Do NOT Deny Science!

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Half-Assed Regulations Ultimately Don't Save Us

I've been balking for months at the ridiculous television ads for the Smoke-Free Illinois Act (formerly the Illinois Clean Indoor Air Act) that promise "air free of cancer-causing toxins" when the only difference in the air is a lack of cigarette smoke. There are still other toxins in the air, and plenty of other ways to get cancer other than from those airborne toxins. Cancer aside, think of all the other irritants polluting our indoor air: wearers of too much cologne, bearers of body odor (ranging from homeless dude to indie rocker in severity), and pet owners who transmit pet dander (allergens) on their skin, hair and clothing. Is our legislature sincerely trying to improve air quality, or just pretending to save people from their beloved vices? Take a guess.

In Illinois, 71.82% of us believe that smoking a pack or more a day poses a significant health risk. Only 38.75% of us believe there is a significant risk in the consumption of five or more alcoholic drinks, once or twice a week. Roughly .2% of deaths in Illinois are caused by cancer. But 45% of traffic fatalities are alcohol-related. Why haven't we outlawed alcohol from public places? Or automobiles? We need to be saved from booze and cars more than we need to be saved from cancer or cigarettes.

Today I'm snickering at New York City's new menu labeling regulations, which claim to help guide consumers to healthier choices - by displaying only caloric information. What about fat, sodium and cholesterol? Sure, 20% of New Yorkers are obese, but 25.3% of them have high blood pressure and 34.9% of them have high cholesterol. If health were the true priority, the labeling wouldn't begin and end with calories alone.

And since when is it the restaurant's job to teach the ignorant masses how to eat properly? Why aren't grocery stores tasked with educating us more? Wait, what about schools - they're supposed to have educated us already, right? Oh, and our parents... we learn our eating habits from our parents more than anyone else. You need a license to drive a car and you have to be 21 to purchase alcohol, but any dumb-ass can have kids and instill unhealthy habits in them.

Why do we feel the need to demonize a fashionable bad guy instead of address the real problems in their entirety? Why does legislature feel the need to save us from ourselves only when convenient? And why do I think that one of my blog readers is going to have the answers to these questions?

Today is just one of those days, I guess.
UPDATE: DC Lies has the answer.

Drop Where You Shop

Saw on Consumerist today that shopdropping is experiencing a spike in popularity. Fun!

SHOPDROP: To covertly place merchandise on display in a store. A form of "culture jamming" s. reverse shoplift, droplift.

Brings to mind The Droplift Project, who've been droplifting for years. Doesn't quite top Bansky's museum-hack, but it's the same idea. The Center for Tactical Magic demonstrates a lot of the ideas I first heard articulated in Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone. Not that I've read all that, I recommend you absorb it the same way I did - listen to it*.

[* If anyone knows of an acapella version of this recording, please share. (I think the mid-90's "world/ambient" music bed might prevent some listeners from getting the most of Bey's reading, plus I'd like to mash-up some bits of it myself.)]

For those who want to skip the strategy and go straight to the rush of shopdropping, there's PeopleProducts123, an endeavor of the Anti-Advertising Agency.

In The Event of [ ____ ] Disaster

Having worked in advertising the past eight years, I've encountered a few worst-case-scenario assignments. The most memorable were in anticipation of Mad Cow disease and bird flu. Thankfully, none of those scenarios came to pass. But having gone through the exercise of "what if, and then what?" gives me an appreciation of this William Safire-penned speech. Written for Nixon, In The Event Of Moon Disaster prepared for some unforeseen catastrophe that would have prevented Apollo 11 astronauts from returning to Earth from the moon.

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

This first sentence is a blatant reminder that politicians rarely speak with such eloquence any more. Where there was an implied sense of reverence and respect for the American public in Nixon's day (yes, I am aware of the irony in that statement), now is self-congratulatory smugness and complacency, if not mild retardation. Something to keep in mind with the election year approaching. Then again, if the wrong candidate wins again, there's always the burgeoning space tourism industry - and a potential to escape not only to Canada, but perhaps our nearest celestial neighbor.

[via Kottke.org]

Undertones Make It Pop

Stronger Revisited from Kanye West on Vimeo

I'll admit it, I get down on Kanye West a lot. I never understood why he got popular for speeding up R&B samples, a.k.a. "chipmunking", a rudimentary sampling tactic which had been going on long before he tried it. I have never cared for the blatant, just-add-a-drum-track style of sampling he often employs, either. And I personally don't see or hear enough original talent to justify his notoriously pissy arrogance. On top of that, it bothers me that someone of his disposition has come to represent the Chicago music scene to the masses. He's from upper-middle-class Oak Lawn, not proper Chi-Town - and folks* in the city of big shoulders just don't whine like he does.

