't already know. Or expressing genuine empathy. Or giving people useful information that helps their lives. Or saying what it is you sell and why it's different. Or apologizing when you screw up.

There's nothing high-tech about those actions that will bump the stock-price. And, after all, we know every problem must have a technology solution. It just must. 

Tech solutions return on investment. Kindness, treating people with respect and as if they're important, doesn't. Worse, they're old-fashion and tech might win you an award.

Planting trees to combat climate change is about as low tech as it gets. My guess is that 12,000 years ago turning the dawn of agriculture people often planted a tree if they cut one down. It's as logical as a Clovis point.

But, still, tech is so much sexier.

So much more attracting-investor-y.

So much more "let's go to Davos and create three-d models about the future."

Same as in advertising.

Using data is so much more au courant than using your heart and your brain.

Why do something that works--that's always worked--when you can do something ornate and press-release-y?

By the way, Terraformation marked its fifth anniversary as a company. It has just launched a new project in the Congo Basin, Cameroon, with plans to restore almost 20,000 football-fields of degraded rainforest, removing more than 4 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. 

That's equivalent to NOT burning 4 billion tons of coal, to not using half a billion gallons of gasoline, to not heating 500,000 homes, or not charging 340-billion cellphones.

It's not enough to stop what humankind started. We need more.

Just as one funny spot won't get people to watch TV again and pay some attention to commercials. We need more.

But it's something.

Bought by Private Equity. (A Short Story.)

I was doing fine, really.

Almost four years early, my wife and I had paid off our mortgage on our three-bedroom co-op on Manhattan's Upper East Side, a neighborhood fairly impervious to real-estate downturns. We'd bought the place in the late 90s. By now it had at least quadrupled in value.

My business, which I started because there was nowhere in the ad industry that would (or could) hire me for what I consider a living wage, was doing well. My yearly revenue was slightly lower than 2023 but slightly higher than 2024. And I was getting calls from potential clients, averaging about one a week.

Most important, my kids were ok. They had each bought condos in their respective cities and each were well on their way in good careers. They were healthy, happy and making their way in a tough world.

When a certain Sally Hedgerow, a senior partner at the private equity firm of Wendelstadt, Ersatz and Kaliper called me, I probably should have ignored it. But she didn't exactly tiptoe in on little cat's feet.

"George," she blustered, "we want to buy you."

"B-b-b-buy me," I stammered. "I didn't realize I was for sale."

"Everyone's for sale, Georgie-boy," she galloped. "Everyone and everything and everywhere, every day. It's all just a matter of terms. It's all just a matter of you seeing things our way."

"What is your way?" I'll admit, she had set me back on my heels. What's more, there are times when running my own agency makes me more than a little lugubrious. It's non-stop, it's demanding, and you usually have to survive Net120 payments. Sally caught me unawares and in a moment of weakness.

"We want to buy you," Sally plowed. "We've looked at the public records, sequestered your bank accounts. We watched you from the bungalow across the street from your beach-side cottage. We social-listened to your social feeds. We AI'd your pupick up the wazoo. We even talked to the conductor on the Amtrak you took into Penn Station last week--business class--we want to buy you."

"Go on," I said. I have to admit, I was more than a little bit intrigued.

And then, as fast as a fart, she called up on her phone a long single-spaced contract full of dense legalese. She scrolled for about twenty seconds--it had to be comprised of at least 8000 words--until she got to a yellow sticky-shaped arrow that said assertively "Signature." As thoughtful as a kid at a carnival shooting-gallery, I signed with the tip of my index finger. 

All at once I was 75-percent owned by Wendelstadt, Ersatz and Kaliper.

"We're investing $15 million into you," Sally said, to upgrade your technology, data and AI capabilities. We're installing now, as we speak, a set of Quantum-enabled tools and pinpoint targeting so you can more accurately target pinpoints."

"$15 million," I said disbelieving.

"Well, that's not actual money," she eye-batted. "That's debt. You'll have buy that back through your cash-flow, from you clients."

"My cash-flow is good," I answered, "but not quite $15 million good."

I'd never actually seen someone "pshaw" before but Sally Hedgerow of Wendelstadt, Ersatz and Kaliper did.

"We'll fix that," she confidented. "Let's start when you wake up in the morning. You have one of those fancy Oral-B electric toothbrushes."

"It's recommended by the Wirecutter," I defended.

