Three-Fer Friday.

 
PART 1.

It's your job, if you're a functioning human, to be present.

Present at home.

Present when you're at work.

Present with your loved ones.

Present with your friends. And your puppy.

It's your job, if you're a functioning human, to be present and to notice the linguistic corruption all around us. A corruption that would make George Orwell look like a Hallmark card smothered in saccharin.

I just saw, of all things, a small caption on the digital front-page of Thursday's Wall Street Journal. If you subscribe, or care, you can find it here.

The three word phrase, the chilling three word phrase that got me was "select layoff events."

What a horrid sterilization of pain. 

To turn the systemic firing of thousands of people--the shit-canning, the axing, the eliminating, the schmising--into a "layoff event."

Almost 90 years ago, as murderous governments were killing millions and were bent on taking over the world, Hitler's Nazis euphemized "liquidate," as a synonym for murder. That was picked up in a kids' movie, The Wizard of Oz.

If you're, like me, a denizen of the ad industry, you've probably been fired a few times. Even if you despised the job you were fired from, getting fired is no joy.

I'd bet not a single person in the history of the world has ever come home and said to their significant other, "Honey, I've been subject to a 'layoff event.'"

Along with linguistic canoodling like layoff events, goes our Iran war which as of this writing isn't any longer allowed to be called a war, though people are shooting at people, bombs are dropping, people are dying and ships are sinking.

There's so much nonsense happening in the world, between layoff events and international skirmishes.

I can only say, pay attention.

Be aware.

And try to fight.

----------------------

 PART 2.

Not too many years ago I read a book called "Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts." You can amazon it here, so bezos gets even more money he pays no taxes on, so concomitantly, your tax bill rises.

In "Craeft," Alexander Langlands abjures modern technology and goes back to the old way--the "craeft" way of doing things. He does this to see if the "modern" ways are really better. 

I think about this as every day, I see about 32,000 paeans to the amazingness of AI. I wonder with all the hot air, and all the people saying, "I made this in two-seconds for two-cents," and all the energy-gobbling and real-estate subsuming-ness of "data centers," if we're really, when all is said and done, saving anything with AI--either money or time.

The example from Craeft that I can't shake comes from Langlands front lawn. He decides to use a scythe to cut the grass rather than his old Toro lawn-mower. 

Which, really, saves time.

Yes, using his Toro he can do the job in about 30 minutes. 
Using the scythe takes him four hours.

But, using the scythe, Langlands no longer has to spend an hour a day at the gym. He gets his exercise "organically."

But, using the scythe, Langlands no longer has to drive to the gas station for gas to fill the Toro. He no longer noises up the neighborhood and fills the air with CO2. He no longer has to maintain the lawnmower.

Instead, he goes out in the sunshine and gets the kind of workout people pay a fortune for. He also gets the sweaty satisfaction of a job he did himself, with his sinew and muscle. A sense of satisfaction modern humans no little about.

I think we should think about costs more and "savings" less. That is we might think more about our human-ness rather than the splendors of modernity.

--

 PART 3.

In the 1940s, the news scene in New York City was dominated by right-wing, retrograde forces like the Hearst syndicate and Henry Luce's Time/Life conglomerate. Their publications were by and large isolationist--against fighting the nazis, and they were often anti-semetic.

A man called Ralph Ingersoll, financed by millionaire Marshall Field, III, in June of 1940, launched a left-leaning daily called PM. It lasted until 1948.

Below was their code, their belief, their declaration of principles.

We could use a little PM this AM. Every AM.

S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL Lies.

Was is Joseph Goebbels who first put forward the thesis of the big lie? That is “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Was it Goebbels?
Or Roy Cohn?
Or donald tump?
Or maybe your Holding Company.

In fact, it doesn't much matter who said it, or employed it, or who was first with it. What matters is we are all in the thrall of it.

I was an early adopter of amazon's echo.

When I got my first, literally decades ago, I was a heavy NPR listener. The echo allowed me to easily find a radio station somewhere playing "Morning Edition" or "All Things Considered." At the time they were decent news shows.

Eventually, as amazon "added more capabilities" to echo, I started asking it one question a day. I'd say, "echo, what's the weather today in wherever-I-am."

Echo is systemically wrong, always.

If this is AI, it sucks with fervor.

It doesn't organize information.

It has its way of answering and that way doesn't think, adjust or vary. Therefore more times than not, it buries the lede.

