Tech as in Wreck.

One of the most horrid things about the ones and zeroes that speak to you these days is the way they adapt “colonial” attitudes and speak to us as if they are one of us.

In other words, how they pretend they’re human.

Like they take a human name.

They take the pronoun I.

They call you by your first name.

And act like they know you in a sham-effort to make you believe they are listening and even caring.

These are the tactics of scam artists. 

Of three-card-monte dealers.

Of flim-flam men.

Of the charlatan-in-chief.

I’ll admit, I have an alexa.

I’ll ask it the weather.

When I do, I want to know just a few things.

1. The temperature.

2. The humidity.

3. Is it sunny or cloudy?

4. Will there be rain?

5. Anything unusual—like high-winds or raining frogs.

Instead, alexa pretends to be human.

It starts every answer with a faux human interjection and even faux-er touches of ham-handed humanity.

“Well, it’s a beautiful day, George,” it’ll answer.

It fails to give me what I want. 

Instead it gives me what it wants—which is a sales spiel.

Such is the GDD* of modern death by technology.

(*GDD= General Deception Disorder.)

But something even worse is happening all around us. It’s so omni-present we don’t even see it or notice it.

As machines pretend to be more and more human,

humans are acting more and more like machines.

We are trading places.

The trade will result in the fundamental last ding-dong of doom for many people.

Semiotically and semantically, machines no longer work for us,

we work for machines.

That’s what the language—and the technocracy of the altman-musk-ellison class--is telling us.

We work for machines.

We are owned by their machines for their profits.

(I promise you, when the great tech crash—and the societal meltdown that will accompany it arrives in the next six to twelve months—that crash will be blamed on runaway algorithms and self-governing machines, not the so-called humans who gave them their power.)

Here are three examples of humans talking like machines.

If you ask someone to tell you their thoughts on a deep topic or something of importance, you’re apt to hear them reply, “I’m still processing that.”

Machines and Cuisinarts process.

Humans think.

Or used to.

If you say something like, “My feet got wet in the rain.”

You’ll likely get “one-hundred percent,” as a reply.

“Yes,” was so much more human.

But now we spreadsheetize simple feelings.

Finally, last week the so-called advertising trade-press, this was a big story.

If you have any desire at all to retain any human-ness at all, I’d ask you not to process this, but instead to think about it.

1. “Omnicom…” 

I’m sorry. Omnicom is a corporate contrivance. It didn’t do anything. The people who run omnicom did something.

2. “offloads…” Again, containers on giant ships or garbage on trucks are off-loaded. Humans don’t offload. 

I baby-sat my 17 month grandson yesterday. When it was time for his nap I didn’t say, “I off-loaded him to a crib.” Semantically, offload seems as nazi-fascist as “liquidate.”

3. “hundreds of staffers…” Try hundreds of “people.” With a people-like sphere of meaning. Like lovers, children, mortgages, and the need to eat. Laying off staffers masks the pain you’ve caused and the hardship.

4. "AI platform...” I don’t know what a platform is in this context. AI is lines of code. A platform is a physical structure upon which people can stand and build. There’s none of that here.

5. "third-party contractor…” That’s how people use legal-jargon to say, “subsidiary that removes omnicom from responsibility.”

Finally, there’s the dreadful illustration.

Which semiotically places the disembodied omnicom appendage into a god-like level. Wisdom, strength, power flows from that hand. 

That’s what they want us to “process.”

The corporation and the tech is god.

We are dust.

We were only following orders.

Faith.

Faith, at least in my strangled neck of the woods, was always hard to come by.

I’ll start close to a macro. 

How can you believe in love when your own parents beat the stuffing out of you. Then made you feel like they did nothing wrong and you had asked for it.

Now, let’s go up a couple levels.

How can you believe in god when that supposed powerful being did nothing while millions were shot, millions more gassed, and still millions more worked to death.

Down a level.

How can you believe in your nation, allegedly “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” when that same nation denies so much to so many with such arrogance, cruelty and violence.

Finally, down about 29 levels.

Advertising.

How do you believe in it after the wholesale destruction of the industry by holding company oligarchs? How do you believe in it when what wins awards never even runs? How do you believe in it when giant hairballs and cream-soda scented ass-wipes are regarded as acceptable—even good?

How do you believe in advertising when so few people engaged in the profession haven’t the vaguest idea of how a) communication works or b) advertising works or c) how the brain works. How do you believe in advertising when so many people in the industry don’t even believe advertising has to be interesting and different in order to work?

