Snappy Snappy Answers.

 On Friday, March 21st, my elder daughter had her second son. Mother, daughter, father, first son, and puppy are doing well. As are the the maternal grandparents.

So on Saturday, my wife was like me when I played ball.

Man, I couldn't wait to get up to bat and take my swipes at the old horsehide. It was all I could think about.

As Senator Claghorn from the old Fred Allen radio show might have said, my wife's "tongue was waggin' like a blind-dog's tail in a meat market."

She just couldn't wait to drive the 125 miles to Boston, hug all involved and drive back to our sturdy (formerly ramshackle) cottage on the Gingham Coast. 

So, without benefit of lunch or toilette, we fired up our aging car and dodged the Spring potholes to the Hub of the Universe. 

A lot of people ask me, "George, how have you written a blog every working day for nearly eighteen years?" I usually give the same reply. 

I say, if you were a baseball scout in a rich territory, like the Dominican Republic or Southern California, you'd quickly realize that around every corner could be the next Clemente. A blink could cost you a five-tool-player. So you learn to be always on, always aware, always with your note-book and check-book. Always observing.

It's the same with being in advertising. Or writing a blog. Or to be vainglorious about it, being a writer.

The sins of the Fodder are visited upon the children. In other words, you don't take a blink off if you're looking for an idea--and you should always be looking for an idea.

I got one in the hospital on Saturday.

There was a chain food place (I won't call it a restaurant; it's hard enough to concede that though they sold things to eat that it was food.) It was a place called Panera, a part of a conglomerate called JAB that seems to hold dear (at least in the way they treat customers) to their Nazi-past.

You are met in the fluorescence by four dirty computer screens. Each festooned with offers (to buy the highest margin crap) none of which allow you to scroll to see the entirety of their limited menu.

Giving up on the screen, I grab from a luke-warm-erator case (it wasn't really refrigerated) two small orange juices, a yogurt cup with granola, two fruit cups and from the counter a bag of cookies for my son-in-law who has a sweet tooth. When I pick up the $7 orange juices my hands get sticky.

When I get to the checkout counter an unshaven grunt grunts at me. He says "Thirty one dollars." I say, "Do you have iced-tea? It wasn't on the computer screen." He points to the back of the store. 

I hadn't been wise enough to bring my own cups so I ask him for two. He hands them to me. 

I now have seven items to carry. "Do you want a bag," he grunts. I feel like answering "No. I'm a cephalopod." But I don't bother to answer.

I walk to the iced-tea machine and fill my petroleum-based cups with ice and tea. I cannot find lids that aren't all stuck together or that fit. But finally, I make due.

Then I say to him. "How about utensils?" Because of course the napkins and sweeteners are in one place or two, with no spoons and forks to be found. He points in another direction like a weather vane having ingested lysergic acid or grain ergot. 

I grab my teas and by the forks I see an artificially-yellowed banana, roughly the temperature of a Arctic ice-core. I take it and put it into the bag.

"I'm stealing this and the ice-teas," I grunt at him. The Panera is in a hospital, and I suppose that's good, because he has no pulse. I walk out of the store having over-paid for seven items and stolen three. I am still, by my pecuniary acuity, in arrears. Not even counting Nazi-ism.

I walk back to see my daughter with $31 of crap plus stolen stuff, all of which tastes like shit.

I bring this all up in a blog on advertising, because in a sense ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is, the development of an individual looks like the development of an entire species.

In other words, the same Pervert Equity MBAs who have efficiency-ized every food-outlet, airline, customer-service-bot, big-box store, and government bureaucracy have been, for about thirty years, loosed inside every ad agency and ad agency holding company.

The details are different.

The experience is the same.

The net-take-away is identical.

I am buying here. Though it sucks. Because everything sucks. And there's no place else. And the experience is so deadening, I no longer expect anything better anymore. I have been beaten to death by efficiency.

I'd imaging most clients feel this way dealing with BlandOcom or whatever they're called this week. 

Dirty and used.

And for all the purported cheapness and efficiency, ripped-off and time-stolen.

Yes, this is a metaphor. But I don't think it's exactly like reading something obtuse by Gerald Manly Hopkins or Ezra Pound in a psychosis. 

