If I was going to pen that line for the way I feel today, it would be, "I'm just sitting on my couch, arguing with my wife while nothing of consequence happens. I wish, I wish, I wish they would...
Thom Yorke captured it best on Radiohead’s 1995 track, "The Bends," where he whines; “I'm just lying in a bar with my drip feed on. Talking to my girlfriend waiting for something to happen, I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy, I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen”.
If I was going to pen that line for the way I feel today, it would be, "I'm just sitting on my couch, arguing with my wife while nothing of consequence happens. I wish, I wish, I wish they would let something happen."
I think we are oppressed by the size and weight of the capitalist machine. Corporations are big, careless (of consequences to actual people), and conservative (in the sense of wanting to maintain the status quo, not politically). Anything that doesn't fit the mold gets squashed or starved at the margins. As a consequence, advertising is banal and peaceful because it's meant to be a balm smoothing over things we aren't supposed to want to change.
Ironically, I don't really believe there's a cabal of billionaires who jet off to an island to plan this. I think it's an emergent property of a system that's run out of control. Stephen Backhouse is a political theologian who talks about a principality as a thing that has lost sight of its original purpose and has become an end to itself. I think that's a perfect way of saying it.
I don't know what to do about it though. I feel this way all the time. But I'm busy, even overwhelmed, trying to raise my daughter, make my marriage work, pay our bills, do some good at the margins. Seeing my daughter flourish is by far the best part, but then I think about what her life will be like when she's grown up, and I'm right back to hopeless. Increasingly, it all just feels like meaningless shouting into the void.
If the problem is feeling bored and wanting more variety, it doesn’t seem like big, disruptive changes are the answer? When big changes do happen, they’re often disruptive and people don’t like...
If the problem is feeling bored and wanting more variety, it doesn’t seem like big, disruptive changes are the answer? When big changes do happen, they’re often disruptive and people don’t like them at all. They miss the good times. (The pandemic sucked.)
The world is terrible and there are lots of things that should change, but I don’t think that maps well to wanting some excitement in your personal life?
But I think one thing people miss is not being part of some larger effort. It’s two centuries old, but there’s a famous passage by Tocqueville about Americans’ tendency to form associations:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.
There are still quite a few organizations in the US, and yet, I’m not a member of any of them, and instead I spend a lot of time online. I think that’s true in general?
I've heard of the lack of being part of a group mentioned when discussing loneliness. It was easier to make friends back when we had a group thing to attend, be it church or something like the...
I've heard of the lack of being part of a group mentioned when discussing loneliness. It was easier to make friends back when we had a group thing to attend, be it church or something like the Masons/Scouts/Rotary Club. Someone new in town would immediately be exposed to many potential friends who shared at least one interest.
Not "I wish something would happen," but, "I wish they would letsome thing happen. It's not boredom so much as the feeling that anything counter to the overarching capitalist/wealth accumulation...
Not "I wish something would happen," but, "I wish they would letsome thing happen. It's not boredom so much as the feeling that anything counter to the overarching capitalist/wealth accumulation agenda is being suggested if it gains any scale.
The centrality of group membership is interesting as a source of identity. Like "I'm a Mason" or "I'm a Presbyterian". It feels like something that was true for the baby boomers, at least. I think you're right that being online has supplanted many of these things.
Off-topic, but the Tocqueville quote reminded me of this:
Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
It still seems like a rather vague form of unease. Who is "they?" Depending on the subject, "they" might be Republicans, it might be NIMBY's, it might be local regulations, or it could be some...
It still seems like a rather vague form of unease. Who is "they?" Depending on the subject, "they" might be Republicans, it might be NIMBY's, it might be local regulations, or it could be some other form of opposition. Sometimes, the problem is indifference. (Nobody comes to your event.)
Also, my impression from reading the news is that lots of things are happening every year. But maybe they're not the sort of changes you care about?
Father John Misty's "Things it would've been helpful to know before the Revolution" pretty much covers this with lines like "Sometimes I miss the top of the food chain but what a perfect...
Father John Misty's "Things it would've been helpful to know before the Revolution" pretty much covers this with lines like "Sometimes I miss the top of the food chain but what a perfect afternoon" and "from time to time, we all get a little restless with no one advertising to us constantly."
But the final verse begins, "though I'll admit some degree of resentment for the sudden lack of convenience around here." and that's the hard part. Revolution isn't fun and most people smart enough to see that might still have problems with the system as it is. Too smart to upset the whole system, too dumb to upset the whole system.
Well put. I used to consider myself a free-market capitalist but the past decade has been such a treadmill of company after company making egregiously consumer-hostile decisions for the sake of...
