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Michelob Ultra’s advertising slogan, “It’s only worth it if you enjoy it,” encapsulates hedonism as transactional: Pleasure is why we work. The effort is mapped onto desire gratification (a dodgy target), and a measure of pleasure is the payout.
Yet, true enjoyment transcends selfishness or one-to-one zero-sum transactions: joy most often arrives in communal moments of excess, allowing joy to spill over and spread without effort.
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In the attention economy, our capacity to focus is the measure of our free will.
When attention is commodified and captured by digital devices and advertising, we lose the ability to engage in deep thought -the kind that shapes an authentic self rather than one driven by manufactured desires.
While we naturally filter countless stimuli to focus on single tasks, our attention is constantly being spent. This spending shapes who we become.
Critically, we must choose whether we consciously direct our attention (prioritize and focus) or surrender it to external forces that would mold us according to their interests, into their subjects.
tags insight, perspective]
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Anchoring is a cognitive bias where initial information shapes subsequent judgments.
As a selling tactic, pre-telling exploits this bias. For instance, labeling a product "delicious" anchors consumers’ evaluative expectations, influencing them to perceive it as tasty. Similarly, using words like "power" to describe a product anchors it in the consumer’s mind as highly effective, regardless of its true capabilities.
This manipulative use of language sets a baseline expectation, influencing us before intellectual consideration.
Interestingly, ideology does the same thing: pre-blinding us, pre-disposing us.
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When you separate responsibility from authority, you create a space in which bad ideas can flourish without repercussions.
Accountability is necessary for weeding out dangerous, frivolous, promotions that lower communal trust for personal gain.
Examples include gain of function research, unrestricted AI, massive bureaucratic edifices surrounding economics, cloaking decision-makers and passing failures onto consumers, and political contributions made anonymously.
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A new advertising billboard, presumably Spite (a Coca-Cola product), has reverted to text advice in black with large white text commanding "You decide you."
While mimicking the style of Barbar Kruger and John Carpenter’s "They Live," where one dons spectacles to reveal the functioning ideological imperative, this advertisement sides with subjective authenticity.
If "you decide you" -which is to make a self-determined choice- either you align with the advertising message, or it aligns with you, subverting your individuality back into obeying an external authority’s imperative.
Your inverted rebellion now must be "don’t decide," or "decide for others." Both unpalatable. We must see beneath the aesthetic mechanism of capture and say "fuck it" to the therapized self-help and freedom lingo stolen and packaged to bind you to a brand: "just do it" or "think different" which prompts following instead of thinking or doing or deciding.
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In the workplace, the common-sense logic of working hard, not taking any vacation days, and not complaining about anything does not get you promoted.
Instead, consider that you must be just polarizing enough to be noticed (and possibly disliked) by some leaders in order to be championed by one leader. Once this Executive goes to bat for you (defends you), they must not back down in the competitive arena of high-power egos. The champion must then fight for your promotion to further validate his/her stance.
Fighting for a stable, hyper-productive wallflower is seldom heard of.
Your best bet is to be a hard-driving idiot: look like you are passionately working hard, saying “yes” to everything, and hurting yourself. Solve problems that don’t exist. Get others to help your silly crusades. This creates a much better emotional spectacle than methodical, logical progress, with the bonus of involving others which looks like leadership.
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As the human figure is replicated and flattened (allá Warhol) and enlarged (allá Oldenburg) the body loses affect. This representation mirrors advertised, commodified objects: objects without spirit or agency.
Frederic Jameson calls this the “death of affect.”
To clarify, it is a spread or dispersal of affect. Affect of the body (it’s agency to produce effect) is siphoned into the image and distributed ubiquitously. This is not profound, but a banal vampiric bleeding-off the affect of a real body into a sans-animate representation.
Our true death is that we lose the ability to experience the real.
But, let’s not be hasty: one encounter with the primal real, a real body, can reactivate the giddy potency so carefully neutered.
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When presented with the “sinking of the titanic” or the “reign of the pharaohs” in a museum, you encounter protected, curated historical artifacts and detailed, digitized storyline renderings.
When you encounter alien museums, they appear cobbled together by an amateur, often using a Xerox machine and hot glue. The budget craft leans into kitsch, undermining credibility.
Would enhancing the display to align with high-budget blockbusters create easier acceptance through a mainstream aesthetic?
Or is homemade production the key to alien culture’s resilience? By eschewing the mainstream, it opens itself to outsiders, using its cheapness as camouflage to maintain a joking persistence over short-lived seriousness.
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With all of our behavioral and cognitive science, with our best practices psychology, there is always a better way to soft serve facts to people. No one is ever "wrong." Instead you made a decision that was right for you in the moment, or you were lacking a vital piece of information.
Our language is really a version of influence marketing.
