Within the internet, we live in our own personalized echo
chambers. The dark side effect, we have become psychotically intolerant of
anything outside our safe spaces. Borrowing from McLuhan, the medium has become
our lifestyle. We now live on a planet that never looks up, never looks in each
other’s eyes. We’ll never see the meteor coming.
Lifestyle Marketing.
It’s one of the most effective ways to sell things. The
fashion, apparel, perfume, automobile, travel, sports, outdoor and other
consumer industries depend on it. It’s about segmenting and beguiling human
beings to transform them from disinterested parties into devoted purchasers. It’s
brainwashing for financial gain. Since the days of Madison Avenue and Marshall
McLuhan, America has become probably the most finely tuned consumer selling
machine ever known to mankind. We have conditioned consumers to snobbishly
crave products and hate alternatives not on measures of objective utility; but
on how well they soothe our egos.
Many of us now have more virtual friends than real life ones.
Author Julie Albright’s recent book, “Left to their Own Devices” chronicles how
human value systems are changing because we have put our lives on the net; how
we have become utterly alone with a tiny portal in our hands to experience the
life. Humanity has become lonelier even as it has become more wired. Lifestyle
marketing has achieved its apex goal, a world where humans almost entirely
connect via machines designed to package and sell personal dreams.
We are entertained by the popularity of fads. A plethora of
fads. Transient fads the go viral and just as quickly disappear. Fads segmented
and tailored for each one of us. It’s made us hyper-tribal. Intolerant to
degrees we would, until very recently, never be in person. We have become afraid
to speak out of turn lest we be judged and rejected for being “incorrect”. Or
vocal about our views so that we block off those who don’t soothe our fragile
feelings. Either way, it’s a dysfunctional, traumatic experience to navigate. We
allow ourselves to be codependent on people we’ve never met, or barely know,
for affirmation. We declare everyone else to be blood enemies.
I’ve always viewed social justice to be one of those fads. Invented
by academics to deconstruct theories of societal organization and analyze them,
it morphed into a pop culture tool to bludgeon people. The feeling of
entitlement and elitism being able to write one’s own rulebook with impunity in
any way you’d like to imagine. It is the drug permeating the internet.
It is a cancer-causing drug that is killing our souls. Plurality,
that tolerance respect for disparate values, ceases to have practical meaning
in such prickly times. It is replaced with an ocean of hate groups, each one
thinking they are the most virtuous. And underneath the noise makers, an
orphaned society struggling to find its voice to call bullshit.
Artifacts of a Changing World.
This system that serves the demigod of the for-profit echo
chamber may be omnipresent, but it’s still a house of cards. It’s built on a ground
rule and assumption that you can exploit lifestyle marketing forever without
consequence. Such grand assumptions have never been true. Every innovation has
a half-life. Every belief set reaches a threshold of impracticality.
I believe we are beginning to see some of the tenets of the
social justice fad weakening. I’m a bit of a student of societal artifacts. I’ve
been studying for a while corporate sustainability reporting, an element of a
public company’s financial filings. Investors know them as 10-K’s, 10-Q’s, 8-K’s
and other documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
SEC filings are an echo chamber of sorts that gives you
insight into what businesses America considers to be their “safe spaces”. Don’t
be fooled into thinking every company is unique. That’s not how the so-called
soft and squishy part of business works. It’s more like lemming.
The reality is that the sustainability portion of a company’s
filings is more like the practice of carbon copying what lawyers and risk
consultants tell you will work to put into that section, what the safest thing
to say is. At any time, corporate America is likely to pretty much be saying
the same thing.
It’s faddish just like any other fad. For some time, copying
and pasting approved platitudes about social justice and environmental
sensitivity have been considered the “safe” words.
That’s beginning to not be the case. In the Internet
triggered era, such platitudes have themselves become the seeds of corporate
reputational risk. As social attitudes change, and in America they change and
rebalance very quickly, they lead markets to question if corporate management
and governance are acting in the best interest of the company. Let’s look at
some case studies,
Nike, Inc.
Nike is part of the apparel industry. It is one of the most
aggressive users of lifestyle marketing to carve out market share in a highly
competitive environment. Nike relies on edgy attitude to not only spot fads and
trends; but to make them. They walk the fine line of whom to extoll and who to
disrespect in the name of aiming for maximum sales volume.
