Hoaxing the System
I believe branding, as in the word used by advertising and marketing people, is, in fact, a hoax. I don't mean literally a hoax, like bigfoot or alien abductions. I mean the entire field is essentially something other than what it professes to be. Wikipedia says:
Branding creates a collection of symbols, experiences and associations connected with a product, a service, a person or any other artifact or entity.I propose an alternative to this definition that is closer to reality:
Branding is a primarily semiological activity whose purpose is to disconnect a product, a service, a person or any other artifact or entity from its direct, human experience in order to place it psychically in the human mind in the form of a mythological narrative or religious experience.Allow me to demonstrate with an especially loaded brand:
This is the logo for the Christian Faith. It is a critical part of the brand of Christianity. This symbol evokes thoughts and feelings that have almost nothing to do with the overall function and operation of the myriad Christian Churches around the world that use it. The brand telegraphs a mythic message to the people who have accepted Christianity as their own religion (i.e. people who "buy" the Christian "product"). I can only approximate the message roughly as "salvation and immortality". What the various Christian Churches around the world actually provide is primarily a form of entertainment for a congregation by enacting a rite called "Holy Communion" on a scheduled basis in exchange for cash that the "buyers" place into a dish that is passed from one kongregat to another. I'm speaking in general terms here. Churches do other things too, and the logo for Christianity varies. However, as unfair as this might seem to Christianity, this example is how most successful brands work. They promise one thing and hopefully never have to actually make good on that promise. In the course of promising something they cannot actually deliver, they often create an emotional imprint that diverts the convert from connecting the dots, so-to-speak, from associating the activity of being a Christian from the brand of Christianity. Amen.
Why? Why is this branding, this hoax, this "dance", this "wink-wink" circle-jerk where in our heart of hearts we know we're being suckered yet we beg "please, [insert brand name], sucker me, oh, please!"
The answer: for commerce to work properly, it must be at its root impersonal. Yet human beings are not machines. Brands bridge the gap for us.
This is actually a rather "updated" answer to an updated question. Branding today is what Myth was to the ancient Greeks. All civilizations are powered by myth. Ours is no exception. Mythology in the dawn of civilization is what helped us explain who we were and how to survive. Today it is used to regulate human behavior in the service of commerce. For business to be efficient, it has to be impersonal. Markets that rely solely on high-touch, high relationship activity are profoundly inefficient. These types of markets are called bazaars, or "black markets". They are about knowing the right person, greasing the right wheels that create Rube Goldberg machines out of societies. Look at the former Soviet Union. Black marketeering created terrible social turmoil because nobody could be trusted and many people fell through the cracks. Instead of going to work and doing your job (i.e. renting yourself impersonally for whatever skills you had), you had to know the right guy to get your heat turned on or your car fixed. Russia still suffers from this today, even though their markets are far more efficient than they used to be. This and the fact that Russia is the second biggest oil producing nation on earth is the reason why Russia has $0 of foreign debt. They were so untrustworthy and inefficient for so long that no foreigners wanted to invest in them.
But the older answer to the older question may be more instructive. Why do we need myths? And the answer: for civilization to function correctly, it must be at its root an emergent-behavior-oriented system, i.e. a system that relies on correct super-behaviors of its entirety, ameliorating the behaviors of the individual members. For the ameliorating process to work correctly, the members must be aligned with the correct behaviors of the civilization. This goal of alignment is the reason why written language itself emerged. Written language is to early civilizations what nuclear weapons are to modern superpowers. They allowed for empires that spanned half the globe to exist. The language was used to construct myths. Myths told people when to plant, when to pray, when to have children, what to do with children, etc. Myths are a way to compress information in a way that makes the data consistent and virally portable, because the human brain is biased toward narrative information. If I give you five unrelated facts, you could construct a narrative out of them almost without thinking. In fact, I think you would have a hard time resisting making a story out of the information. Without myths, tribes couldn't survive. We've always needed them. Without conscientiously constructed myths that are written down, like in the bible, or if that association doesn't suit you, in the tablets of Hammurabi, nations couldn't survive, either.
