Image Courtesy of sodabooks.com
We are trapped, are we not, trapped in the very devices we devised? Have we finally reached the apotheosis where there is no more outside, no route of escape? Now Ideology has been replaced by Brand Values, Radical has been recast as Disruption. Brand and Disruption are two sides of our contemporary coin, the currency in a differential system of competing identities. It’s a zero sum game wherein Apple and Alibaba, Kimye and Kazakhstan all compete. The disputed territory over which campaigns are waged is the dwindling real estate called Mindshare. Disruption is a business model that reassigns control (usually in ways that disadvantage the already disadvantaged). Entrepreneurs promise to change the world by developing new surfaces on which to paste more advertisements announcing more brand values. Isis has Instagram. AirBnB, Uber and Spotify consolidate distributed empires: the insatiable appetite of global for the local. It’s a battle fought on screen where we, the dazzled spectators, root from our couches, cradling our next-generation PDAs, blurting out clever 140-character encouragements, right up until the point we are forced to live amongst the consequential rubble.
Published in 032c Magazine Issue #29 “Nest”
© