So I get to this site, and it asks me to take a survey to see the page. I just wanted to, you know, see the cap space on all the teams in the league, you know? I'm (theoretically) making the NBA world a little more comprehensible. I'd been asked a direct question, and I wanted to answer. And so I get to this site. And this site has the audacity to ask me a fairly personal question, you know, or share the page with all my little friends on Facebook or Twitter, so now everyone knows I'm reading this page (I haven't read it yet!) or some anonymous marketer somewhere gets to look at his quarterly numbers and say "Thank God for Alex Dewey; we can go to Aruba now." I don't even know where Aruba is, and, frankly, you know, I don't think I'd want to. I thought about it and closed the web site without getting that information. Other places would have it.
But like, here's the thing... like, I was curious, because, like, I've seen this a few places, newspapers and all that, and it pissed me off every time, right? So I started researching it. I was curious, you know, what's the protocol for society when someone invents something that immediately annoys us? What's the proverbial ventilation for our social irritants?
And I say this because I was honestly somewhat disturbed. I looked for a few minutes on Google, and that stretched out into 20-30 minutes. And, like, there wasn't a single person outraged enough to give this crap even, you know, a "B minus"! Like, really, no one! No one was complaining. The only people that were going out of their way to blog about it were blogs about marketing, you know, or business magazines. And of course, all of them were pleased as punch. Because it's Google, you know, which runs the world of ads. Most of them had spoken with Google directly! Do you know what I mean? Like, most of their information was filtered through Google as a primary source, or even through running the campaigns themselves on their site. There was not a single designated user of the product that ever weighed in. All of the complaints (even in the comments of the blog) were like "But can't we ask them like... a hundred questions instead? That would be a lot more statistically valid!" or "Yeah, getting two questions from a random user base is probably not very valuable." It was just marketers talking to marketers about marketing, as if we're chopped liver.
You know, like, I get that advertising has to exist. Necessary evil and all that, but I just think it's screwed up that the only people really overseeing what kind of messages, you know, we're sending our kids with 7 minutes out of every half-hour, and on every website? The sort of standards that our advertisers on the web are creating? Those people... those people are also advertisers. I'm not generalizing to say advertising is created and critiqued by people that don't really give a shit about us as people. Okay, that's a bit too far. To put it more fairly, we're mainly investments to them. We're the product that advertisers are selling to companies. Specifically, our ability to buy things, but really, the way ads are structure, it's us personally. The way we think about things, the things we think about, the way we talk to friends, all of it is both commodity and impediment, and they seek to change the essence of that mixture using almost purely rhetorical means. The most important part of their jobs is making it harder in some sense to get at the entertainment we want without being openly manipulated. You get what I'm saying? And the only people overseeing them are themselves openly manipulating us, and are actually scholarly in their approach.
Look, these guys are craftsman at manipulating people's purchasing decisions. I mean, we have this culture of purchasing, which is kind of messed up, but, like, also incredibly liberating in another way. Yes, it's terrible that we are all so busy that we have to substitute facsimiles for experiences and advertising for real shared culture experience, in general. I can deal with that, because there is an earnest core to it, at base. We are busy because we are creating and cultivating a great nation. It's unfortunate, but it can't be helped. What bugs me is that the overseers are not true critics; they are nitpickers of efficiency. "It's awful that you're advertising tequila by using a children's theme". "Why?" "Because most of the people we're targeting have depressing lives, sure, but we're also going after people with depressing childhoods. That's why their lives are so depressing. And your ad completely ignores that demographic. Come on, step up your game." "okay"
I'd imagine a lot of people care (at least a little) about privacy, about usability, about the sinister subtexts of ads that now define a terrifyingly not-quite-marginal slice of our culture. But their number will always be silent and their power will always be dwarfed by the people who have been enticed by our purchasing power to manipulate us. And so it goes that our creativity and time are being attacked by the inevitable product of that creativity and time.