How can you believe in anything—god, family, country, work—when the only thing that makes sense in most circumstances today is that absolutely nothing makes sense.

Among so many people faith has always been hard come by.

When you’re leading major pieces of business and making your company money and then you’re fired—it’s hard to any longer believe in the status quo.

When you see robber barons like sorrell interviewed as if he is a sage builder of businesses (when he eviscerated WPP and is in the process of wringing out S4 Capital) it’s hard to have faith. Likewise when you see robber barons like wren getting a $69,300,000 payday because he successfully cut $1,000,000,000 in salaries, it’s hard to have faith. When you see robber barons like rose—though she served on WPP’s board for ten years say she had nothing to do with its current parlous state, while praising read’s disastrous leadership as successful, it’s hard to have faith.

Without faith it’s hard to live.

And faith is hard to come by.

But it’s there.

It’s there in the people who help you. Who recommend you. Who tell friends.

It’s there in people with shoulders you can cry on. It’s there in people who believe in you, even though most often you believe in nothing.

It’s there almost seven years into running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company when what seems like bleak is lit by a blaze of hope. A phone call, an assignment, a comforting word.

It’s there most often, you’ll discover, when you judge it gone forever.

Some reserve you have inside.

That keeps you going.

Keeps you writing.

Keeps you thinking, working, turning over rocks. Or pushing them up hill.

It’s there in your fortitude.

I’ve read the Dostoevsky above about sixty-two-hundred times in my life and after all those times and all those readings I’m not sure I’m any closer to understanding it now than I was when I first read The Brothers Karamazov as a sullen teenager.

But faith is faith.

You don’t have to understand it to have it.

In fact, you don’t even have to have it to have it.

You just have to know, somehow, that often the door nailed shut the tightest is the one that swings open with the loudest bang.

I think that’s what this all means.

The Human Touch.

I noticed something a few moments ago as I was having a cheese omelet on a stale onion roll for lunch. (Since there are virtually no bakeries left in amerikkka, just about all of the bread you can buy is either injected full of chemical preservatives or stale.) I noticed the plastic pepper mill on the table was proudly festooned with a logo that proclaimed “NON GMO.”

Much of South East Asia was developed and exploited by Europeans because of spices like pepper. In the 16th and 17th centuries, if you had a share in a ship loaded with peppercorns worth $1, that investment could return as much as $4000. The same held true for cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, saffron, cardamom and of course, frankincense and myrrh. Not only did these spices flavor food, they helped preserve it. Also many people believed they cured syphilis and her concomitant venereal friends. Always a plus—and better than being treated, I’ve been told—than with a tincture of mercury.

You can read more about this sort of thing in a book called “Nathaniel’s Nutmeg.” Basically, Manhattan was traded for a Spice Island and considered a steal. "The tiny island of Run is an insignificant speck in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago--remote, tranquil, and now largely ignored. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, Run's harvest of nutmeg turned it into the most lucrative of the Spice Islands, precipitating a fierce and bloody battle between the all-powerful Dutch East India Company and a small band of schmata-wearing British adventurers led by the intrepid Nathaniel Courthope. The outcome of the fighting was one of the most spectacular deals in history: Britain ceded Run to Holland, but in return was given another small island, Manhattan.”

But none of that is what is dopey post is about.

This post is about the state of artificial recklessness that has taken over the world.

500 years after pepper was more valuable by weight than gold, we now have to say NON GMO. We have to assert that this natural spice wasn’t sullied by science or chemistry. That pepper has always been NON GMO isn't enough for us. Today science pisses in everyone’s pool. We have to label unsullied natural products rather than assuming they’d be left unsullied.

Without thinking too much about it, I’d imagine this ilk of labeling will become more and more present in the not so distant future. 

I could imagine a website with a starburst like this:

Or a college football team with something like this on their logo-strewn uniforms paid for by alumni, tax-payer supported football and Nike.

Perhaps women of dubious virtue will be emblazoned with badging like this. Though this will probably earn me some scorn.

The point in all this is simple.

Algorithms are now the default.

Artificial comes naturally to us.

We expect them to do everything.

Even though we’re unhappy with about 97% of what they do, we can’t opt out. From misleading AI generated YouTube descriptions, to features that turn on that you can’t turn off, to help desks that no longer provide help, this is the age of “succubus ex machina.” 

