Immoderate Friday.

A couple weeks ago I met some advertising friends for dinner at the Old Town, an ancient, beery-bar down on 18th Street between Broadway and Park Avenue South. As the city has changed, the neighborhood has changed and the world has changed, the Old Town hasn't. Except for their prices, the place has the same dust, the same stained menus and the same sepia photos on the walls that they had when I first went there back in 1988.

                                

I'm sure "weathered" would not have been my adjective of choice.

What's more, the Old Town is said to have--and this is a source of some local pride--the "oldest urinals in New York." (And I might add, the best tasting urinal mints.)

The people I met at the Old Town were two creatives--work partners and young people--they're younger than my daughters. They used to work for me when I was at Ogilvy. Since then, they've traveled to half-a-dozen agencies, always searching for a place to do good work, a place where they feel supported, ok-- loved.

Such a place is getting harder and harder to come by. Just hours ago, as it happens, I had a Zoom call with a young copywriter--a friend of my younger daughter's from their tweenage years. She's at the hottest of hot shops now. Still, she's feeling disconsolate--she's unhappy there and doesn't know where to go.

Some of this general and intergenerational malaise ain't that different, I think from how the Old Town itself might feel, if an old-timey bar had feelings with too much anthropomorphism. The Old Town might feel like I feel, an anachronistic piece of hard-wood furniture in a press-board world. Flesh and blood in a world with silicon standards.

I had a professor in college who taught me a lot in one sentence. I had another one who did the same trick when I was in graduate school. I bumped into a third just a couple months ago when I read Emily Wilson's new translation of "The Iliad."

In college, my teacher said, "you can understand Shakespeare by understanding one word: Order. When the order of the universe is upset, the rivers flow blood. When foul is fair and fair is foul, shit happens. Heads roll."

In grad school, my teacher said, "all of Western Civilization can be summed up with one line (below) from the African Queen."

Wilson, in her brilliant preface to the Iliad, never uses the word "immoderate" to describe Achilles, but immoderate is what he is. As Wilson says below, Achilles' reaction to Agamemnon, or later to the killing of Patroclus is without moderation.

Somehow, I look at these three examples and words:  1) order; 2) natural and 3) immoderate and feel they work well to capture my feeling about life today and the ad industry today.

As long as there have been bipeds on the planet, we've always  communicated the same way. 

• We've worked to get attention.
• We've told what we want.
• We've found a way to persuade. 

And we've regarded this evolutionary tendency as natural. It's how pre-language babies communicate. It's how friends and lovers communicate. It used to be how advertising worked.

It used to be natural. The order of things. 

But now we have machines who know how to do it, we're told, better than we do. We have machines who have been granted the license and authority to upset the order of the universe, to attempt to rise above the natural. This isn't just using AI. This is choosing the love of mammon more than the love of humankind.

And I feel immoderate about that.

Do you?

Can you watch this and not think that it was written for what used to be the ad industry?