It's pretty easy to get.

We're so efficient we've made everything suck efficiently.

That's not a joke, son.

And They're All Following 'Best Practices.'

Just about everyday, or at least every month, yet another 100+ store retailer seems to go out of business. In the last couple of weeks two stores I've never visited, Joann's, which had 800 stores in 49 states, and Forever 21, which had 540 stores went belly-up.

Not to mention another agency. Usually one that's just won agency of the year, though it's lost 30-percent of its business and fired 52-percent of its people.

Sign my petition to replace the Bald Eagle as the symbol of amerika with a dead goldfish.

If you look at this Wikipedia site, (assuming your memory is all out of memory) you'll find a list of literally hundreds of stores from your past. They used to anchor malls across the country. Now they're liquidated and no more.

During my long years in the ad business, I only worked on two fast-food chains. And I never worked on a giant retail brand--though I spent two early years working for Bloomingdale's in-house advertising on the 11th Floor, way above the selling floors. There, I wrote ten ads a week, usually with scintillating headlines like "Save 30%-40% on plush cotton towels."

As for fast-food, I worked intermittently on Dunkin' Donuts and even more sporadically on Rax Roast Beef restaurants. While I did a brand commercial or two for Dunkin' (I helped introduce their low-fat muffins) most of what we did were :15s that filled a donut in a brand spot. "Now that we've made an airtight case for Dunkin' Donuts world-famous coffee, get this airtight case to 
keep it in."

Yippee.

If you go to the Wikipedia list above, I'd argue that just about all those retailers, and about one-thousand more I haven't included, did everything everyone said they were supposed to do.

They followed best-practices.

They had door-buster sales. Then door-buster savings events. Then door-buster BOGO hamentaschen-day savings events. They cut costs. They hired salespeople who barely sold and were even less likely people. 

In store, the merch looked like shit, you couldn't find out the difference between X and Y and you left feeling like you spent a lot of time for a lot of plasticine junk.

I'm tired of Kohls in my stockings. 

Today in the world, especially the marketing LinkedIn world, you hear all kinds of bushwa about brand and experience. It seems half the people in the industry are user experience people. 

But try to find something in a store (or online) that is from out of the top 20 SKUs. You can't. 

My wife often sends me to the 75-store grocery chain up here on the Gingham Coast. They claim to be A) "A world-class market." And B) "Family-owned." And C) Un-staffed.

I can do the entire 100-item shopping list in about 12 minutes. It takes me an hour to find the green lentils my wife needs. And there's never anyone to ask. Or to even ask when I check out if I've found everything I needed.

My sense is that almost every business in every vertical operates in the same manner. From the giant 40-brand hotel conglomerates (Like IHG or Marriott) to airlines to telcos to ISPs to Banks to Advertising Holding Companies.

Once you get past their purportedly door-busting prices, there's no brand in their brand.

There's only cheap. And purportedly efficient.

As efficient as moldering ever is.

And in case you haven't checked lately, efficient never is. Staffing is so lean, if one person in any store, bank, agency or what not takes a bathroom break or calls in sick, the whole "streamlined" operating goes up in cheap Chinese smoke.

This is all to say simply that under the guise of "best practices," thousands of companies have gone under. They provide low-prices but the cost of those low prices is too high.

That's the agency business, too. No one knows the clients' needs, the agency's capabilities, or even how to answer a brief, much less a question or a need. No one even uses the clients' products, spends time with engineers, or visits the factory.

None of that fits on a best-practices timesheet calculus.

Best practices are usually the worst thing you can follow.

Lemming me your ears.

But follow we must.

Into the Abyss.

Sn Sn Snappy Answers

On Friday, March 21st, my elder daughter had her second son. Mother, daughter, father, first son, and puppy are doing well. As are the the maternal grandparents.

So on Saturday, my wife was like me when I played ball.

Man, I couldn't wait to get up to bat and take my swipes at the old horsehide. It was all I could think about.

As Senator Claghorn from the old Fred Allen radio show might have said, my wife's "tongue was waggin' like a blind-dog's tail in a meat market."