Social technology and social media people are going to find the idea that "business has to be impersonal to work well" problematic. Well, I hate to break it to them, but it remains true, just like it did 10,000 years ago and I don't think it's going to change anytime soon. The key differentiator is fidelity. Social technology allows for people to communicate with greater candor than before, because the communication is more direct. You can be impersonally honest and still be honest. The data flows are better not because they are casual or vernacular. Don't mistake something that looks a little like a conversation with actual conversation. The strength of the ideas are what matters most, not how cool, nifty and keen you are while presenting them.
By: Colonel Nikolai
Sat Jan 03 18:40:24 CST 2009
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Filed under: sciences->psychology->semiology->branding
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•Comment•
OBEY
posted by: BalRog , on Sun Jan 04 15:49:12 CST 2009Gohd Bless You, John Carpenter!
Gohd Bless You!
Re: OBEY
Yeah, it's still a relevant film.posted by: Colonel Nikolai, on Mon Jan 05 20:53:11 CST 2009
About Bullying
Came across this:
Audio link
This is the Diary of Leanne Wolfe, a radio documentary about a girl growing up in Cork, Ireland who was bullied relentlessly by her classmates and eventually committed suicide a few years ago.
It's an absolutely heartrending story. I was relentlessly bullied as a kid. Was literally hunted for sport by my classmates. When the Columbine shootings happened, I immediately remembered my bullying experience growing up. This is the flip side of the result of bullying: suicide instead of homicide.
By: Colonel Nikolai
Thu Jan 01 23:51:38 CST 2009
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Filed under: bullying
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About Support and Fighting Back
posted by: BalRog , on Sun Jan 04 14:57:54 CST 2009I too grew up as a human target. The worst of it was that no one close to me could understand. My dad was a popular (albeit poor) jock in high school; I think he just thought I was spoiled. My mom was voted "Most Likely to Succeed"; she saw my pain and wanted to help but she didn't really understand it. She had no tools to help her help me. My brothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, neighbors, all seemed to have no trouble fitting in or even flourishing.
I remember complaining about it one day after school to my dad, and hearing him once again launch into a taunting chorus of "Why's everybody always pickin' on me?" (from that early rockabilly song "Charlie Brown"). I would like to believe that that was the last time I ever tried to tell him what my life was like, but it probably wasn't. Hope springs eternal.
But I eventually found my way out of hell. Air Force combat and survival training helped. College helped. Marriage and fatherhood helped. When my son began to have similar problems in jr. high, I was ready. We had enrolled him in martial arts classes since he was 6, and I reminded him that, while I wanted him to avoid fights if he could, that he should not run from them. "When do you fight back?", I asked him. "When someone hits me?", he ventured. "No son, you fight back when your dignity is threatened."
I never witnessed what was (to me) my son's finest moment. Over a year after the incident happened, one of my son's friends told me about it. In a crowded hallway between classes, some guy walking behind my son kept shoving him in the back. My son warned him several times to stop it. "And then", said the friend, "I couldn't see exactly what happened, but suddenly the guy was folded in half and groaning. [Your son] just kept on walking."
Italian toast to the new year
I stole this from Lina Wertmüller's "The Seven Beauties" (Pasqualino Settebellezze) but it kinda sums up how It felt to see everything unravel last year, So raise your glass for this toast:
To the ones who can't enjoy themselves even when they laugh.Happy new year.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones that worship the corporate image not knowing they work for someone else.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who should have been shot in the cradle, POW!
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who say "Follow me to success, but kill me if I fail", so-to-speak.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who say we Italians are the greatest he-men on earth.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who are from Rome, the ones who say "That's for me".
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who say "You know what I mean".
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who vote right because they're fed up with the strikes.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who vote white because they don't want to get dirty.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who never get involved with politics.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who say "Be calm. Calm".
To the ones who still support the king.
To the ones who say "Yes, sir".
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who make love standing in their boots and imagine they're in a luxurious bed.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who believe Christ is Santa Claus as an old man.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who say "What the hell".
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who were there.
To the ones who believe in everything, even God.
To the ones who listen to the national anthem.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who love their country.
To the ones who keep going, just to see how it will end.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who are in garbage up to here.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who sleep soundly, even with cancer.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who even now don't believe the world is round.
Oh, yeah, Oh yeah.
To the ones who're afraid of flying.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who've never had a fatal accident.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who had one.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who at a certain point in their lives, Christ, make a secret weapon...
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who're always standing at the bar.
To the ones who are always in Switzerland.
To the ones who started early, haven't arrived and don't know they're not going to.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who lose wars by the skin of their teeth.