That said, I find this clip sort of endearing. Kanye just can't get his drums sounding the way he wants, and has to consult eleven(!) different mixers... until finally Timbaland schools him about undertones and proper drum-tone layering. Watching it, I considered that maybe West is so desperate to win awards because it won't be long before people realize his naiveté. It's almost cute, in a way. He's really just trying to become a super-star.

But, back to my beef with him, that's the approach you expect from NYC or LA, not our beloved Illville. (I know, I know... then how do I explain Billy Corgan? I don't; he's another over-entitled rich kid from the burbs clamoring for attention over integrity.)

Clip courtesy of E.
[* Full disclosure: I'm originally from the "Chicagoland" part of NW Indiana, and truly dislike it when people claim to be "from Chicago" when they actually live outside the city limits, sometimes further from the actual city than I was growing up in Indiana.]

Pseudonymity Reconsidered

I've been reconsidering some of my pseudonyms lately. And wondering how far pseudonymity will take you when you would prefer that your efforts were all related, connected and coherent.

The primary moniker I use for producing music, Instigator, has proven too ubiquitous. I adopted it eight years ago and am the oldest listing for artists named "Instigator", for the record. The bigger point is that I think I've outgrown it. I argue with myself about whether Instigator was supposed to do anything but get my solo production efforts underway. Things have been instigated well enough (the ambitious "Used Materials" album, and the fruitful Noise Throng label). It's time for the name, like the creative product itself, to move beyond the beginning-stage mentality.

This is what I did with INSTILLE, a name derived from the portmanteau of Instigator and Distille.

But getting my musical monikers in order inevitably leaves me reconsidering my PYLBUG moniker, too. A misspelling of pillbug, inspired by a dream about an abundance of insects and pills as interchangeable objects, it's been my handle for extra-curricular productions since 1995. Sometimes, however, I find myself wary of the connotations "pylbug" brings.

I am not, for the record, a pill-head any more than I am an insect aficionado. [Though I'm definitely much closer to the latter.] The reasoning by which I arrived at "pylbug" doesn't always hold up now, nearly 13 years later. Many of my extra-curricular efforts now seem inspired by different things, and this makes me feel like they should go by a different name. I'm considering a revised strategy to naming my projects; a refined point-of-view. Something like that.

All of that is for me to figure out. But, here's the question for my readers: where does your pseudonym come from, and did you plan any longevity into it? Maybe this question is more for bands, bloggers, content producers in general... people with a product that needs a brand name, if you will. What thought, if any, did you put into the act of picking your favorite pseudonym?

That is, if you can reveal the secrets behind your screen names.

Piracy is a business model

Interesting post on Boing Boing, quoting a Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney. While the executive's comments at Mipcom seem clearly spurned by the belief that "content is king", Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow rounds out his post with a moment of clarity to which more studio execs and marketers should subscribe:

Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

Well put. I'm inspired to put it this way:
Conversation is king because no one can own it.

(Not even Disney, not even with all the pirate references ... coincidentally made as a Disney pirate movie special edition DVD is made available for pre-order.)

In fact, Sweeney goes on to mention that some consumers want to consume content in a timely fashion so as to not miss out on the proverbial "watercooler moment" - conversation, in not so many words. This doesn't jive with her "content is king" stance. You don't bring content to the watercooler, you bring conversation. Let me give you an example:

This week, had I a watercooler conversation, it would have been about how the streaming online player for selected ABC programs doesn't work very well, and how the Disney-owned network was unable to stream more than twenty seconds of LOST without grinding to a halt for minutes at a time (an unpleasant, frustrating user experience). I'd then turn the conversation to the feeling I got, saying "just go buy it at iTunes and be done with this", and how I thought I'd just been teased into buying content I was supposed to have gotten for free. I'd managed to see a choppy two minutes of the episode, and now I wanted to see the rest. This is where I'd let the conversation go parenthetical...

(What do you do when the brand new, free streaming player isn't working? You can pay two dollars for the same content - plus DRM - at iTunes, or you could just watch for the content on a free P2P network, where you can get the content that will keep you in tomorrow's conversations.)

I would have concluded the conversation with mention of the BitTorrent options for freely acquiring the content on which our conversations thrive.