She just couldn't wait to drive the 125 miles to Boston, hug all involved and drive back to our sturdy (formerly ramshackle) cottage on the Gingham Coast. 

So, without benefit of lunch or toilette, we fired up our aging car and dodged the Spring potholes to the Hub of the Universe. 

A lot of people ask me, "George, how have you written a blog every working day for nearly eighteen years?" I usually give the same reply. 

I say, if you were a baseball scout in a rich territory, like the Dominican Republic or Southern California, you'd quickly realize that around every corner could be the next Clemente. A blink could cost you a five-tool-player. So you learn to be always on, always aware, always with your note-book and check-book. Always observing.

It's the same with being in advertising. Or writing a blog. Or to be vainglorious about it, being a writer.

The sins of the Fodder are visited upon the children. In other words, you don't take a blink off if you're looking for an idea--and you should always be looking for an idea.

I got one in the hospital on Saturday.

There was a chain food place (I won't call it a restaurant; it's hard enough to concede that though they sold things to eat that it was food.) It was a place called Panera, a part of a conglomerate called JAB that seems to hold dear (at least in the way they treat customers) to their Nazi-past.

You are met in the fluorescence by four dirty computer screens. Each festooned with offers (to buy the highest margin crap) none of which allow you to scroll to see the entirety of their limited menu.

Giving up on the screen, I grab from a luke-warm-erator case (it wasn't really refrigerated) two small orange juices, a yogurt cup with granola, two fruit cups and from the counter a bag of cookies for my son-in-law who has a sweet tooth. When I pick up the $7 orange juices my hands get sticky.

When I get to the checkout counter an unshaven grunt grunts at me. He says "Thirty one dollars." I say, "Do you have iced-tea? It wasn't on the computer screen." He points to the back of the store. 

I hadn't been wise enough to bring my own cups so I ask him for two. He hands them to me. 

I now have seven items to carry. "Do you want a bag," he grunts. I feel like answering "No. I'm a cephalopod." But I don't bother to answer.

I walk to the iced-tea machine and fill my petroleum-based cups with ice and tea. I cannot find lids that aren't all stuck together or that fit. But finally, I make due.

Then I say to him. "How about utensils?" Because of course the napkins and sweeteners are in one place or two, with no spoons and forks to be found. He points in another direction like a weather vane having ingested lysergic acid or grain ergot. 

I grab my teas and by the forks I see an artificially-yellowed banana, roughly the temperature of a Arctic ice-core. I take it and put it into the bag.

"I'm stealing this and the ice-teas," I grunt at him. The Panera is in a hospital, and I suppose that's good, because he has no pulse. I walk out of the store having over-paid for seven items and stolen three. I am still, by my pecuniary acuity, in arrears. Not even counting Nazi-ism.

I walk back to see my daughter with $31 of crap plus stolen stuff, all of which tastes like shit.

I bring this all up in a blog on advertising, because in a sense ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is, the development of an individual looks like the development of an entire species.

In other words, the same Pervert Equity MBAs who have efficiency-ized every food-outlet, airline, customer-service-bot, big-box store, and government bureaucracy have been, for about thirty years, loosed inside every ad agency and ad agency holding company.

The details are different.

The experience is the same.

The net-take-away is identical.

I am buying here. Though it sucks. Because everything sucks. And there's no place else. And the experience is so deadening, I no longer expect anything better anymore. I have been beaten to death by efficiency.

I'd imaging most clients feel this way dealing with BlandOcom or whatever they're called this week. 

Dirty and used.

And for all the purported cheapness and efficiency, ripped-off and time-stolen.

Yes, this is a metaphor. But I don't think it's exactly like reading something obtuse by Gerald Manly Hopkins or Ezra Pound in a psychosis. 

It's pretty easy to get.

We're so efficient we've made everything suck efficiently.

That's not a joke, son.

The (Not-Lost) Art of Writing Headlines.

I don't see a lot of ads nowadays.

Partly because there's no more print.

Partly because I have every adblocker known to humans.

Partly because I use one of those esoteric non-surveillance browsers that sits just shy and to the left of wearing a tin-foil hat.

And partly because I no longer can deal with television. Especially during the trumpocalypse. 