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who say "Everything is wrong here".
Oh, yeah.
To the ones who say, "Now let's have a good laugh".
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
By: Colonel Nikolai
Thu Jan 01 16:00:44 CST 2009
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Filed under: 2008
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Why Your Google App Engine Apps Need a Different UI Strategy
I assume you know what Google App Engine is. The short version is this: when you are writing an application for Google App Engine, you need to take a careful look at how Google uses their own platform before you start writing your own app on it.
Consider when you log into Google Mail or Google Calendar, you'll notice something different about them. Instead of loading templates with mostly static markup with chunks of dynamic pieces of code in them (traditional ASP, JSP, PHP, ERB templates, MVC or not), they load tiny AJAX clients that programatically draw ALL the page markup based on carefully constructed fetches to the server. I say "carefully" because the final word on the user interface state of the google mail application is not resolved from a page load. Google's server platform will kill requests that take more that 8 seconds and they don't want a user to see a "server error" page. A failed request to Google's backend results in a little message on the left side of the screen like "trying again in 5 seconds..." So requests are assumed to be "unstable", leaving the user interface in a consistent state separate from the request state, which can routinely fail for reasons having nothing to do with the correctness of the request or server code. Obviously, this is a different approach to web app development. Sure, many of us have added AJAX-y love to our webapps using technologies like jQuery and Prototype. Yet few of us have written web applications that are entirely rendered through a AJAX/AHAH like Google Mail does. I think the closest I've ever done was writing a Firefox add-on. You simply can't reload the browser widgets on a per-request basis, so you are forced to follow this approach.
None of this is covered in the Google Presentation Building Scalable Web Applications with
Google App Engine, mind you. But it's implied when you look at Google's own "Google Apps" (a confusing name in this discussion, but I refer to Google Mail, Documents, Calendar, etc) in general
and see how they work. Google's own browser, Google Chrome, with its emphasis on fast and scalable execution of JavaScript, is an obvious lean in the direction of this approach. If you don't follow this strategy, errors in your Google App Engine log like this will show up randomly:
And your users will get ugly "Server Error" pages instead of nice "trying again in 5 seconds..." messages.
File "/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/api/datastore.py", line 1636, in _ToDatastoreError
raise errors[err.application_error](err.error_detail)
Timeout: datastore timeout: operation took too long.
By: Colonel Nikolai
Mon Dec 29 14:06:37 CST 2008
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Filed under: technology->software->internet->web->googleappengine
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•Comment•
Re: Why Your Google App Engine Apps Need a Different UI Strategy
Excellent observation.posted by: Thomas , on Mon Dec 29 14:55:11 CST 2008
Thanks
Dude, that means a lot coming from you, being my guru in all this App Engine stuff.posted by: Colonel Nikolai, on Mon Dec 29 15:13:21 CST 2008
Definition: "Think-Tank Wanker"
Coined by Economics Correspondent Daniel Gross in late 2008 to describe any pundit-like public figure promulgating ideologically-based policy and revisionist history usually in mass-media outlets who is paid to do so by partisan think tanks such as the standards The Heritage Institute and The Cato Institute, but also including a lesser-known set of 12 foundations as follows: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch and Claude R. Lambe charitable foundations, the Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.
By: Colonel Nikolai
Fri Dec 26 16:49:03 CST 2008
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Filed under: politics->partisanship->thinktanks
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Re: Definition: "Think-Tank Wanker"
Of course, never forget that it was Atrios who originally introduced the term "wanker" into our public policy discourse.posted by: BalRog , on Sat Dec 27 18:17:09 CST 2008
Really?
Is that actually true?posted by: Colonel Nikolai, on Mon Dec 29 15:59:01 CST 2008
Yep!
Colonel said:posted by: BalRog , on Mon Dec 29 19:11:15 CST 2008
Is that actually true?
Well, he certainly gets credit/blame for that in blogospheria, even among conservatives. This is probably based on his "Wanker of the Day" feature that he has been doing--not daily, but whenever the mood strikes--for 3 or 4 years now.
Uptime for OpenBSD
I just rebooted my firewall machine for my home network running OpenBSD. It had a 315 day uptime. Wow.By: Colonel Nikolai
Thu Dec 25 19:27:28 CST 2008
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Filed under: technology->hardware->robustness
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