I don't really believe there's a cabal of billionaires who jet off to an island to plan this. I think it's an emergent property of a system that's run out of control.
Well put. I used to consider myself a free-market capitalist but the past decade has been such a treadmill of company after company making egregiously consumer-hostile decisions for the sake of enriching CEOs and shareholders in the short term, damn the consequences. Seems like everything these days is just shrinkflation, enshittification, unjustifiable subscription pricing models, or whatever other bait-and-switch grift these sociopaths think they can get away with because nobody’s paying attention. (And spoiler: They are getting away with it, and continue to, which only further incentivizes that behavior.)
None of this is what I believed capitalism was supposed to be. I was on board because it was supposed to encourage innovation, competition, more value for lower prices, and so on. I’m not seeing much of any of that these days. We’ve arrived at an outcome that is antithetical to the goal, an outcome that as you put it is an emergent property. An unintended consequence. It needs to be called out as such and course-corrected.
I grew up with a similar pro-capitalism viewpoint, but no alternative was ever presented seriously. (Probably because I had a half year of political science in high school taught by a substitute...
I grew up with a similar pro-capitalism viewpoint, but no alternative was ever presented seriously. (Probably because I had a half year of political science in high school taught by a substitute teacher with an abiding love of the Texas Rangers. Seriously, I had her as a sub three different times, and every time, all we did was learn about the Texas Rangers and play Uno.)
Maybe with a properly independent regulatory oversight (including proper regulation on monopolies) and limits on generational wealth, maybe I could buy into it again. But there is so much inequality written into our systems, I feel like an overhaul would need to move more toward a socialist model to be an effective change.
“Banal” is a good descriptor of modern advertising. It doesn’t really have any opinion at all. On occasion I’ll pull up a YouTube compilation of 90s TV ads pulled from VHS recordings. It might...
“Banal” is a good descriptor of modern advertising. It doesn’t really have any opinion at all.
On occasion I’ll pull up a YouTube compilation of 90s TV ads pulled from VHS recordings. It might just be the tinted glasses of nostalgia at work, but to me the overwhelming tone they carry is considerably more optimistic and energizing than anything that airs today. It’s quite a contrast to modern ads.
I really do think the 90s were much more optimistic overall than the current era. I was in my 30s then, so my opinion is definitely not based on nostalgia for my childhood, and in fact on a...
I really do think the 90s were much more optimistic overall than the current era. I was in my 30s then, so my opinion is definitely not based on nostalgia for my childhood, and in fact on a personal level it wasn’t a very good time for me, but for the society and culture at large it was a much more positive time than anything since.
Could this perhaps have something to do with the rise of data driven marketing and wanting the broadest possible appeal? The author suggests that it may have something to do with our chaotic...
Could this perhaps have something to do with the rise of data driven marketing and wanting the broadest possible appeal?
The author suggests that it may have something to do with our chaotic world, which I don't disagree with, but the homogeneity of everything these days seems to me more inline with companies being desperate not to offend any given market demographic.
Take the Skittles commercial for instance, as a former, slightly edgy 90s and early 00s teenager, I found it darkly funny. My parents, Boomers, however, would find it weird, off-putting and alienating, something corporate execs would kill for fear of alienating a particular demographic.
Which I can understand, really. Given how much things cost to make these days and how thin profit margins often are, companies are unwilling to take risks. Video games alone are often costing companies 300-500 million to make, so it's important to them that it has the broadest possible appeal. Even cars, no longer will a company take a risk and build something bespoke like a Thunderbird or a Prowler; now everything is on the same platform, so your Highlander is functionally the same as your Camry.
Ads aren't simply just aimed at the wall anymore to see what hits. Now everyone can see that Males, ages 35 to 50 buy this one particular thing, as well as women ages 18-24, so we need to appeal to both of them without alienating the other, so things need to be kept bland. Again, between this and things costing so much to produce, we've got our problem.
I'm definitely just rambling here, so hopefully I've made a cogent argument, but what we need to see is just stuff that costs less to produce and buy. There are still things in those spaces here and there, but I feel like as a whole, we're really not going to get back there. Between stuff like regulations (a good thing!) and increased demands for the next big thing (smaller computers, faster processors, etc), things seem set to continue to be expensive to produce and buy and thus, will be marketed to the widest demographics via bland advertising and bland design.
The author didn't bring up TiVo. I think people tend to forget how much of an impact it had on someone who could get access to one. Suddenly, instead of having to watch as you went forward through...
The author didn't bring up TiVo. I think people tend to forget how much of an impact it had on someone who could get access to one.
