Wednesday 18 December 2019

The new Christmas feel-good factor: weaponising grief for profit



  There’s an advert for a new Apple iPad being shown in cinemas at the moment which delivers an unwarranted, and to my mind cruel, blow to the plexus to anyone who’s been recently bereaved. If that includes you I urge you to get off your seat and leave for the duration if you don’t want to spend the first ten minutes of whatever jolly Christmas film you are there to see stifling sobs into your scarf and wiping snot with your bare hands.

  It starts innocently enough - long minutes tracking the journey of a family of four across America (planes, trains, automobiles) to visit Grandpa. The iPad makes a few appearances along the way, being put to the traditional use of quieting the two squabbling little girls at various points by the weary parents. So far, so cliched. But this iPad is magic, you see, this iPad is different.

  We get to Grandpa’s. Something is not right - cue sad music. The house is cold, uninviting. The old man is grumpy and unsmiling. It turns out Grandma has recently died and Mum/Daughter is there to help Grandpa clear her closets and make sure he's eating right. The two little girls squabble on, to the irritation of all.

  Left alone with old family pictures and ancient video cassettes the girls get working on a project. On Christmas morning they unpack the iPad anew for Grandpa and their handiwork, it is revealed, consists of a childish PowerPoint charting the story of the young grandparents, the growing family, Grandma’s demise and so forth ending with a comforting picture of the family still together at Christmas, at least with the aid of a digital collage. See, Grandma is still here, smiling among us, it’s still us. When the old man’s scowl dissolves into tears so will you.

  Adverts have always made us cry to make us buy. But normal psychological manipulation tends to weaponise more positive human emotions, such as joy. Newborns gurgling, lovers getting together, friends reuniting. It’s still cheap, it’s still not great but it feels less exploitative somehow.

  Using imagined grief (a sentiment presumably still only tangential to the lives of your core customer demographic of young, busy, exasperated parents) to sell tablets strikes me as low for two reasons. The first is that you can throw money at just about anything else but not at grief. Retail therapy might help in a romantic breakup (although that's never been my experience), it can distract you from your mid-life crisis. But shiny new ‘stuff’ can’t assuage the howling sadness caused by the loss of a loved one.

  The second objection is more specific to the product in question. The ad pretends to be about love, showing and sharing love with the aid of clever technology. But Grandma, you see, is still dead. Grandpa is still all alone. Once your leave taking your expensive iPad with you he won’t even be left with the image of his family, complete with smiling Grandma, stuck to his fridge, to look at every so often.

  And all because your insufferably spoilt children can’t be fagged to do an actual collage, using paper, scissors and glue like normal humans. Or maybe they would. But where’s the profit for Apple in that? 

  And since you can only bring down capitalism from within (if at all) I look forward to seeing the actor playing Grandad being hired by Ryan Raynolds for a new Aviation Gin ad. The camera pans away from his dejected face to reveal him sitting in an untrendy bar, drinking himself to death surrounded by his elderly friends. "Drink up mate, have another one". And the pay off line. "Forget those fucking children!". That's an advert I'd toast to.

Wednesday 27 November 2019

Justify your existence internally




Recently, on a not particularly busy day, while processing the usual 150 to 200 emails that flow into my inbox daily, I was inspired to click on one bearing the subject line: Justify your existence internally. 


  I was in a philosophical mood that day, contemplating as I had been doing the pointlessness of life in general and the senseless wasting of my own particular life within the four walls of that particular office. Could the email be the key of some spiritual revelation, something, anything, that would encourage me to live with myself for another day? It turned out to be, of course, the title of a seminar on internal communications.

  It figures.

  The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place, as G B Shaw is widely believed to have observed one hundred year before Twitter was even invented. But even absent the cacophony of social media George Bernard would only have had to spend a couple of hours inside any office to come to his conclusion.  


  Meetings. Meetings about meetings. Pre-meetings, meetings’ agendas and meetings’ minutes. Hours, days of meetings. Short reports, memos, grids and lists. Meeting notes. Relaying meetings to those who weren’t there, email threads, whispered gossip about what happened and who said what. Box-ticking, form-filling, feedback and postmortems to dissect how all of that went.


  No decision is ever reached during a meeting, you understand. The first you hear about a decision is two months after it was taken by someone in authority without consulting anyone and you only find out when you get locked out by the new security system or the website colour scheme turns acid green.