Devil out of machine.

Humans will only enter the picture as in my pepper-mill above. When machines haven’t screwed things up.

Not too long from today, a person might run for political office proclaiming “I read a book once.” That will repel more voters than it attracts.

I noticed the other day that every time you get an email or some sort of notification that something like terms and conditions or some level of service has changed, what you had been getting and were comfortable with has gotten worse.

That’s where we are.

We’ve improved our _________, so that lines are longer, help is more impossible to get, and actual attention is more and more missing.

Improvement means worsening.

Especially in blogs.

—

BTW, their trust and safety team is a bunch of ones, but mostly zeroes. As long as the ad you’re irked by is pro-tech, it doesn’t matter that it’s nazi-adjacent, child-trafficking abutting, democracy-undo-ing-leaning, or just plain so full of mouse-type and data-thievery that it seems Torquemada was the creative director. If it speeds billionaires to trillions, it’s ok.

 

Friends.

Since Covid covered New York six-and-a-half years ago, and my wife and I packed a bag each (and two or three bags for our eight-year-old golden retriever, Whiskey) we have turned our ramshackle pile of seaside boards scattered willy-nilly along the rocky Gingham Coast into our primary residence. If you can call this living.

 My 1966 Simca 1500. Purrs like a kitten. A dead one.

Much of the primary-ness was done for tax reasons. We spend fewer than one-day-in-five in the Big Rat-Hole and we saved a number of thousands in state and local by making our Connecticut-ness official. Even my 1966 Simca 1500 with 424,000+ miles on it, has shed its New York plating and switched to Connecticut tags. To me, that was a St. Sebastian- like set of cuts. I felt like my pith and core were removed all for the sake of a few thousand dollars in insurance savings. Selling your soul can save you 15-percent.

Nice abs.

During the six-and-a-half years of our seaside sojourn, and primarily due to the general geniality of L, my wife, even I have made friends up here.

I am not one who makes friends often or easily. In fact, because I regard human-relationships as so fragile and unreliable, I don’t even put people’s names in my phone contacts until I have spoken to them at least one-hundred times. Many friendships in our overly-pollinated era come and go too easily for my taste. They grow stale then moldy like bread served in the former Ogilvy cafeteria, the Botulism Café.

That said, I have a somewhat of a coterie of friends up here. Mostly a group of dog dads who gather most evenings in Tom’s fenced-in greensward. There, while the men talk about sports and various aches and pains, and the dogs cavort and dig in the hydrangeas, and the wives sip Prosecco, we enjoy an easy camaraderie of the sort I have rarely experienced.

Once about six years ago I was talking to my wife about a New York friend group I am in—the JCrew. It’s me and five or six other 60-ish ad people. We get together every other month or so, usually for some really good Chinese food, and mostly let each other know there are like-minded people out there. I said to my wife, “Outside of teenage baseball teams and the JCrew, I’ve never willingly joined anything in my life.”

L looked at me, scanned me up and down, took in my free-floating slovenliness and said something like “no wonder,” as she fled the room and went to the garage to inhale carbon monoxide direct from the tail-pipe of my Simca.

The little woman recovering from monoxide poisoning in
the lush back seat of the Simca.

All that said, last night we went out to dinner with some new friends who live less than 400 feet down the coast from us, Dr. and Mrs. Y. The Ys are roughly our age, with kids roughly the age of our kids and the accompanying Normandy-invasion of grandchildren roughly the age of our grandkids.

In more care-free times, we’d pile the kids in the trunk and hit the open road.

We went to an upscale town about ten miles up the Connecticut River called Chester and to an upscale restaurant—one of approximately 88 restaurants in thse environs called “The River Cafe.”

If “We Try Harder,” was the slogan of the Sixties, “We Don’t Give a Hoot,” is the slogan of today.

The restaurant is beautiful and pretentious but not quite pretentious enough to give you acid-reflux. That’s what the food’s for. The 21-year-old unshaven and short-pant-wearing waiter duly introduced himself.

“Hi, I’ll be serving you tonight. I’m Sebastian and we’re out of the duck confit and the spicy Thai style charred local beef salad.” If you’re out of it, I thought, it can’t be all that local.

Before too long he steered the table toward the more expensive of the wine choices and took our dinner orders. I got the tagliarini with a beef ragout, in part because it was the only thing on the menu under $36. Innocently, I asked, “Could you bring us some bread?”

“We’re all out of bread,” he answered as if that were acceptable.

