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.
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