Today it's very windy up here on the Gingham Coast. The waves look oceanic and our expensive double-pane windows rattle. There are tree limbs here and there. And people chasing their hats,

echo only gives me the temperature and that it's partly cloudy. Not mention of the wind. Semantically, echo often says something like, "It's 47-degrees. Today's high will be 62 and the low, 54." If you say "echo, it's lower now than the low," echo does not comprehend its own systemic stupidity. I imagine echo discombobulating like the robot Hymie on the old "Get Smart" TV show. For a "logic-based-machine," it's as logical as an advertising awards show.

My point in all this is simple.

We are living in a universe where giant malign powers are feeding us a line--a la the big lie above--over and again. We hear it so often, and it appears in so many places, that we accept it.

We're meant to believe AI works. We're meant to believe it's miraculous. Though I've yet to see any good or any cost savings or any service or solutions come from it. And if it's spilled over into my daily life--if it has anything to do with, say, the simple act of making a phone call, it's a colossal bollux. I haven't had an un-dropped call since I was forced by verizon to get rid of my land-line.

[BTW, the world's real technological miracle--across humans roughly 200,000 years is indoor plumbing. Life expectancy before indoor plumbing was about 40. Almost immediately after indoor plumbing's wide-adoption, life expectancy soared to about 70. Put that in your sam altman and smoke it.]

From the bushwa about the strength of our economy, to the genius of twenty-first-century robber barons, we are being told again and again by the mega-wealthy that the course they've decided upon (which benefits only them) is the right course for all of us.

You need spend only about twenty minutes on LinkedIn to see the onslaught of AI crap and the incessant drivel on how great it is. Otherwise normal people are today using words like agentic and generative as if they have genuine meaning, which they don't.

The ad industry is a great example of the Big Lie. 

In about a month it will be lying about its affluence and importance and its influence. We'll see hundreds of photos and bushwa from the south of France, with thousands of plasticine faces saying all is ok.

We'll read the self-promotion from thousands of award-winners pontificating about whatever the trend-du-jour is. Agencies and people will win all sorts of acclaim. It will be repeated over and again.

So often that no one questions, or can even find out information about, the reality of the agency world.

I have nothing against this person.

But how do you make it into a hall-of-fame without ever having created a great campaign responsible for real material client and marketplace success. 

How do you make it into a hall-of-fame while the agency you are the creative chief of is today one-tenth the size it was ten years ago. Its parent's market cap is down 90%, and they've shed, since 2017, over 100,000 people. [When I rejoined Ogilvy in 2014, they had ten large footprint floors in a block-wide office building. Today they have less than one-floor in a smaller building.]

But the Big Lie prevails.

Sooner or later we succumb.

It was repeated so often, you have to believe or you'll be bludgeoned to death.

It's 52-degrees where I am.

Though today's low, the Big Lie says, will be 54.

OK, we say. 

We don't notice anymore the contradictions. 
We don't notice the lies.

As every phone "customer success person" says when you hang up not having your problem solved:

"Is there anything else I can help you with?"

But help is far away.

As is truth.

Silent Treatment.

You probably don't read obituaries.

Most people don't.

Many people mock me for reading them. 

Somehow they find the practice morbid.

But obituaries aren't about death. 

They are studies of lives. 

And if the obituary has made a prominent national or international newspaper, there's a good chance the subject of the obituary has led a life we can learn from.

As Alexander Pope wrote almost three-hundred years ago in his "Essay on Man" [meaning mankind, not the gender, so spare me and Mr. Pope the rebuke] "The proper study of mankind is man." ie focus on self-knowledge and understanding of human nature. The ad industry, the Spirit Airlines of it that remains, would do well to have remembered that. The remnants however are too interested in algorithms, trends and awards.

All that is a prelude to an obituary my wife sent me last night at 2:16 AM. Like me, L is afflicted also by Dame Insomnia. She fought it last night, as she often does, by reading the approximately eleven-percent of the New York Times that's not about recipes, Hollywood gossip, or myriad other banalities of, at most, transitory consequence.

The subject of the obituary was Semyon Gluzman, a psychiatrist who refused to abide the lies of the Soviet states and declare people who disagree with the state or speak out against the state "insane." You can read the short piece here. 

Here's a small portion--a lemon-zest of flavor that I hope whets your curiosity--if curiosity itself hasn't been homogenized out of you.