And mostly because every time I do see or hear something, it's so aggressively stupid in the first mille-second that I've effectively blocked it by the second mille-second. 

Even the latest Spike Jonze (who's no Spike Jones, btw) Apple five-minute spot, had me playing it at double speed. Even so, I lasted just 24-seconds.

A lot of my disdain is that ads no longer talk to peoples' brains. They talk only to their impulse or their wallets. If everything in the world is twenty-percent off, buy one get one free, and part of a Spring into savings sale-a-bration, nothing is. 

I repeat.

When everything is on sale, nothing is.

When everything is loud, nothing is.

When everything is the same, nothing is noticed.

We don't notice anything because nothing is notable, noteworthy or even noticeable.

The funny thing is (funny to me, anyway) is I see a lot of great writing, a lot of great headlines, in a lot of places. Just not in advertising. 

Take a look at this, which I just pulled from an email from Princeton University Press.

I've written 20,000 headlines over the last forty years. I'm not sure I've ever written one as good as above. And mind you, this is for a book from an academic press. This book will not be a best-seller. (It might not be a seller at all.)

Yet, someone took the time to write it, to design it, to approve it.

Someone decided, "That's new. That's different. That's interesting. That provides value to the reader."

All criteria missing from modern marketing (mis)communications.

Here are a few more. All from the same obscure Princeton University Press email. 

I'd imagine there are people reading this who are now cursing me and saying to themselves, "George. You're talking apples and oranges. You're interested in the classics. And these book topics and titles are inherently more interesting."

I thought of that just now on my hundred-yard walk to the mailbox. 

On the way back I flipped through the latest issue of The New Yorker that just arrived. And only ten days late as if I lived in Burundi.

Mind you, the New Yorker has an affluent and well-educated readership cohort. It probably overlaps with people who get emails from the Princeton University Press.

I saw these ads. Not even the worst of the 50 or so in this week's magazine.

There is nothing inherently uninteresting about comfortable shoes, taking an expensive cruise, or a well-made mattress. But each of these ads is so insipidly bland that I believe they'd actually suppress sales. People seeing them might say, "they're too care-less and dumb for me to even consider."

If the best selling point you can derive for a cruise that probably costs $20,000 for two is that you can a) dive in the sea and b) walk through a town square, I'd say you didn't try very hard. Likewise the Skechers Grinturbation. BTW, the "no touching shoes part is offensively wrong. If you're feet are in them, you've touched them. Likewise the Avocado mattress ad. I'm 67 years-old I've never once laid on an un-sheeted mattress with my keister pointing to the heavens in post-orgasmic repose.

I've posted what follows about one-hundred-and-eight times before. My friend Neil Raphan gave it to me before I taught a class for him at School of Visual Arts. That was thirty-two years ago.

The spiel was, there's really not that much a creative director has to do. Or, if a creative director insists on answers to just a few questions the work will improve. 

This point seems to be as forgotten as kindness, manners and good jokes.

It can't be as hard as ad people are making it look.

A Rite of Passage.

One of the meanest effects of working under an ageist regime while at an ad agency isn't people calling you "grandpa." It's the people who run the agency who think that because you're old, you've run out of ambition.

They think you've run out of ambition.

When ambition--chasing dreams, challenging yourself, doing something new, better, different is what makes us alive and human.

If an institution thinks you've run out of ambition, they think you're dead. 

Likewise, if they think you can't keep up, or aren't somehow cool, that's they're way of regarding you as dead. When you regard someone as dead, it's easier to pass them over for big assignments, give them the grunt work, and make sure they never get a raise. 

Why should they? 

You've run out of ambition. (And you don't know the latest music, as if that were the sine qua non of advertising.)

Lately, in about the past two weeks, I've had half-a-dozen calls from people who after 15 years, or 25 years, or 35 years in the business, have run out of rope. 

They've been shit-canned. They're scared. They might not know me, but because of my seeming after-life success, they feel they can talk to me. Talking to them is my obligation, if not privilege. Talking to younger people has always been the biological imperative--a reason for being--of older people.

Here's what I've learned from these many conversations. Grab a pencil.

