reprint of an earlier broadside
Posted here apropos of the delivery of Part II in very soonage.***************************************************************
MANIFESTO: THE HEAT DEATH OF THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY, PART I
A Superflatmonkey Communique
Here at the mid-point of the first decade of the new Millennium, it is no coincidence that at a time of information technology convergence equally as revolutionary as Gutenberg's printing press, when we are staring in the face not only of instantaneous real-time wireless video teleconferencing on a global scale, but the even greater watersheds of smart paper and thumbprint banking, the mightiest nation on Earth is controlled by factually challenged religious fanatics.
We are living on the knife edge of risk and opportunity, when possibly nothing might stand in the way of total human communication across all boundaries and distances; and yet, what good is that if what we are communicating is not even fertile enough to be called bullshit?
In the downloadable, peer-to-peer, open source culture, commodities as we used to know them have grown obsolete. We have seen short-sighted people try to create bottlenecks and charge a toll; this is the real piracy, not the digital black market, which is still the strongest market on Earth as it always has been. We've tried prohibition before and it just doesn't work as a business model. It's not that "information wants to be free", because information is a thing - it doesn't want anything. We are the ones who want to be free, and the truth of the matter from a Bakuninist [as much as a Buddhist] perspective is that we already are - we are merely struggling against the imposed illusion that we are not.
If we want to profit, we have to examine the rules of profit, not as we hope or imagine them to be, but as they really are. And the first rule of profit is not "Buy cheap and sell dear", nor is it "Never give a sucker an even break"; both maxims, in the end, contain their own hidden costs that only the suicidally stupid can afford to ignore, and only the retarded can pretend never to have learned from the most painful experience.
No, the first rule of profit is, simply, "It is always cheaper - and infinitely more profitable - to sell the customer something she or he already owns."