Common, change your name to Commercial already.

When he still went by Common Sense, I saw this Columbia College drop-out hanging with his buddies at a Wendy's in a suburb of Chicago - that's right, a suburb, not Chicago proper.

A few years later, I watched him "perform" at NIU. It was so uneventful, people in the far-from-sold-out crowd were sitting down on the floor and some even nodding off to sleep.

Fast-forward a few more years and he's done away with all Sense, and openly fancies himself one of those psuedo-poetic, racially charged "issue" rappers. By no coincidence, he also started doing a lot more commercials and fashion spreads. He still claimed to be "representing" Chi Town through all this.

Common, come on. How can you possibly "represent" Chicago when you, like Kanye, don't even live there anymore? Maybe you need a hook to sell your records? Maybe geography isn't your strong suit.

Let's talk about social issues, since you claim that's what you're all about. Did you ever stop to think that the empty calories in Coca-Cola are helping to deteriorate the health of "your people" and contribute to the obesity epidemic? Your role as a shill to promote cola is in direct conflict with the stated mission of your children's charity.

Let's address the real issue: you going commercial. With this new Gap deal you've got, not only are you now potentially mid-shark jump, but you're also wearing out your own moniker. I think you should just change your name to Commercial and spare us all the cognitive dissonance.

CoolHunting loses its cool.

Leading participant in and non-objective observer of fashionable fads, CoolHunting has announced that it is expanding to form a mobile marketing company called Bond Art and Science (which offers a stunning lack of design and dismal brand experience on its own web site). Judging from what Josh Rubin says, this latest effort is all a bit convoluted if not misguided:

“Experiences now span beyond the first and second screen,” says Rubin. “Our solutions are based on a belief that mobility is a critical element that anchors effective communications.” He continues, “Bond designs all digital touchpoints to work cohesively, offering a consistent brand experience. The result is an exponentially positive impact.”

I see a big problem in that statement. Mobility is not what anchors a communication, consistency is. Communication has to be consistent through all touchpoints, not just digital ones. And just because you have digital touchpoints linked together does not in any way indicate that you have created a positive brand experience. Rubin apparently wants us to believe that technology alone makes for a positive brand experience. If you're getting a strong sense of deja vu, you're not alone. This kind of thinking helped burst the dot-com bubble just a few years ago. It would seem that Rubin is now poised to replicate such disaster on a mobile platform.

The technology is not the message; the technology is the vehicle for the message. A good "experience designer" would know this. But Rubin's quote dodges common sense and sinks straight to BS-buzz-word hype. What's cool about that?

The Backlash Bandwagon

It always happens... The industry leader is the brand that takes criticism for the entire category. The brand's competition may very well be worse for you, but it doesn't matter because you armchair activists and podcast pundits aim for the biggest target. I'm not defending McDonald's or Microsoft, but pointing out that "anti-hype" is little more than a backlash bandwagon - based on misplaced emotion more than fact.

You can see the anti-hype around MySpace more frequently now. From the half-assed "Fox bought MySpace" panic that, in the end, only attracted millions more people to the social networking site... to this article. Let me get this straight: a site that has 70 million members is "out" because one 18-year-old out of just 400 high school students surveyed said she's done with MySpace? Can't we just admit that we're tired of stories about MySpace's dominance, instead of publishing superfluous fluff and clutter about it? I'm not defending MySpace, but wondering where our collective common sense went.

We bitch about MySpace being too big, yet we've more than doubled the site's population in the past year. We claim that we don't eat McDonald's any more, yet we actually go to the fast-food giant more often and spend more when we're there since SuperSize Me came out. We bitch about Bill Gates and Microsoft, yet somewhere around 90% of us still claim Windows as our operating system. As consumers have proven that we are lying through our teeth; that we love to complain, but we have no resolve to effect change.

Why not get off the backlash bandwagon and put your money where your mouth is, folks?

The God Delusion

I thought it appropriate to follow that last post with a quick shout-out for Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion. Pre-order it now, so you don't forget about it before the October 2006 release date.

For more info, here's a Salon interview with Dawkins from last year, about how all of America's god-mongering is pushing the country back into the Middle Ages. If you want more, here's another article in which Dawkins claims religion amounts to child abuse. Given the vast amounts of misinformation, false hope and resignation to not understand the world that religion gives us, I have to agree that it's extremely unhealthy when taught as divine truth instead of moral fiction.

