I've lived in New York City for almost half a century. And within five miles of its borders for the entirety of my life. I'm back now for a few weeks and despite all the incessance about its noise and dirt and collapse, the old place is like an aging starlet: still beautiful, still winsome, still drawing me to her.
As a copywriter I learned long ago to always throw out the first sentence of my copy. I've learned to start in medias res in the middle of the story. There's energy there, and a subtle evocation of missing-ness so the reader feels like she has to hustle to catch up. You've got her where you want her.
You don't start telling a joke by saying "I heard a good one the other day." Start with the listener a little unsteady. You'll get more laffs that way. A little disorientation can be good for your listeners' attention span. Start with a rug pull. Or some seasick.
In any event, today's post will be brief. An unintended consequence as me being as busy as a serrated knife at the bris of quintuplets.
Today's post is about unintended consequences. I doped it out in my dopey head as I was on the crosstown M79 heading east having had a three hour cuppa with a young-old friend, an Ogilvy daughter, so to speak.
Many people--and politicians, who ain't really people because they no longer live in our world--decry the raft of fare-evasion in the city. People hop on the subway--which moves 3,700,000 people a day or on buses--which move 1,290,000 people daily and often they skip paying their fare. Those aforementioned decriers see fare-evasion as a general indication of lawlessness and societal decay.
(They seldom say the same about trillion-dollar corporations evading taxes, or billionaires paying less tax than their secretaries. Or felon-presidents not paying at all.)
Fare-evasion is a race-bludgeon. It's assumed it's done by people of color--and it sorts them into a "lawless" bucket. The better to hate them with.
To my eyes something else has happened.
Buses are now "extended." They're twice or three times as long as they were in my youth, and you can enter at any one of three or sometimes four doors. Only one of those entrances is watched by a person. The others rely on you swiping a special card to pay your fare.
The same sort of system exists in the subway. Token booth attendants are no more. The turnstiles are people-less. Like self-check-outs at drugstores and supermarkets.
People were removed from the equation to save money, or to increase profits. There's nobody left minding the store. And the people on the bus, or train or store feel like no one cares, no one's watching, they don't matter.
As I have written here many times. Brands, social organizations, political entities, companies, marriages have a choice. They're either YOYO or WITT.
YOYO=You're On Your Own.
WITT=We're In This Together.
They each have consequences.
A YOYO dynamic is happening on amerrycaca highways since EZ-pass was installed. There's no semiotic concrete (toll booths) that say, "There is law and order and authority on this stretch of highway."
The infrastructure of good behavior has been cost-cut out of existence.
The unintended consequences of replacing people is that some people feel like they're of no consequence. They're not "pleased and thank-you'd." They're not greeted. They're not protected, watched over, cared-for.
Without signs of governance, we've lost societal governors. It's anything goes. Fare-beating, turnstile-jumping, speeding, tailgating, tax-evasion. Growing a company until collapse. Or collapsing a company but first making sure you get your $100,000,000.
Likewise in our industry, now that there's no accountable measurable viable media, everything--whether it ran or not, whether a client paid for it of not, no matter how much money it cost the agency--is eligible for an award.
The unintended consequences of removing authority is chaos. It's unaccountability. It's the triumph of assertions over the verifiable.
It's anything goes and everything sucks.
A consequence of no consequences.
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