The phrase “seeing around corners” gets tossed around boardrooms and strategy meetings as though it were a compliment, a kind of secular beatification for the executive or thinker who got there first. But the phrase deserves closer scrutiny, because what it actually describes is a discipline, and one that most people refuse to practice because the conclusions it produces are uncomfortable.
Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.
Continue reading → Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name
In July 2009, Amazon reached into the Kindle devices of thousands of customers and deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. The company had discovered that the third-party publisher selling those editions lacked the rights to distribute them in the United States. Amazon issued refunds. Then it erased the books. A high school student in Michigan lost his annotated copy mid-assignment. A class-action lawsuit followed. Amazon’s CEO called the decision “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” The company settled and promised not to do it again, unless a court ordered it, or unless the company determined it was necessary to protect consumers from malicious code, or unless the consumer failed to keep paying.
Continue reading → The Rental Life: What Happens When You Own Nothing and They Own You
The coronavirus, the rising threat of Covid-19, is nobody’s fault. Viruses are wild. Viruses happen. As long as humans keep eating animals, we will have viruses transferring from the animal world to the realm of the human being, but let there be no doubt that the “Wuhan Virus” and the “Democrat Hoax” and the “China Virus” will, very soon, be known as “The Democrat Pandemic” if Donald Trump has his way naming himself a “War President” as he leaves the cities to rot, and fold, while he claims victory in doing nothing.
Donald Trump is, without pause or preservation, “An Enemy of the People” in the truest possible manner as warned in writing by Henrik Ibsen in 1882.
The 2017 Oscars will be forever remembered as a debacle over naming the “Best Picture” in a mixup that was more human than mechanical, and for that pleasure, I’m grateful. We continue to prove, even in our dearest moments, we are not beyond the touch of the fallible, and that we are mortally are bound to fail — by proxy of The Gods — for even tempting to create beauty over form, and meaning over function.
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