"You brush for two full-minutes," she calculated. "You can decrease that by a full 25-percent, to 90-seconds, and see only a marginal 12-percent increase in dental anomalies like cavities and endodontic issues. The rise over run is a lot of rise for a little run.

"Then there's your blog. You're giving it away free," she said. "You have to start charging."

"But I get 90,000 readers a week and business from the damn thing," I said. "It drives my revenue."

"You can't prove that," she answered. "We looked at the numbers and we don't like what we see. The same goes for the way you work with clients. You have to stop over-delivering. No more kibbitzing on the phone. In fact, we need you to hire three or four project managers. You're walking your dog way too much."

"It's good for my brain," I defended. "I get ideas when I walk Sparkle out by the sea."

"Listen, Mr. Obstreperous. You have four major limbs. Just a reminder: We own three of them." I felt a tightening in my nether lands.

"When do I get my $15 million," I asked.

"As soon as you pay us back $22 million, plus interest and fees. It's all in the contract. You read it, didn't you?"

She grabbed my computer. She sat me down in my chair in my office and turned off the light.

"Now get to work," she demanded. "And that standing desk, that's Herman Miller, isn't it?"

I nodded, looking with admiration at its deep walnut finish. 

"We can get two-k for that."

Out of Opt.

It might sound strange to you, it did to me, but 399 years ago, in the part of Europe we today think of as Germany there was a war--a bloody and mean one (not that there are other types of wars)--over freedom.

Freedom.

Remember it?

I am no expert on this period. And my understanding of the schism between Martin Luther and the Pope is limited. I'm a Jew. Let the goyim do what the goyim do. Is that wafer Christ or a representation? The discussion is cause for war, yes?

Martin Luther rebelled against the Church.

He rebelled against the idea that the church dominated all of life. And that the word of god could be received by the masses only through priestly intermediaries. 

He rebelled against the idea that peasants (that's you and me) were bound to both the church and the noble class.

The priestly caste and the nobles (and they were by all definitions castes) owned most of the land, and concomitantly most of the lives of most of the people. What's more, those priests, those nobles, and their hierarchy, sold "get out of hell free" cards--indulgences. Yet another way these castes could enrich itself. 

That's my point.

It sounds like today.

Really.

Pay us or burn in hell.

Let me explain. And analogy-ize. 

Please bear with me.

If you were a peasant in most of Europe in the 16th Century, you were owned. You were either a de facto or de jure serf.

What's more, there were so many laws, rules, precepts and strictures that virtually every move you made was monitored and taxed by either the church or the estate you belonged to.

Want to fish: Tax.
Want to marry: Tax.
Want to die: Tax.
Want to travel to another town: Tax.
Want to farm: Tax.
Want to hunt: Tax.
Want to pray: Tax.
Want to breathe: Tax.

In the parlance of New York, "Dey gotcha comin' and goin'." You were owned.

As I'm reading the book above, I've struck by the similarities between 1526 Germany and 2025 America. 

The difference being there's no one left in America who realizes what's going on or who protests against it. 

The ownership of our every protoplasmic pixel is complete. Every simple process demands that you turn over your data. From seeing a website, to ordering take-out, to buying a train ticket to going to the doctor.

Your every movement is monitored and owned--by the modern-day version of the Church and the nobility. A relentlessly authoritarian government, or even more relentlessly authoritarian corporations. Just to get paid for freelancing at an ad agency, you have to submit a petaflop of data. 

Then wait 120 days.

At the doctor's office on Thursday, a kiosk demanded I sign three separate consent forms--each over 1000 words long, before the receptionist would acknowledge that I arrived in the office for my appointment. This is after I've received about 27 "My Chart" texts asking me for the same information the kiosk demanded. People no longer say good-morning. They say, "date of birth."

Like 16th Century Germany, in 21st Century Amerika, every point of contact is a point of control. And every interaction demands an act of submission.

Like the churchmen and the nobles almost half a millennia ago believed they had dominion over hunting lands, rivers, lakes and human lives, the government and corporatist state is reasserting dominion over our world today. They have the right to sully our air, our water, destroy our planet and track us relentlessly. They have dominion. The right to control us.

All this serves no purpose other than to remind us that we are under the thumb, under the control of the powerful entities that rule our lives. They have dominion. You are dominateable.

You can't opt out.

We're out of opt.