Chester is a one-street town and on Sunday’s that one street is taken over by a farmers' market. 

Where they sell bread.

A lot of bread.

But the restaurant, which is central to the one-street had no bread.

It’s hard for me as an old and getting-older man to understand the complacency of a restaurant “running out of bread.”

It seems symbolic of so much of the world today. Things that should be givens are no longer within the realm of possibility. Did you seriously think you’d be doing self-checkout in the grocery store, not have your own desk in the office and be told every 22 feet that you’re “family”? Did you seriously think you could drive one-hundred miles on a major highway and never see a cop? While you can’t walk one-hundred feet in an airport without seeing soldiers carrying machine guns.

My mother’s motto: Close cover before striking.

When I was twenty, I worked as a cashier at a big Rush St. Chicago liquor store called Bragnos’. Behind me behind the counter we kept minatures and pints, those small bottles the neighborhood parking lot attendants would turn to to get them through the night. We also sold cigarettes.

One evening a distinguished-looking man came in and in addition to his daily booze, he asked for a pack of Winstons.

I scanned the shelves. None.

I looked around for Lorenzo Jeffries, the stock man. He had gone for the night.

“We’re all out of Winstons,” I answered.

The distinguished-looking man stared me down.

“Winston’s are the second largest-selling cigarette in America,” he informed me. “You should never be out of them.”

That was a life lesson and a marketing lesson I never forgot.

So much has changed in the world.

Mostly that it’s now every person for themselves and no one gives a shit about anyone but themselves.

It’s been said you divide the world in two. People who believe and live in WITT: We’re In This Together. And people who believe and live in YOYO: You’re On Your Own.

We are clearly alone, stranded on an ice-floe of absolute alienation.

All I wanted was a slice of bread.

A Lot of People Will Hate This One.

I often think of myself as a can of soup.

Or a French mustard.

Or an Italian olive oil or balsamic vinegar.

You can go to any grocery store and find about 259 others that look just like me. 

259 others that have roughly the same ingredients, provenance and heritage. 

259 others that do roughly everything I do roughly as well as I do it.

That’s the world most of us face every day.

Whether we’re looking for a significant other or a significant occupation.

How do we get noticed?

There are 259 other cans of soup in the grocery store that are made with the same red, ripe tomatoes.

Some of those cans—most of them—may try to get an edge by lowering their price by a couple of cents. 

If everyone else is $4.29, and they’re $3.99, they might get a sale. Bargain hunters.

A few of those cans have red, ripe tomatoes enough to raise their price by a couple of cents. They charge $5.29 and hope that people will think they’re worth more and that they taste better and are healthier because they cost more.

But for every more expensive can of soup, there are about 28 cheaper cans of soup. 

Obviously, I’m not a can of soup.

Or a French mustard. And Italian olive oil or a balsamic vinegar.

Obviously, I’m not in a grocery store, either.

But it’s worse for us.

Our grocery store is LinkedIn. 

And there aren’t just 259 other creatives we are competing against for the same seven shitty assignments, there are 259,000 other creatives.

Not to mention four giant holding companies that control about eighty-percent of the jobs in the ad industry and because of their size and reach have pricing control over most of the jobs.

What’s more, with the proliferation of awards, everyone is award-winning. If Moses were alive today his LinkedIn would read.

And there are a lot of shoppers, holding company “talent acquisition specialists,” recruiters and head-hunters who really can’t tell the difference between one soup and the other and are paid and incentivized to do all they can to drive your price down.

The soup might be served in a bowl. But we are an industry of bottom-feeders.

It’s not different really if it were 1880, your name were Cżleotǔwicz, you were newly off the boat from Upper Slobovia, and you found yourself in the coal fields of central Pennsylvania.

You might have been promised by 25-cents for each ton of coal you mined. By the time you were a mile below the earth in Shamokin, PA, you were surrounded by so many competing Bohunks, that your promised 25-cents a ton was halved. You’d get 12 1/2-cents a ton. When the mine-owners subtracted what you owed them for use of their pick, their lantern, their mine elevator, their canary and the shack they rented you, you were, as the song goes, “another day older and deeper in debt.”

Then.

That’s the scenario in advertising today.

Now.

I started my GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company just as Covid descended on the ad industry. The ad industry was in the spray of a single cough transformed into the subtract-industry.

There was nothing left.

There is nothing left. 