To Hell With Religious Tolerance

Douglas Rushkoff moves a little further into Richard Dawkins' "anti-religion" territory with his latest post about "why the Bible is much more useful as a metaphorical guide to life than as a literal document." (quoted from BoingBoing)

The Science of Stupidities

Ad-verse's title, not mine... this is a pretty damn good rant about the ineptitude of direct marketers.

Of all the marketers who send their irrelevant "direct" pieces to me, one really needs to read that rant: Micro Center. This computer supply merchant once sent me a sales flyer that had a huge "Your Privacy Is Important To Us!" sticker referring to their great new privacy policy... Problem was, right next to it, they also printed my full name, address and home phone number.

I was instantly livid. My privacy couldn't be more flagrantly violated by a single piece of direct mail. Time for a direct response, and one the company truly deserved. I literally got on the phone and told them to "fuck off", and immediately remove me from every single list they have. I used to shop there at least once a month, but they haven't seen a penny from me since - and never will see one. Ever.

AMP'd Fakes Don't Make It

First off, I have to say that the fad of replacing "extreme" with some variation of "amp" is already old-and-busted. You can all stop using it now. Please.

Speaking of old-and-busted, let's talk about fake sites. Like the one you get to from this banner that ran Comedy Central's site this week (among other sites, I'm sure).

Click "approve" and you go to get AMPD. But click "disapprove" and you get this.

This "fake" site BS seems to come up more often than bad ideas are made into TV spots - but does it help to undermine your own message so readily? Obviously, someone wants to make the point of saying "this is not for some people" in an allegedly "young-adult" fashion. But are these sites made with genuine concern for the consumer, or are they just funny to the interactive marketers who spend their days making this stuff?

Definitely the latter. Every button on this fake site just sends you back to AMPD.com. It's a particularly hollow gesture, as it doesn't even do "fake" right. Irritating and overwhelmingly pointless. It's possible to do "fake" and remain conceptually sound, but this isn't even close. It's such a shitty experience for the user, whoever came up with this should be shot.

To AMPD and it's agency: don't pat yourselves on the back, mistakenly considering this post "earned media" -- you haven't earned anything but scorn and distaste, and this is from an "early adopter" in your target audience, as far as you know. Don't take us for idiots.

(I wonder if Coors was officially involved in any way... theirs is the only product featured in the banner ad, and I'm pretty sure it's done without permission or legal clearance. And is that cat 21?)

RE-Remixing movies

This PSFK post reminded me of a Mike Meyers film-sampling effort that was talked about a few years back but has yet to materialize. Now Xeni Jardin has Steven Soderbergh talking about this allegedly "new" approach...

But film and video remixing isn't a new idea. Films ranging from Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid to Kung Pow: Enter the Fist have already dabbled in this territory. And these barely compare to the complexity of Emergency Broadcast Network's work. (Remember U2's ZooTV? That was video remixing.)

Steven Soderbergh implies that it's as simple as recutting and rescoring your own film. Meyers seemed to be taking more of a mash-up approach (much like we see in the other examples listed above). Both count, technically, as remixes (a vague term that is too often co-opted and over-used for the sake of sounding hip). But neither is a new revolution in film-making (or re-making)...

It's been forty years since Woody Allen "remixed" new dialogue into International Secret Police: Key of Keys - which would become What's Up, Tiger Lilly? - it just wasn't called "remixing" then.

Cooking with social currency

Douglas Rushkoff recently posted an excerpt about social currency from his forthcoming book. He first wrote about the idea a few years ago, and ran with it as the theme for this latest book.

A term like "social currency" can help explain a bigger idea like the meme, and Rushkoff's analogy about how we listen to the telling of jokes starts getting at the meat (which, I'm fairly certain, is lurking somewhere in that new book):

Observe yourself the next time you’re listening to a joke. You may start by listening to the joke for the humor - because you really want the belly laugh at the end. But chances are, a few sentences in, you will find yourself not only listening, but attempting to remember its whole sequence. You’ll do this tentatively at first, until you’ve decided whether or not it's really a good joke. And if it is, you'll commit the entire thing to memory - maybe even with a personalized variation, or a mental note to yourself to fix that racist part. This is because the joke is a gift - it's a form of social currency that you’ll be able to take with you to the next party.

This is a lot like an example of the two ways memes spread, which I seem to recall from Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. I don't have the book with me, so I'll go on as if this was in fact where I got this (it may have been Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene): memes are ideas - regardless of "good" or "bad" - that spread via imitation. Memes are the building-blocks of culture; culture is based on imitation. There are two basic ways we imitate, and you can think of them around this example of an apple pie: when you have a great piece of apple pie, you can either experiement with various ingredients in an attempt to arrive at the same pie by trial and error, or you can just get the recipe.