Most people think "Rites of Passage," leaving one period of youth, like hanging with your friends to dating, or leaving high school for college, or getting a proper office job, or getting married or starting a family, is a young person's game. 

Getting your haircut by yourself, or going to the movies alone--those of Rites of Passage. Most people think you're done-finished with them at 23 or something.

Let me tell you something, 67-year-olds go through Rites of Passage too.

And they're just as challenging as the first time you called a pretty girl on the telephone and asked her to the movies.

Rites of Passage are also an old person's game.

When after 40 years of being given assignments, you have to get an assignment--that's a Rite of Passage.

When you have to look at the prevailing industry dayrate and tell your prospective client you're asking for twice that, or three times--that's a Rite of Passage.

When you get that twice or three-times--that's a Rite of Passage.

The first time a client tries to stiff you--that's a Rite of Passage.

When you work alone and realize you've gone four days without laughing with a friend--that's a Rite of Passage.

When you win a major award on work you've done completely on your own--from getting the client, to selling the work, to producing it, to entering the award show--that's a Rite of Passage.

The reality is, if you've not 'hung up your cleats,' if you keep growing and learning and striving, Rites of Passage are to your right, your left, your front, your back. They're everywhere, every day.

But the biggest Rite of Passage is one of self-definition. 

So much of our careers, we're defined by the agency we work at. I liked being regarded as "the youngest Creative Group Head in the history of Ally & Gargano." Or "the oldest creative fuckface at R\GA." Or, simply, "the head of copy at the world's greatest copy-driven agency, Ogilvy."

Those extrinsic definitions are gone when you leave those places.

Now what?
Who are you?
What makes you want-able?
What do you do?
What makes you special?

Why should someone pick you?
Not someone cooler, younger, better looking?
Cheaper?

That's a Rite of Passage.

Answering those questions and a thousand more is where the people who call me often start to cry. 

Yes--that's a Rite of Passage.

You decide what's right--that's a Rite of Passage.

Wriggling. Wriggling. Wriggling.

I suppose it's as human as farting.

As a species, we find ways to focus on everything but what's important.

Agencies announce, seemingly weekly, their triumph as Network of the Year, seldom paying attention to the fact that they lose 20-percent of their revenue and 30-percent of their people annually. As Yogi Berra is said to have said, "sure we're lost. But we're making good time." 

That might be a good epigram for our species.

The religious wars that have destroyed the world many times over and wiped out hundreds of millions of people, were usually about some peculiarity of interpretation of some obscure point of debate. The nature of the Trinity. They were rarely about doing unto others. 

The examples are countless. And they continue to accumulate. Like snowflakes in Frost's woods. Or lies from Washington.

Paul Fussell in "The Great War and Modern Memory," widely regarded as one of the greatest histories ever written, wrote about such "ironies."

In advertising, individually and as an industry, we grasp at every new new thing. A new director. A new Adobe tool. A new AI protocol. A new way of slicing data. New generation. New "cultural" signpost, aka, fad.

We are so headlong in the pursuit of the new that we ignore the always been.

One of the most intelligent columns in any journal that's still standing, is the "Bartleby" column in "The Economist." There is usually more vim in a single Bartleby column than there are in a trillion Seth Godin blatherings. Not to mention a LinkedIn post from a holding company impotentate.

What's more the name of the column, after Melville's Scrivener--and perhaps history's first 'quiet quitter,' is so adroit it almost makes me angry. Oh well. As Melville wrote in Chapter 86, 'The Tail', of "Moby Dick," "In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority." As a species and as a tribute to Melville, we wriggle away from consistency.

This week's Bartleby column is about repetition. And how we ignore it to our own detriment. 

We certainly ignore repetition in advertising. Where we change campaigns way too often. As often as clients change agencies or agencies change teams. Or agencies replace C-suites.

As creatives and as an industry, we make the colossal mistake in believing something registers just because you said it once. Anyone who's ever been in a relationship with someone else knows that that idea is as stupid as a musk. As the old Henny Youngman joke goes, "I have to say everything to my wife three times. She ignores two-thirds of everything I say." 