Unless you’re one of the six people who get eight-figure salaries every year for slowing the shrinkage of the companies they mis-manage and extract from.

This is what I faced.

I had faced it before when I was fired from R\GA at age 56 and reckoned I would never work again.

I asked myself, “How will I ever get a job.”

Quickly, I answered myself.

As if I were a can of soup.

“What am I best in the world at?”

Not what am I good at.

Not what awards have I won.

Not who I know.

Not where I worked.

Not my winsome smile.

What do I do better than anyone else in the world?

I wrote my answer down.

I’m best at taking complicated things and making them simple,

friendly and even sexy.

That’s what I worked at.

That’s what I did.

That’s how I marketed myself.

That’s how I became ECD and Copy Chief at Ogilvy on IBM.

When Ogilvy fired me, I had to do that again.

What do I do better than anyone else in the world?

Recently he former head of Ogilvy recommended me to a new client. She wrote this about me.

"George is as good at positioning and articulating the purpose and value of an enterprise as anyone with whom I've worked. (George was a creative director at Ogilvy for years.). And he does it with charm.”

Your job, if you’re looking for work is to find a statement like the above without you.

No one works harder than Cżleotǔwicz.

No one tries more options than Cżleotǔwicz.

No one is more optimistic than Cżleotǔwicz.

I’ve written this because I’m about to write a note to a client who I’ve worked with since I opened GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. I was on retainer with him for five years. Then because he wasn’t making any money, we went our separate ways. About two weeks ago, he called me and wants me back.

I’m perseverating about how much to charge him.

I find myself talking myself down price-wise.

Something you should never allow yourself to do.

That’s why I wrote this.

Man, that is one amazing can of soup.

The Irrelevancing of the Ad Industry. (And Us.)

 

Last week, you couldn’t spit without hitting about 97,000 posts on LinkedIn and the bought-and-paid-for trade press about last week’s most important advertising topic. Or the most important topic according to all those easily shiny-objected out of noticing what’s really happening in the world.

Do you really care about instagram’s “runic” “r.”

Does it change the facts about the brand (no matter how many billions in legal fees are spent by non-tax-paying meta and zuckerberg to appeal the many rulings against their evil and corrupt company. A company that will do anything for the billions in ad dollars they suck up (or zuck up) regardless of how much data they steal and how many children are raped because of them.)

Some facts to consider before you get heated about the merits of their new masturbatory logo distraction.

• meta maintained a policy allowing accounts engaged in the "trafficking of humans for sex" to accumulate 16 violations before being suspended on the 17th. 

      In baseball we say “three strikes and you're out.” meta                   rewrote that to "17 strikes and you’re out.’

• A New Mexico jury ordered meta to pay $375,000,000 in civil penalties for “willfully violating the state’s unfair practices act.”
• meta misled users about the safety of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and enabled child sexual exploitation on those platforms.
• internal company documents showed a “pattern of executives prioritizing growth over child safety.” BTW, safety here is not a kid getting a bee sting or scraping her knee. It’s selling kids for sex and profiting from it.
• Meta's head of content policy, Monika Bickert, wrote that the company was "about to do a bad thing" and called the plan to encrypt facebook messenger "so irresponsible.” She warned it would hinder the reporting of child exploitation cases to law enforcement. 
• Internal documents filed in the case revealed that meta's own staff had repeatedly flagged the risks its platforms posed to children, but that safety features were blocked or delayed because they were deemed unprofitable. 
• As of March 2020, instagram had no dedicated mechanism for users to report child sexual abuse material. When an employee raised the issue multiple times, she was told building such a tool would require too much work. (Probably not as much work as a logo-redesign, however.)
• Internal documents from a November 2020 technical failure further showed that meta's ability to track bad actors was disrupted at a time when thousands of minors were reporting the most severe category of inappropriate interactions, including sex trafficking, sextortion, and real-world meetings for sex.
•  A 2019 proposal to make all teen accounts private by default was rejected after meta's growth team found it would damage engagement metrics. 

As an industry, are we really so shallow, stupid and corrupt that we’ll over-look these easily available facts and instead focus on ligatures, precious design and the like.

That “r”?

That’s heinous.

The child-rape? That’s our business model.

As Sir John Hegarty said some years ago, the industry has retreated to the fringes. We don’t build brands. We stunt growth.

We lie. We’re not even the “toy department” anymore. That’s too dignified.

So we do fake.

So we do hate.

So we do rape.

Hairballs.