People+Tech

After the peak you gradually decay in just about every detail of your physical self. From nature’s point of view, after you’ve reproduced you need to take care of your offspring. Making sure he survives until he’s fine on his own, that’s about your sole utility. That would be around the time he gets to 15-20, which would make you about 40, supposing you’ve conceived him at your physical peak. Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly the average age people lived throughout history. That’s the distressing way things are. Or were, until recently, when we started using science to increase our life expectancy dramatically. However blissful that may sound, the truth of the matter is we’re just not built to live that long. And the planet isn’t able to host and feed so many people living so weirdly long. From nature’s point of view, once we reproduce successfully (implying the offspring is alive and well on its own and ready to reproduce) we’re worthless and obsolete. We’re a waste of natural resources. We’re the old which should make room for the new. But we love ourselves and our lives too much to accept nature’s way without putting up a fight. So we desperately (and mostly unconsciously) hang on to existence in any way we can. We even invented uncanny concepts like reincarnation or afterlife because we just can’t bear the thought of our own nonexistence. Then, as we gradually realize we’re approaching the end, we start thinking more and more seriously about leaving behind a legacy of some kind. Be it money, objects or something more abstract, it’s still a rather pitiful way of extending our existence beyond our physical limit.

So although after one point we’re chemically-sustained beings that weren’t really built to be alive anymore, we’re kinda fine with it. So fine we’d gladly throw almost all our money into medicine just to push the final failure a bit further. And this is why I strongly consider investing in a drugstore someday. 

I advise the humble use of jargon as no more than a shortcut. It's wise to only use those words you can't find elsewhere in your language. Otherwise, try not to adapt and limit your language to a specific field. When thinking, it’s advisable to always use the largest amount of terms at your disposal. Make full use of the toolkit. This will allow you to access the largest amount of possible connections between them. And eventually drive you into making even the unlikely connections. And this is, you guessed, the definition of being creative. 

One thing I wish I did is to count down the words I used at the end of each day. And then count down the ideas I had. I bet I'd find a correlation there.

Choosing the culturally easy way is an option we make with the persistence of breathing. And by easy I mean the familiar way. People who behave as we'd expect them to, things happening in a way that makes sense. We only allow a tiny, predictable room for surprise. But not enough to surpass our logic. So how would one expect his logic to evolve, then? A is probably never resuming that movie. Sadly, I think she's rather trapped inside her cultural bubble. Having endless options can trap you, really. What if she were locked inside a room with no TV or computer and someone would bring her a DVD player and the old Japanese movie. Could she suddenly give up all her cultural restrictions and actually become anxious to watch it? Probably. Had technology not offered her easy and comfortable alternatives she would've gladly pushed her cultural boundaries on a daily basis.

But just like A we get to choose from almost countless numbers of cultural alternatives. We’re programmed to live by maximizing our comfort  so it’s only natural we habitually take the easiest paths. Why dwell into the cultural unknown when there’s so much familiar and almost certainly-satisfying stuff to choose from? We don’t read books anymore because the gratification doesn't come easy or fast enough. We go online instead. And most often end up looking at pictures or videos. Images are easier to digest, that’s why they gradually conquer the parts of our minds that were previously filled by text. Besides trapping us inside cultural bubbles technology triggers a shift towards visual culture.

Making the easy, unchallenging choices means surrendering to the comfort culture. Carl Sagan once said “somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”. Resting inside our cultural bubble is the best way to avoid that. 

We hate our jobs.

                                We're easily annoyed.

                                                   We're superficial.

                            We keep most of our social interactions by a minimum effort.

                           Naturally, we don't trust our peers.

                           We don't trust religion,

                          nor education.

                          We're lazy,

                          yet busy.

                          We overdrink,

                          and overshare.

                          We're well informed,

                          and it's no secret we want what we can't have.

                          So we practice escapism.

                          We're hateful,

                            and cynical.

                          No wonder we complain a lot.

Ferdinand de Saussure wrote „Psychologically, our thought - apart from its expression in words - is only a shapeless and indistinct mass, a floating realm”. Some thoughts are doomed to remain unconscious (and thus never become thoughts) because we do not have a word or a combination of words that could encapsulate them. These are the little traps our culture sets for us, condemning us to never think about certain things. Yes, you can feel lots of things. There may be a huge, indistinct realm floating inside your mind but you might never be able to drag it out, to verbalize it entirely.

On the other hand, there’s Twitter. Because of its focused, limited and somewhat dull nature, Twitter is condemned to never escape its niche. It could never encompass the whole diversity of how we interact with others. It’s quite the opposite of Facebook and it will probably never truly become mainstream. And then there’s the business model. Facebook knows so painfully much about who we are, what we do and what we want. One day it might become able to predict the rest of our timeline just by analyzing the patterns in our lives and comparing it with those of people similar to us, but older. But until it works out who we'll be, Facebook already knows better than anyone else on the web who we are. It does that in order to sell us stuff. And it will only get better at it as we spend more and more time using it. Soon it may even become better than us at predicting what we want. Needless to say, there’s tremendous potential value in this. 

While I only hold a mere piece of the equation (and yes, I know Facebook's stock has been plummeting for a while now), I'm doing my job to regard things from a behavioral point of view. From where I’m standing it seems that unlike Yahoo, Myspace and other broken dotcom bubbles, Facebook is here to stay.

Let's take a jump into the future and assume the present trends will keep their course. It's 2030. Everybody's so fed up with advertising and the tools for avoiding it have gotten so efficient it's a challenge to even create contact between people and ads. And most of today's advertisers are working in different fields.

  So how do we go about an alternative future of advertising? How do we reverse the trends and keep our jobs? From an advertiser's standpoint, the only actionable way is to make your work desirable to the public. Ideally, people should crave for our ads like they crave for the latest Batman trailer. Well, most of us already knew that. And already did our best to hit the masses with likeable advertising. But hey, that's still advertising. And people will continue to hate it as long as it's called that. Because it carries mercantilism (read evil) at its core. I believe the only way out is if your ad or product is contained into the Batman trailer. Or even better, if your ad is the Batman trailer. And, consequently, if your product is Batman. Yes, this is what I think 2030 should look like: an indistinctly blurry line between advertising and entertainment. I think a large part of advertising will be entertainment and vice-versa. Or, more simply, (good) advertising will equal content. Like Wally Ollins once said, Brazil's national football team should be the example of branding. Or Christopher Nolan’s Batman, I should add.

  Today’s largest online companies seem to have found a way to tweak advertising into being more useful or less intrusive. They started by making it pop up in better contexts, or to more likely-interested people. And built gargantuan stock value on the concept of usable (thus more desirable) ads. But is advertising less mercantillist? It isn't. Is it less observable? Not really. It's just an evolutionary step, but not the Omega point. Advertising's still not fine. Whoever manages to take the next step and convincingly blur the line between entertainment and advertising might be the one who extracts the evil from its core, the rightful exorcist of this concept. And, quite possibly, the one who builds the next corporate Gargantua.