What's extra dumb is that in response to the demise of the three network era when repetition ruled the airwaves (Two, two, two mints in one) rather than redoubling our single-mindedness as media became schizoid, we became schizoid along with it. You can't out fractal a fractal. You can only out-focus it.

The Economist writes:

In communications--in advertising--we've prioritized new (not news) over consistency. I think of a probably apocryphal story I attributed to Ted Bates of the old Ted Bates agency. He's showing a client around the agency and the client says, "We haven't changed our campaign in ten years. What do all these people do? Bates replied, "They keep you from changing it."

A Stanford University study (for those of you who still believe in facts) reports:

Much of my business comes to me because I have the temerity to ask clients "what do you do/make/sell? How is it different? What's your 'Ultimate Driving Machine.'?"

Realizing they can't answer me, they usually write me a check.

Luckily, I usually get repeat business.

Speaking of repetition, let me end with another Henny Youngman one-liner: Everytime I ask what time it is,
I get a different answer.

Downed. But Not Out.

Sometimes, I'll be candid, working essentially by yourself sucks.

You're out on a limb.

You have to find two new pieces of business a month.

You have to create the proposals.

Sell them.

Then do the work.

And sell it.

Then do it all again.

Then hope to be Net45'd.

Often you feel like you're arrayed against colossal forces that have the might and power to crush you like you're a nothing, which of course, you are. 

What's more, the big guys are big. They have the power to control, to a fair degree, prices and deliverables. So you have to, in a sense, get in line. 

You have to follow their rules.

Just now, I read the obituary of the last RAF fighter who defeated the Nazis in the Battle of Britain. "Paddy" Hemingway died earlier this week in Dublin at the age of 105. You can read the obituary here.

I can't help but think he didn't follow the rules of the game.

Churchill said of this band of flying brothers “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” 

If you need convincing, here's some data. 

Just 749 RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes faced off against 2,550 German fighters and bombers. Data is numbers. Numbers don't know how account for soul.

Further, most of those Germans had had more practice. They had flown scores of combat missions in eastern Europe, Poland and during the war in Spain.

Actually reading Hemingway's obituary is astounding. He was downed four different times by the Germans. One time he described it this way. It almost sounds nonchalant. 

“Somebody clobbered me. They hit me in the engine. It covered the inside of the cockpit with oil, and things got very smelly and hot. I had no hope of getting to England, so I bailed out and landed in the sea.

"There were jellyfish everywhere, I started swimming. Two hours later, a rowboat from a lightship bumped into me.”

Hemingway grabbed an oar and helped row the small boat back to Blighty.

I find hope in obituaries and stories like Hemingway's. Today when almost everyday the little guy is being kicked in the arse by gigantic forces, people like Hemingway show that fighting back, and yes, winning is not an impossibility.

Hemingway, as you'd expect, sums things up well.

“Being the last of the Battle of Britain veterans has made me think of those times. Fate was not democratic. New pilots with just a few hours in Hurricanes did not have the instincts of us more experienced pilots and were very vulnerable in combat. Many did not last long.”

No, fate is not democratic.

Actually very little is.

If there's a lesson in all this, it's about survival. 

It's best told, of course, in by Hemingway.

“I am here because I had some staggering luck and fought alongside great pilots in magnificent aircraft with ground crew in the best air force in the world at that time. It was just a matter of taking each day at a time. Others write the history — we were doing our job.”

That's it.

In five words.

We were doing our job.

That's what you do. You ignore the odds. And buckle down.

Priest. And Desist.

Because I read widely and voraciously, and without supervision, or even people to discuss things with, I probably arrive at a lot of stupid conclusions. A result of my limited knowledge, limited intelligence and leaps of logic. That's ok. Sometimes the best starts are false starts. And at least I'm not merely parroting things I've heard some talking head somewhere say.

Lately I've been thinking about language and literacy. I'm thinking about it because in the era of AI, or Quantum, or whatever we want to call it next, the only people the potentates of government and industry will consider literate, or intelligent, are those who can read, write and think in AI.

I suppose we used to say that about HTML. Or English. Or before that, Latin or Greek, Mandarin or Aramaic.

From a long-history point of view, humankind, from our earliest permanent settlements about 12,000 years ago, has always had a priestly caste.

