doing business in a culture of damaged trust
as professional snake oil salesman, the culture of mistrust in which we live in this first decade of the new millenium isn't a challenge - it's a goldmine to the adventurous, to the daring.how could this be so?
let me put it to you straight. until now, business was done by pulling the wool over people's eyes. making silk purses out of sow's ears, and vice versa. holding one's customers - one's constituency, if you will - in contempt. the idea was to eat people, basically - or burn them like presto logs, make lampshades and soap out of them. k. w. jeter's prophetic novel, noir, described the concept of "TIAC™", or "Turd In A Can", which is really a hyper-realization of typical pre-millenial practices, being replaced with "TOAW™", or "Turd On A Wire" - no turd, not even any can - just robbing people. or as some people glibly call it, Dotcommunism.
naturally, most intelligent human beings, assuming there are any left, don't trust us, as well they shouldn't; and the rest will follow wherever they lead.
lying to people the old way isn't just bad for business - it's not what's for sale any more. instead, we are proposing a new format:
catering the lies to the self-deceptive whims our clients require.
people more than anything want to buy an idea of themselves. the question is, how durable is j. crew's idea of the self, or gap's idea of the self, or banana republic's idea of the self? let alone, target or wal-mart's idea of the self? well, we know some ideas of the self that are very durable:
1. white/black/etc.
2. jewish/catholic/muslim/etc.
3. democrat/republican/etc.
4. liberal/conservative/libertarian/etc.
5. american/french/etc.
6. marxist/capitalist/etc.
7. gay/straight/bi/trans/etc.
let's leave the list at lucky 7 for now.
our premise is that even these ideas of self are up for grabs, and soon discerning clients with capital to spend are going to want new ones.
some new fulcrums/pivot points where we may be able to aim our laser beams in the future:
1. "human/post-human"
2. "terrestrial/extra-terrestrial"
3. "biological/post-biological"
4. "mortal/immortal [or post-mortal]"
you get the picture. what's important to recognize is that these are about ideas of self, not so much actualities - so it's irrelevant whether people are, in fact, post-human, extraterrestrial, actual blood sucking vampires, etc. - just that they enjoy thinking of themselves that way and will pay us money to help them sustain that illusion.
so the fulcrums/pivot points for the consumer vs. marketer relationship here, then, are as follows:
1. sell me an image that looks like what i dream of being but no amount of excercise, diet, surgery, or costume change could ever make possible - and remember, that's the image, no thing itself - no clothes or accessories, that's for some other mook to dick around with
2. sell me a world where a creature like that moves - and again, not a real "world", not a ticket, not even a movie with great special effects, just the pitch
3. sell me exclusivity - in other words, keep others out.
now the important thing to note here is that in the 21st century and beyond, the new infotech/infoecon prevents real exclusivity, so a large part of what we sell is a sort of imagined, ideational exclusivity.
the way you accomplish this, of course, is imagining a package that is desireable yet shameful.
in other words -
we are going to sell people the Human Shadow.
even better, what this implies is we are going to sell them a part of themselves - in other words, we are going to sell them something they already own.
how fucking perfect is that???!
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