Suddenly, instead of having to watch as you went forward through commercials, you could press the 30 second skip button x times to completely skip over commercials without paying any attention to them. I remember figuring out how many presses I needed for half hour or hour long shows. Because commercials were sold in 30 second blocks, you could consistently watch a show while not seeing a single ad. On top of that, TiVo knew you were doing it. They kept track of which ads you watched, how long you watched, and so on. Of course this sounds familiar now, but it's the first time this level of detail was available to advertisers.
From "How TiVo Changes Our Behavior and Attitudes Towards Television":
Most respondents say they skip some ads while watching through the DVR. There are many estimates on the percent of commercials skipped with a DVR. The Times article has one of the most aggressive estimates, claiming 88% of advertisements are skipped. We’ve also heard people in our qualitative intentionally starting to watch their favorite shows 10–15 minutes late and using the lag time to skip over ads.
There's no way this didn't have an effect on advertising content. Throwing out high visual impact ads makes a lot of sense in this context; ad agencies were desperate to show the advertisers that folks had actually seen what they'd created. This was new territory, so they could try whatever they wanted in an attempt to find out what would actually grab people's attention.
I feel kind of weird knowing there are people who are nostalgic for this kind of advertising. They weren’t making these because life was just too darn peaceful, they were doing it as a way of...
I feel kind of weird knowing there are people who are nostalgic for this kind of advertising. They weren’t making these because life was just too darn peaceful, they were doing it as a way of shocking you into paying attention so you would buy their products. These advertisements were painfully “edgy” even for the timeframe they were in. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe them as cringe in today’s parlance. I think there are more than a few cases where they weren’t necessarily trying to appeal to anyone insomuch as they were trying to shock and puzzle people; they were trying to become viral so that more people would hear about them and their products would sell better. Why else would you have stupid stunts like advertising in graveyards and running a contest where the entry fee is legally naming your baby after their product?
I guess it shows where my mind is that I was at least half way through the article still thinking about how I'd never seen an ad for the open source VCS and wondering when they'd get to the part...
I guess it shows where my mind is that I was at least half way through the article still thinking about how I'd never seen an ad for the open source VCS and wondering when they'd get to the part about selling Subversion.
Half off-topic, half criticism of the article: Dear author, your poor link tracking choices have led to an article where 90%+ of the image links are broken. Do better.
Half off-topic, half criticism of the article:
Dear author, your poor link tracking choices have led to an article where 90%+ of the image links are broken. Do better.
I only see 1 image link in the article. Everything else is either a YouTube page or a Tweet. Which ones were broken? I can forward it to the editor and see if she can review it.
I only see 1 image link in the article. Everything else is either a YouTube page or a Tweet. Which ones were broken? I can forward it to the editor and see if she can review it.
The first five links in the article are all image links, one reddit, four twitter image links, the latter four do not work. The link tracking itself is scummy as it is.
The first five links in the article are all image links, one reddit, four twitter image links, the latter four do not work.
Yeah, I got them to load after removing all the tracker crap. Typically speaking, everything in a URL after a question mark is superfluous and can be deleted. Worked for the first, the second I...
Yeah, I got them to load after removing all the tracker crap. Typically speaking, everything in a URL after a question mark is superfluous and can be deleted. Worked for the first, the second I did the same then added the .png filetype to the end to get it to load. The others were treated similarly, just bad and unnecessary actions by the site.
Wouldn't matter, still broken due to poor choices by the site. With the extension the first link turns into... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FP3QKgQUcAIgTn5.jpg?utm_medium=newsletter ...which is...
Wouldn't matter, still broken due to poor choices by the site. With the extension the first link turns into...
If I was going to pen that line for the way I feel today, it would be, "I'm just sitting on my couch, arguing with my wife while nothing of consequence happens. I wish, I wish, I wish they would let something happen."
I think we are oppressed by the size and weight of the capitalist machine. Corporations are big, careless (of consequences to actual people), and conservative (in the sense of wanting to maintain the status quo, not politically). Anything that doesn't fit the mold gets squashed or starved at the margins. As a consequence, advertising is banal and peaceful because it's meant to be a balm smoothing over things we aren't supposed to want to change.
Ironically, I don't really believe there's a cabal of billionaires who jet off to an island to plan this. I think it's an emergent property of a system that's run out of control. Stephen Backhouse is a political theologian who talks about a principality as a thing that has lost sight of its original purpose and has become an end to itself. I think that's a perfect way of saying it.