These are people, usually, who can see things, read things, understand things, decipher things that ordinary people can't. Again, 12,000 years ago, they might have been able to tell the populace what a red star in the skies meant, or a two-headed fish, or a white raven. These things were signs that resonated and had to be explained. Often they were used as metaphors for larger predictions. Like the Roman emperors who saw a cross in the sky and quickly said, "In Hoc Signo Vinces." 

In this sign, we will conquer.

We've always had people who could compel us to believe in the power of what they could see and we couldn't. When I was a little boy, Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ's Secretary of Defense, was able to look at rows of numbers and convince us that we were winning in Vietnam.

The priestly caste is alive and well. 

Today, many of them live in Silicon Valley, have private jets and islands and are helping ru(i)n the country. Their names are Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Cook.

They're priests.

They have the ear of the gods (technology) and can propitiate the gods--that is, placate them, because they have access to the gods that those of us not in the priestly caste don't.

From their digital pulpits they give their Sermons on the Mount. Their views that they in their enlightenment have and you in your darkness are too dumb to see.

The world has always been led by Priestly classes who have and keep power because they can read languages the rest of us can't. In most of Europe until the Reformation, or the King James Bible, or the Enlightenment, the word of god, the preaching of god was only available to the masses (that's you and me) through priests as conduits. The Christian Bible was written in Latin. And only priests and a few learned people could read Latin. That extra knowledge is how priests stay in power.  The minute knowledge becomes "democratized" they change what knowledge is important.

It's how the priests and the elite stay above the people. Like a banker at Goldman Sachs or a wily baseball coach. They know what moves to make because they see things we can't.

Right now, AI is the language of the gods. It's the language that will reveal the future and make it.

We know this because the people who invented AI tell us this about ten-thousand times a day. In advertising, data is the language of the gods. The few people and agencies who can read the future in the entrails of binary code will win the big pieces of business and become the head of a holding company.

But...Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or Quis custodiet ipsos datades? Who will guard the data?

False gods, prophets, leaders always have and always will be with us. The tablets from on high, Mao's Red Book, the Ten Commandments, the Tweets of rump, will be as off as often as they're on.

The uniforms change. The teams really don't.

A lot of people ask me about AI. I was involved in it early on, participating heavily in the launch of IBM Watson. I derive most of my not inconsiderable income from companies selling or using AI. Since those heady IBM/Ogilvy days when it looked like conquering cancer, cleaning air, stopping crime etc etc were just around the corner, new and smarter AIs have been introduced by new and smarter priests. Deep Seek. ("That's not funny, it's seek.")

We're told how great it's all going to be, usually accompanied by a warning that AI could displace us and in some metaphorical way "eat our heads."

When people tell me this, how X will improve Y, how AI will make customer service better and AI-enabled chatbots will ease getting my cable-bill reduced and streamline everything I do (the same sort of things advertising people say about data) I usually get a glassy look on my face. Like Phyllis Diller about twelve-minutes after rigor-mortis takes hold.

Why haven't I seen it, I ask.
Why does everything suck?
Why, never in my life, have I never gotten the right message at the right time right how I want it?

If it's all so splendid, where the fuck is it.

Then I ask the priests, where's the EZ-Pass effect from AI? When EZ-Pass took hold, I kept no more change in my car's ash-tray, no more waiting at toll-booths, no more delays. It made things faster in reality, not just in promise.

Priests, if you're out there, where's mine?

I hear about seamless experiences.
I hear about my needs being anticipated and met before I realize I have a need.
I hear about a veritable heaven on earth.

You get that inside information and have told me so.

Just like Armageddon, or the Elysian Fields, or Valhalla, or tip-toeing through the tulips. It's all gonna be great--any day now.

This is not to say that all priests are false prophets or that no good has come from AI and other advanced technologies. In fact we need advanced tech to help us overcome the problems of advanced tech. And some people, I suppose, spread truth, light and joy--though I suppose all prophets are false prophets to someone. As Jagger pointed out, Every cop is a criminal/And all the sinners saints. Most things good/bad/peanut butter/jelly are open to interpretation.

But look before you leap and leap before you look.

Clip 'n Save (yourself).