Politics aside, there’s serious mathematics in the economic
calculus of a company like Nike. Inventory is just one element in a larger
evaluation. For instance, to sell or junk a shoe design. If a few people in the
core demographic of trendy social justice lifestyle buyers indicate they might
get a little uncomfortable, is it better to take a write down loss on the shoes
and parlay it into lots of free viral advertising that will make Nike’s core
lifestyle purchaser’s affinity grow? For the Nike’s of the world, that’s a
decision they ponder all the time.
But increasingly, it’s not a decision that doesn’t also come
with business sustainability risks. Attitude can radically alter what market
segments you have access to. There was a reason the Betsy Ross Flag show design
made it all the way into stores. Someone at Nike did the research that said
there was purchase intention there; that the market is turning.
In my opinion, Nike management chickened out. There was no
danger their core market was going to abandon them. They went for the “safest
word” in their version of corporate sustainability. They elected to not offend the
market share they knew instead to exploring how to expand their business to
address objectively found emerging areas of demand.
That’s leaving money on the
table for competitors. That’s hardly ever a good thing for a company. Other
lifestyle apparel companies will gain strength wherever they are not. I suggest
that Nike’s board of directors should be asking some serious questions about the
incident.
Quoting tongue in cheek from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Universe, have they crossed their “shoe event horizon”?
CNN
Cable News Network is another company that invested heavily in lifestyle marketing. At one time the world’s premier global news company, CNN made a big bet that Blue America, the world of a Democratic Party controlled national agenda was the media territory that was its path to greatness. It relinquished fair and balanced reporting, gave the right of aisle market to Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News, and put their attention into battling other left of center media outlets for dominance.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump threw a wrench into that
plan. Suddenly, CNN had to make a choice whether to return to the center or
hold out for two years until the mid-term election. They chose the latter and
proceeded to double down on their lifestyle marketing bet.
The network put its lifestyle persona bet on things like
Mueller investigation and it’s ended disastrously. The network’s ratings went
into free fall. They lost 24% share in as of April 2019 and estimated additional
16% of their primetime ratings in the month of May 2019 alone. They now have an
estimated 1/3 the audience of rival FOX. It’s a shadow of Ted Turner’s former empire.
It hasn’t helped CNN retain audience share that the once
invincible Blue Dream of the Democratic Party has descended into it’s own chaotic
nightmare that sees leadership like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader
Charles Schumer being challenge by Saikat Chakrabarti’s Justice Democrat harem
who seem to be as good at confounding the Establishment Democrat leaders on
Twitter as President Donald Trump can. Sparring with AOC? Really Nan? That’s
beneath you.
And then there’s Barack Obama’s prediction of the Democratic
Presidential Primary Race turning into “circular firing squad” playing out like
a zombie apocalypse to the horror of orphaned centrist Democrats and the
delight of Trump’s MAGA voter base.
This is about as perfect a storm as it gets.
This is wounded bird case of corporate failure that just
cannot be ignored. And they’ve run into a merger with AT&T, a company that
runs strictly by the numbers and is looking to economize following the
acquisition of CNN’s parent Time-Warner. The word is that WarnerMedia boss John
Stankey wants CNN to go down the path of developing a digital arm to rival
FOX’s Digital with specializes in aggregating light news to fill the internet and
yield many millions of page hits per day. Can you imagine a world where TMZ has
more meat than the major outlet on the same story? You don’t have to. It’s been
happening at FOX and soon it’ll be happening at CNN too.
That’s kind of a journalist’s version of a perfect storm.
Seeking redemption, I’ve also noted that the opinion section
of CNN online has even begun carrying contributions that are not overtly hostile
to the Trump administration, albeit with the “this op ed does not represent the
opinion of the company” disclaimers prominently on display. Well, post debacle,
one starts somewhere.
That is an artifact that says hell may be freezing over.
CNN are not the only ones centering up. It’s back to business
by the numbers for the industry. My question is whatever possessed them into
thinking dividing the country into political factions was a sustainable
business model? Supernormal return for a while yes. But all overtime pay
eventually ends. CNN got addicted to it. These choices are ending predictably.
Starbucks
There’s probably no business model where managing social
justice expectations is more problematic than a distributed retail franchise
like Starbucks. With just shy of 300,000 employees deployed at over 28,000
stores, touching humans looking up from their phones just long enough to recite
mystical incantations that turn into cups of coffee is about as lifestyle
retail as it gets.
Keeping the balance of peace within the interior of their
store spaces has evolved into some macabre rules. Anyone can be in a Starbucks but
no one can fall asleep in one. That’s a new rule to deal with homeless people
coming in and hanging out in a place designed for people doing business and
homework to come in and hang out while drinking coffee. You used to be able to
take a nap between reading book chapters or composing article paragraphs. No
more of that.