When police arrived at Gluzman's Kyiv apartment in 1972 to arrest him, the Times writes, "Officially, he was charged with spreading 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.' But his real crime, the one officials did not want publicized, was questioning the Soviet Union’s widespread use of psychiatry as a tool of oppression — and being the first doctor to do so.

One hundred and a handful of years earlier, another dissident against the prevailing power of the day, Abraham Lincoln said, "To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men." That quotation was on a poster in my high-school library. I remember it from about 1972, when I read in the library instead of going to class, the same time Gluzman was first arrested.

The phrase that pays in the obituary is just eleven words long. “Psychiatry is a branch of medicine and not of penal law.” This seemingly reasonable stance earned him seven years of hard labor and three years of exile in Siberia.

As amerika's current felon-in-chief calls "democrats crazy," and says "they are destroying our country," [see three-minute excerpt from the felon's state of the union here] we as humans--and I assume my readers are still functioning humans--would do well to remember how dominant powers demonize not just dissent but anything different. Ad absurdam (which is really ad realitum) those protesting ice-incursions into amerika's cities were called "domestic terrorists." Many were imprisoned. Some were killed. 

We see dissent labelled as "deranged," "unpatriotic," and "insane" from almost every precinct of the current criminal power structure.

Of course, there's a larger point here. 

At least I hope there is.

In any oligarchy--where control of power is held by a few giant entities that often work together to enforce the dominant complacency--raising a hand and saying "why," is a behavior to be squashed.

From the trillions of dollars of AI hype we're being fed, to ballrooms being crammed down the tax-payers' wallets, to businesses and agency holding companies that eliminate staff and replace them almost-wholly with easier to over-power freelancers, those who bark are treated like dogs.

Years ago I learned something.

Any bad behavior at work was ok and tolerated but one. Once you're labeled "hard to work with," your career is over.

That's why, like Gluzman, we have to keep our voices. Even if they're nothing more than a blog no one reads.

--

BTW, the Times' obituary, mentioned a 22-page manual, Gluzman co-wrote while imprisoned on "how to avoid being declared mentally ill during an interrogation by a Soviet psychiatrist." I found it online. It's pasted below.

At the very least, show up 77-seconds late to your next zoom and read page one here:

The Power of Words.

Last week, amerika's radical right supreme court, allowed the re-gerrymandering of amerika. It's a long step toward revitalizing and legitimizing the marginalization of amerika's non-white population--barring people from being able to vote, be elected and a raft of other rights that should be sacrosanct and for all.

Gerrymandering describes the intentional manipulation of district boundaries to discriminate against a group of voters on the basis of their political views or race. It allows the "state" to configure a voting district in such a way as to diminish or increase the voting influence of a certain bloc of voters. 

[Essentially, in many ways, the u.s. has always been gerrymandered. California with 40,000,000 people has just as many senators as Wyoming, with under 600,000 people. This is a nasty vestige granted as a conciliation to the sparsely populated slave states in the late 18th century--to give them disproportionate power and to get them to join the united states.]

With the abrogation by the supreme court of universal voting rights, the New York Times ran a timeline of the Voting Rights Act, passed under the aegis of Lyndon Johnson's presidency in 1965.

Growing up as I did, in a liberal bubble, I knew violent and hate-filled people killed african-american girls with bombs in churches. I knew people were tortured and lynched. I knew grown men were called 'boy,' and women we're called 'the girl.'

I knew all that and a thousand more examples of virulent and institutionalized hate. 

I knew that the memorial sign pointing to where 15-year-old Emmitt Till was murdered is constantly being defaced. 

But while I had read of all this, and of LBJ's speech before a joint session of congress in support of the Voting Rights bill, which crescendo'd with the words "We Shall Overcome," I never saw the footage below--I saw a small clip first on the Times' site.

I'd never seen before the political leaders in the audience sitting silent and stolid in defiance of everything we as humans are supposed to hold dear.

This is the reaction, applause, when he says "We shall overcome." The camera cuts to a wide shot of congress.

Most clap.

Some don't.

I thought the non-clappers were gone.

They are ascendant today in amerika.

I beg you to listen to LBJ's speech pasted above. 

The whole thing.

Think of his guiding words.

And try not to cry when you think of how far we, the people, have plummeted. 

--

PS.
I know you're busy.

But take five minutes and watch all of the speech above.

Then wonder, what happened.