It's not really in my scope to define an alternative to something so pervasive. I just wish I could have a basketball game on and my windows open and not feel like I'm peddling wares to my neighbors. I'm gifted at music and writing, and I love to do these things. And yet, the crap my neighbors have to hear is a sexual ad for Sprint or a cutesy ad targeting young consumers to State Farm. And these are relatively entertaining, well-made ads! "Close your window". Yeah, but it's basketball, it's one of my passions. It's a team sport that is fully actualized in the context of people cooperating and competing on a stage. It's just a bit ironic that I have to close my window or mute it just to solve this problem, put it that way. Does that make sense?
I'm not great at socializing and most of how I communicate with others is through creative self-expression, stuff that has taken me a long time to learn how to do and that I'm even proud of, occasionally. And yet, mommy's got some things for daddy to do, that height of banality!, must emanate from my speakers unless I take special care to avoid it. The NBA (and NCAA basketball) is paid for by advertisers, owners, and ultimately ticket-buying fans with purchasing power. Advertisement is a necessary part of the equation. But it's a beautiful game, and, you know what? The public is pouring a lot of money into stadiums in colleges and pro arenas, and they're not even guaranteed to keep a team. The NBA doesn't seem especially charitable on the money front. Their recurring opt-out and blackout restrictions for League Pass (ostensibly their most loyal fans) are and have been laughable. Their service for fans has been better, and they haven't been insane about shutting down Youtube highlights of Dennis Rodman like they're the unmonetized manifestation of Satan. But they blackmail cities, and openly want to encourage bidding wars between cities just for the right to have a team and a gigantic arena, as if it's a privilege to have another venue around, and not a serious commitment that the NBA itself has shown itself unwilling to make.
Basketball is a beautiful game, but I sometimes feel vulgar when it comes to sports and TV and movies. Because when I promote what I think is a testament to team sports or an excellent matchup of teams, I'm also promoting that darker side of the equation, that manipulation. And it makes me sad that with our culture everything that causes us enjoyment with one hand seems to cause us manipulation on its second hand, and even the only respites from this - to be truly alone or to be truly in the company of others - are poisoned at their core with the seeds of prior manipulations, and manipulations yet to come.
I'm not trying to be melodramatic about this. There are serious problems in the world, and in our country, and we've solved a lot of prior problems, and that aggregate of solutions - right or wrong - is, as Drake might say, our here. In some sense, the question "How did we get here?" is always materially the previous sentence at its essential core. "Why do we have nationalism?" Because nations presented themselves as a superior alternative to feudal societies, which were far more oppressive. And once nations had been established, nationalism was a natural consequence. Point being that you can't just critique a solution to solve it, there has to be something more essential about the problem that makes it somehow unbearable and seemingly necessary to change. This is our essential conservatism, and it serves us well.
But it's awful, and it's surprising that for all our wealth and power as a nation, that we haven't found a better solution than to have our most treasured cultural creations tied inextricably to perceived ability of manipulators to connect viewers to products. If I sound oblivious, well, I didn't watch TV except through downloads mostly, once I got to college. And recently, I only watch basketball on TV, finding other means for shows like Breaking Bad. But I stayed at a Holiday Inn while moving, and it occurred to me that I really could never get a grasp on the shows because the ads take you out of the moment just long enough that you have to refocus. It really was a shock to see how strongly the ads come on. To watch a 30 minute show with 10 of those minutes being interruptions is an embarrassing experience. It really poisons the well, and suddenly "what's good that's on" is tinged with "what's reasonably non-manipulative" as a natural second question. And I don't want to adapt to the second question so I can ask the first question more readily. I'd already adapted when I was a kid and my long absence from its wares really illustrated that it's not the kind of adaptation to be cultivated.
I realize I probably sound like a character in making this rant, a Lovecraftian protagonist stuck inexplicably in a technological era. But I'm no Luddite, I'm no deranged critic. I love to listen to all kinds of music, including today's, I love to watch all kinds of shows. I love to talk with people and think about the things that present themselves to us today and in our past and future. I'm not worried that advertising is somehow diluting the purity of my thoughts or some other crap like that. I just think that the effect ads have on my thoughts and speech is cluttering and irritating and lacking in dignity when noble and lacking in passion when animalistic. I want to go to the darker places of my mind and the brighter places of my mind. I don't want someone to associate each of those places with a cute singer just because I fell asleep watching MTV, and I don't want our society to be predicated so much on this stuff.