Social justice has the weirdest side effects.
Just as weird is Starbucks being a safe space that isn’t
safe if a bunch of cops come in for coffee. One squeaky wheel patron causes an
employee who, trying to please that person, insults other persons by preventing
them from reciting their magical incantations and getting no coffee with their
misspelled names on them. Then it goes viral on the internet because that’s
what we do in America now whenever safe spaces collide like particles of matter
and anti-matter.
Then, Starbucks corporate must send legions of trainers out
to those 28,000+ locations to teach everyone a new rule that meets the
universal social justice for all algorithm and, of course, to apologize to
anyone that may have been slighted; in press releases so they don’t get
boycotted again.
And Starbucks does send legions because unlike Nike or CNN, their
business economics are about just doing whatever it takes to not pick any
fights with anyone. Besides, there’s hardly enough space in one for a good
fight and the merchandise display racks have breakables.
Is this just a weird version of America or what?
The microcosm of the damage social justice has created in a store
the size of a two-car garage in 28,000 places everyday kind of boggles the mind
when you think about it. It’s disruption without innovation. It kind of irks me
and makes me want to order my coffee using the app on my phone so I never have
to look up. Plus, my name will be spelled correctly on my cup because it’s a
sticker.
Is this really what post-Industrial America is supposed to
be like? Bizzare rules that bear little resemblance to common sense? And we’re
supposed to accept this like happy sheep? Remember what I said about everything
having a half-life earlier? We are stretching too many rubber bands.
There’s something
amiss about believing this is good for ordinary Americans or for America.
Social media companies are finding out just how risky
lifestyle personalization business strategies can be. Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg has been dragged in front of Congress to answer for the sins of an
industry by a hostile government that 20 years ago didn’t want anything to do
with regulating companies like these. Now, Facebook is feared because so many
people have established their digital “second lives” on them. We’ve revealed our
souls to a machine designed to exploit lifestyle personalization to echo
chambers of one person per bubble. A universe where we are connected to each
other only through the Matrix of Facebook’s omniscient engine that decides what
gets through.
And we want that engine to do exactly what each of us
selfishly wants. Connect us perfectly. Amplify our thoughts. Market our
message. Show us only what we want to see. Make us happy. Make our experience
perfect. Make anything we don’t like go away. Punish those we disagree with
harshly because they don’t matter, only we, only I, matter. Make sure noise
from robots and rogues is kept at bay. But not my noise. Push that into every
one’s face please. Oh, and do this for free.
When you step back and breathe, it’s clear that the world
doesn’t really work that way. What does amaze me is how hard Facebook works to
make it come close to that as possible. Implementing technology to reduce noise
in our personal echo chambers.
There are 2.38 billion active users of Facebook per month. Only
190 million of them are in the United States. The cultural echo chamber
separation algorithms that Facebook uses so Americans do not see the other 2.19
billion people on the system is a lot of work just there.
And now, pushed along by the demands of social justice of
every left and right persuasion, there’s the work of separating Americans from
each other in our increasingly self-segregated culture. Armies of human
filterers are becoming algorithmic artificial intelligence and robots tasked to
make everyone happy in their disconnected loneliness.
And there’s more. I noted that there were two kinds of major
earthquakes in California on 4th of July week. One was natural. A magnitude
6.4 and 7.1 earthquake centered around Ridgecrest, California just outside of
what’s called the Long Valley Caldera, the site of an ancient volcano. Maybe
it’s not just meteors we need to worry about.
The other, virtual world earthquake, happened on July 3,
2019. On that day, the image servers of all the properties owned by Facebook,
Inc. which included Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went dark for several
hours while Mark Zuckerberg’s technology team made base object changes to the
entire network. When it came back up, memes from robots, which had begun to
proliferate with divisive political messages, were sparse.
Quoting from another movie metaphor, “A déjà vu means
they’ve made a change to the Matrix.”
The question for Facebook is will this be enough to placate the
hubris of Americans. That’s an unknown. Will that please everyone? No. That’s
impossible. But Facebook can bend reality.
That’s not the important question.
The important question is does demanding Facebook do a
better and better job of keeping us happily alone amount to the right thing for
the United States national interest? Is this really where we want corporate
governance of our infrastructure and our commerce to go? These companies will
do what we tell them to either by themselves or by regulations. What should we
tell them to do?
Ponder again the warning, we are losing plurality and the
need to be tolerant of other Americans as technology makes it ever easier to
never have to look up.
Without that cohesion, are we still Americans?
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