Imitate the result or imitate the recipe - these are the transactions made with social currency (I prefer to refer to it as cultural currency, but this is mere semantics).

In Rushkoff's terms, you listen to the joke for humor (the pie) at first, then attempt to remember its whole sequence (the recipe) -- so you can retell it (spread the meme, as it were). Consider for a moment the cheap imitations of the world, which attempt to copy the product without respect for the recipe. The recipe is worth more, culturally-speaking, because it does more to preserve the fidelity, fecundity and longevity of future results.

Crazy like a Fawkes

I'm in London for work this week, and arrived just in time for Guy Fawkes Night. Having only a cursory knowledge of the origin of this holiday, I felt I had to do a little research...

For those of you not familiar with the occasion, it is a celebration of the capture of Britain's most notorious traitor, Guy Fawkes. This frustrated military man - whose biography bears several resemblances to that of a more recent American - and his cohorts planned to blow up Parliament (Roman Catholics trying to disrupt Protestant rule with an act of domestic terrorism).

So how does England commemorate the foiling of The Gunpowder Plot? She co-opts the explosive approach Fawkes took... setting off fireworks, bonfires and flaming effigies of the Pope for a night. Okay, the Pope part doesn't happen so much anymore, as Catholics now celebrate the holiday, too. But the holiday was originally set to celebrate the saving of the King and to instill violent anti-Catholic sentiment.

All this drove me to the point that prompted this post:

When you get down to it, practically every recorded incident of terrorism revolves around the fundamental inseparability of a Church and a State. So are we ultimately fooling ourselves when we believe the two can operate independently of each other?

Blue-Faced Cell-Out

CTA Tattler captures the disdain for a U.S. Cellular guerilla marketing campaign that's been annoying Chicagoans during their commutes this week. I personally encountered no less than five of these chumps while riding the Blue Line for a mere three stops the other day.

The first indication that this "stunt" was BS: there's no way any of them were getting a signal in the tunnel -- whatever conversations they were pretending to have were obviously fake. The CTA should know about this (I'd bet that U.S. Cellular didn't bother to get clearance first), so if you've encountered this shite, be sure to report it to CTA customer service.

This stunt seems to coincide with a promotion the carrier is running with WCKG radio (scroll down to "U.S. Cellular - win a free phone and service"). Go ahead and ask Pete McMurray if he's going to paint his face blue, too.

The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. Cellular claims to be approaching teens with this "call me minutes" campaign -- so why are they irritating twenty- and thirty-somethings during the morning commute? You might also ask the conglomerate WPP Group (and subsidiary G Whiz), who (according to WSJ) helped U.S. Cellular come up with such a bad idea in the first place.

And to U.S. Cellular: if you're so keen on minding the blogosphere, be sure to check out that link to CTA Tattler. The people who blog about what you've done don't like you at all. They are talking about boycotting your services in your own home town. Joan Cusack was annoying enough; this blue-faced desperation is a total turn-off.

Cruelty-free living isn't what they say

PETA, in its holier-than-thou crusade for the ethical treatment of animals, has overlooked the fact that man is an animal, too. The alleged proponent of "cruelty-free living" has taken to paying homeless people a meager sum (less than ten US Dollars) to invade KFC locations and scare customers away. Since when are homeless people are lower lifeforms than chickens? PETA is clearly more about sensationalizing marginal issues and pushing propaganda than it is about being an ethical citizen. I suppose when your primary audience is over-privileged, arrogant suburbanites it's easy to lose your grip on reality.

Before you PETA folks post any comments (as if), see if you can answer these simple questions: If animals are not ours to exploit, why do we all drive automobiles that run on fossil fuels (animal byproducts)? Is there a time limit on how long an animal must be dead before it's okay for us to exploit it? Why do PETA booths at festivals sell DVDs and stickers that are produced with plastics (petroleum byproducts)?

On "Across the Sound"

Big thanks to Across The Sound for quoting a comment of mine in the their second podcast. Across the Sound is the pairing of marketing gurus Steve Rubel and Joseph Jaffe, who "discuss the world of new marketing, media and PR"...

If you're a persuader by trade, you should be reading and/or listening to these guys. If you aren't in the persuasion industry, this is potentially even better: you can learn about how the marketing messages around you (and those that are to come) are crafted.