  By then, it is absolutely inappropriate to bring it up in a meeting. That’s not what meetings are for. They are not about the past and they are emphatically not about making things work better going forward. Or foreseeing and mitigating real problems. Or averting possible crises.


  Meetings are about meetings.


  At the end of my working life I’ll be lucky if 20 pc of my time will have been devoted to accomplishing the actual tasks I’ve been nominally paid to do. By the time it’s all over (praise be to god) I will have spent almost 80 pc of my time as a scribe, a compiler of grids and assembler of notes as well as ‘meat in the room’ for endless meetings that won’t result in any change, unless it’s for the worse, due to the total breakdown of communication that is the after effect and the leitmotif of the business of meetings.


  I’m not even angry about this, no longer scandalised or disappointed. I’m simply exhausted. Talked out, minuted out, post-noted and over-listed. Meetings, town halls, memos and complex email threads with an ever-changing cast of 12 people in CC is how the office pond life – that layer of mid-to -top level management whose job titles are completely impenetrable and whose salary level is a daily slap in the face to the rest of the workforce - justifies its existence internally.


  The rest of us, with real tasks, skills, goals and deadlines are just audience, cyber witnesses, clerical courtiers, while our own, one, precious life ebbs slowly away.


  Good luck robots. Do your worst.

Wednesday 20 November 2019

The Upside Down is where shame has gone to die


Stranger things are happening, people. 

Thirty years from the fall of the Berlin wall, it turns out it's possible to gaslight a nation, spread disinformation and anxiety, foment division and hatred and get people to vote for, indeed clamour for, policies which go against their own best interest without a single shot fired or protester tortured.

A willingness and facility to lie, a dormant media (more interested in politics as horse race with occasional televised gladiatorial combats than in thoroughly researching topics and preparing for interviews) and the sheer quantity of information available are all it takes to dull people's critical faculties. Throw in a visible enemy (why not immigrants, that always work!) et voila' your got yourself some tasty, freeze-dried culture war where brains should be.

Twitter, sure, FB, digital tricks and dodgy Russian money - all have contributed to transform our public landscape in a murky Upside Down where white is black and everything ends up grey, fluffy, unsubstantial, un-pin-down-able.  Some of these things are technological and new, some, like corruption, have been with us forever.

But shame is what seals the deal and our fate in this particular political junction; or rather, the absence of it. The death of shame is the water you add to the instant coffee of ideological obsession. My bastard is better than your bastard. My liar is more honourable than your liar. My Islamophobe is classier than your anti-Semite.

In the last couple of days alone we have witnessed the spectacle of the Conservative Party Press Office Twitter account disguising itself as some neutral fact-checking outfit for the duration of the leaders' ITV debate to  propagandise for Johnson, then coolly reverting to its usual title: job done! A bizarre post-propaganda move that proved too much for Twitter itself (and they do have strong stomachs that lot) but is still currently being defended by the Conservative front bench on the ground that 'Labour lies need exposing' and the truly Kafkaesque 'no-one gives a toss about social media'. 

I have myself just got involved (against my best human and comms judgement) in an exhausting twitter exchange with somebody claiming that it's Remainers' scaremongering that's driving much needed EU health professionals away, even while simultaneously claiming that there's way more EU doctors now than in 2016 but there's still shortages because of all the EU immigrants seeking treatment. 

Do people hear themselves? The lack of shame makes us deaf to reason itself.
  
Where is the line? Is there even a line anymore, as our American friends may well have asked when a self-styled pussy-grabber was elected President thanks to evangelicals' and conservative women's votes?

It takes the hapless Prince Andrew, a man so genuinely clueless, so terminally privileged, so comically un-relatable that few can be bothered to rise to his defence, to show us the faint outline of where the line now is. So here we go: when in doubt, don't accept the lavish hospitality of a convicted paedophile: it looks really bad! And if you have done (we are all human) for goodness' sake don't talk about it and hope the whole unseemly row will blow over soon. 

Of course secret, as yet undiscovered, paedophiles are still fine - we don't want to get too puritanical now. As for paedophilia itself, the jury is out of course. I mean, it depends, doesn't it, on who's doing what to whose children, in exchange for what type of incentive and whether a newspaper is about to find out. A blanket policy of revulsion and unconditional censure is, frankly, tantamount to communism.