I don't know, maybe I'm off-base, but hell, I'm a writer. I wrote. I think I was reasonably responsible about presenting things without forcing my opinion on you. That's all I can do. That's all I've ever claimed to do. I sometimes have an arrogant tone, but I just see it like... hey, I tried to come correct, and what more can you really do? Ads don't need to justify themselves. Their justification is the money they later bring in. Justifying my pieces is a long process fraught with anxiety and later self-doubt, cynicism and writing later paragraphs about how I sometimes sound arrogant and apologizing. If a product is bought only in a hubristic mania? Then the ads will not apologize for sounding arrogant. They will be rejoiced over in champagne-laden meetings. Which is not at all a judgmental stab at the victorious drinkers but only at the table at which they drink and the way our society has them pay their tab.
I wonder what brings anyone to this site, random chance and search engines and a few that really like it. I've never really advertised it, which is sort of irresponsible and ironic in the context of this little rant. And yet, I genuinely feel through good and bad I've done my best to cultivate it, and even have a modicum of professionalism, whatever the hell that means for a blog containing mostly broad, humor-laden fiction.
The thing about ads is that... like, intentionally or not I've been going deeper into introspection as I write this essay. I'm advised by the culture I've consumed how to place myself in the world, and by the company I keep how to understand my actions and ambitions and thoughts. I don't believe in God, incidentally. Random chance is not an appealing hypothesis, but ascribing properties to the director when we're not sure how big the bathtub is where we're being filmed? Might provide some comfort, but I don't need or want that. But I try to place myself relative to the boat that I live in, is my point. It's small but, relatively speaking, I make my way through my segment of the world. And you know what? We can keep going deeper into the nature of the boat, and what it says about the bathtub or ocean in which we sit. It's in our nature to keep asking questions, and we can always keep going deeper as persons and as societies. And ads... really can't go any deeper, because all they are is a reminder of the swamp behind, of our relentless need. And, if we're being honest, the same is true for the shows and sports and movies in which they are found. Culture is a nice ornament that gives us tangible distance from the struggling and sloppy and salacious swamp of pre-civilization, despite our need for these things being still mired. We're still there, but we want to feel we're not. We seek comfort in the best storytellers because we need a story to frame ourselves, and a good story quells that sickening feeling that we really don't have a story after all. Writers can write about problems, but they (least of all I) can't solve them. You know what will solve the problem of ads? Probably a thing that hasn't been invented yet, or a new synthesis of things that have been, which is precisely the same thing. Or human extinction .The problem of ads, my point being, will be solved by a solution that subsumes it; or will be worsened by a solution that enhances its importance.
And so what am I doing? Plugging away at a blog of my interest, that I can hopefully make of interest to others? Playing in a sandbox, a template with which to improve my craft of writing? To what end? Just because words flow through me, to satisfy the mechanical impulse and express what I need to? Is this just a valve, an outlet for a repressed personality that can't find too much purchase in fellow human beings and can't find enough time or patrons for what he sees as purer passions, such as math or Bach or Chekhov? Advertisers are not corrupters, they are simply the desentimentalizing demystifiers of our existing corruption, our existing failure to end war, and famine, and disease, and have transportation that doesn't cost so much, and having institutions of education that actually teach, and have, basically, a society that actually takes its wealth and love of freedom and combines it with a rigorous approach to social institutions, not just blase socialism or know-nothing anti-governmental sentiment, but a genuine acknowledgment that government exists, and yet, a genuine acknowledgement that - in its present form - it follows no principles, is not humane, is inherently and particularly averse to human liberty, and subsidizes things for no other reason than for political power-brokering. We need to solve everything before we can solve advertising. We need to solve everything in the world before we can have even one moment of peace that is more than the belated absence of conflict.
Anyway, enough of that, did you hear RJ made it to the second round? And he's going to play the Spurs? I will almost certainly write at least three pieces, purely on this subject. Nothing will stop me.
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