I don't know what to do about it though. I feel this way all the time. But I'm busy, even overwhelmed, trying to raise my daughter, make my marriage work, pay our bills, do some good at the margins. Seeing my daughter flourish is by far the best part, but then I think about what her life will be like when she's grown up, and I'm right back to hopeless. Increasingly, it all just feels like meaningless shouting into the void.
If the problem is feeling bored and wanting more variety, it doesn’t seem like big, disruptive changes are the answer? When big changes do happen, they’re often disruptive and people don’t like them at all. They miss the good times. (The pandemic sucked.)
The world is terrible and there are lots of things that should change, but I don’t think that maps well to wanting some excitement in your personal life?
But I think one thing people miss is not being part of some larger effort. It’s two centuries old, but there’s a famous passage by Tocqueville about Americans’ tendency to form associations:
There are still quite a few organizations in the US, and yet, I’m not a member of any of them, and instead I spend a lot of time online. I think that’s true in general?
I've heard of the lack of being part of a group mentioned when discussing loneliness. It was easier to make friends back when we had a group thing to attend, be it church or something like the Masons/Scouts/Rotary Club. Someone new in town would immediately be exposed to many potential friends who shared at least one interest.
Not "I wish something would happen," but, "I wish they would letsome thing happen. It's not boredom so much as the feeling that anything counter to the overarching capitalist/wealth accumulation agenda is being suggested if it gains any scale.
The centrality of group membership is interesting as a source of identity. Like "I'm a Mason" or "I'm a Presbyterian". It feels like something that was true for the baby boomers, at least. I think you're right that being online has supplanted many of these things.
Off-topic, but the Tocqueville quote reminded me of this:
It still seems like a rather vague form of unease. Who is "they?" Depending on the subject, "they" might be Republicans, it might be NIMBY's, it might be local regulations, or it could be some other form of opposition. Sometimes, the problem is indifference. (Nobody comes to your event.)
Also, my impression from reading the news is that lots of things are happening every year. But maybe they're not the sort of changes you care about?
Father John Misty's "Things it would've been helpful to know before the Revolution" pretty much covers this with lines like "Sometimes I miss the top of the food chain but what a perfect afternoon" and "from time to time, we all get a little restless with no one advertising to us constantly."
But the final verse begins, "though I'll admit some degree of resentment for the sudden lack of convenience around here." and that's the hard part. Revolution isn't fun and most people smart enough to see that might still have problems with the system as it is. Too smart to upset the whole system, too dumb to upset the whole system.
Well put. I used to consider myself a free-market capitalist but the past decade has been such a treadmill of company after company making egregiously consumer-hostile decisions for the sake of enriching CEOs and shareholders in the short term, damn the consequences. Seems like everything these days is just shrinkflation, enshittification, unjustifiable subscription pricing models, or whatever other bait-and-switch grift these sociopaths think they can get away with because nobody’s paying attention. (And spoiler: They are getting away with it, and continue to, which only further incentivizes that behavior.)
None of this is what I believed capitalism was supposed to be. I was on board because it was supposed to encourage innovation, competition, more value for lower prices, and so on. I’m not seeing much of any of that these days. We’ve arrived at an outcome that is antithetical to the goal, an outcome that as you put it is an emergent property. An unintended consequence. It needs to be called out as such and course-corrected.
I grew up with a similar pro-capitalism viewpoint, but no alternative was ever presented seriously. (Probably because I had a half year of political science in high school taught by a substitute teacher with an abiding love of the Texas Rangers. Seriously, I had her as a sub three different times, and every time, all we did was learn about the Texas Rangers and play Uno.)
Maybe with a properly independent regulatory oversight (including proper regulation on monopolies) and limits on generational wealth, maybe I could buy into it again. But there is so much inequality written into our systems, I feel like an overhaul would need to move more toward a socialist model to be an effective change.
“Banal” is a good descriptor of modern advertising. It doesn’t really have any opinion at all.
On occasion I’ll pull up a YouTube compilation of 90s TV ads pulled from VHS recordings. It might just be the tinted glasses of nostalgia at work, but to me the overwhelming tone they carry is considerably more optimistic and energizing than anything that airs today. It’s quite a contrast to modern ads.
I really do think the 90s were much more optimistic overall than the current era. I was in my 30s then, so my opinion is definitely not based on nostalgia for my childhood, and in fact on a personal level it wasn’t a very good time for me, but for the society and culture at large it was a much more positive time than anything since.
Could this perhaps have something to do with the rise of data driven marketing and wanting the broadest possible appeal?
The author suggests that it may have something to do with our chaotic world, which I don't disagree with, but the homogeneity of everything these days seems to me more inline with companies being desperate not to offend any given market demographic.
Take the Skittles commercial for instance, as a former, slightly edgy 90s and early 00s teenager, I found it darkly funny. My parents, Boomers, however, would find it weird, off-putting and alienating, something corporate execs would kill for fear of alienating a particular demographic.
Which I can understand, really. Given how much things cost to make these days and how thin profit margins often are, companies are unwilling to take risks. Video games alone are often costing companies 300-500 million to make, so it's important to them that it has the broadest possible appeal. Even cars, no longer will a company take a risk and build something bespoke like a Thunderbird or a Prowler; now everything is on the same platform, so your Highlander is functionally the same as your Camry.
Ads aren't simply just aimed at the wall anymore to see what hits. Now everyone can see that Males, ages 35 to 50 buy this one particular thing, as well as women ages 18-24, so we need to appeal to both of them without alienating the other, so things need to be kept bland. Again, between this and things costing so much to produce, we've got our problem.
I'm definitely just rambling here, so hopefully I've made a cogent argument, but what we need to see is just stuff that costs less to produce and buy. There are still things in those spaces here and there, but I feel like as a whole, we're really not going to get back there. Between stuff like regulations (a good thing!) and increased demands for the next big thing (smaller computers, faster processors, etc), things seem set to continue to be expensive to produce and buy and thus, will be marketed to the widest demographics via bland advertising and bland design.
The author didn't bring up TiVo. I think people tend to forget how much of an impact it had on someone who could get access to one.
Suddenly, instead of having to watch as you went forward through commercials, you could press the 30 second skip button x times to completely skip over commercials without paying any attention to them. I remember figuring out how many presses I needed for half hour or hour long shows. Because commercials were sold in 30 second blocks, you could consistently watch a show while not seeing a single ad. On top of that, TiVo knew you were doing it. They kept track of which ads you watched, how long you watched, and so on. Of course this sounds familiar now, but it's the first time this level of detail was available to advertisers.
From "How TiVo Changes Our Behavior and Attitudes Towards Television":
There's no way this didn't have an effect on advertising content. Throwing out high visual impact ads makes a lot of sense in this context; ad agencies were desperate to show the advertisers that folks had actually seen what they'd created. This was new territory, so they could try whatever they wanted in an attempt to find out what would actually grab people's attention.
A retrospective on 90s aesthetics and advertising and how opposed it is to the twee and didactic nature of today’s.
I feel kind of weird knowing there are people who are nostalgic for this kind of advertising. They weren’t making these because life was just too darn peaceful, they were doing it as a way of shocking you into paying attention so you would buy their products. These advertisements were painfully “edgy” even for the timeframe they were in. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe them as cringe in today’s parlance. I think there are more than a few cases where they weren’t necessarily trying to appeal to anyone insomuch as they were trying to shock and puzzle people; they were trying to become viral so that more people would hear about them and their products would sell better. Why else would you have stupid stunts like advertising in graveyards and running a contest where the entry fee is legally naming your baby after their product?
I guess it shows where my mind is that I was at least half way through the article still thinking about how I'd never seen an ad for the open source VCS and wondering when they'd get to the part about selling Subversion.
Oh, they mean subversion, not Subversion!
I still have version control flashbacks whenever I enter a CVS drugstore…
Same thought. I was thinking, "oh my, is anyone still using Subversion?"
Half off-topic, half criticism of the article:
Dear author, your poor link tracking choices have led to an article where 90%+ of the image links are broken.
Do better.
I only see 1 image link in the article. Everything else is either a YouTube page or a Tweet. Which ones were broken? I can forward it to the editor and see if she can review it.
The first five links in the article are all image links, one reddit, four twitter image links, the latter four do not work.
The link tracking itself is scummy as it is.
Ah that sounds more like a twitter thing than a Beehiiv thing.
Maybe, maybe not. The tracker link tries to resolve the url as this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FP3QKgQUcAIgTn5.jpg?utm_source=weekly-dirt.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=selling-subversion...and...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F5k8itwb0AARdZv?format=png&name=small&utm_source=weekly-dirt.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=selling-subversionI had to remove the
utm_source,utm_mediumandutm_campaignparams from the URL to get the images to load.Yeah, I got them to load after removing all the tracker crap. Typically speaking, everything in a URL after a question mark is superfluous and can be deleted. Worked for the first, the second I did the same then added the .png filetype to the end to get it to load. The others were treated similarly, just bad and unnecessary actions by the site.
I recommend you use CleanURLs, I didn't know there was an issue until I read your comment.
Wouldn't matter, still broken due to poor choices by the site. With the extension the first link turns into...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FP3QKgQUcAIgTn5.jpg?utm_medium=newsletter...which is still broken.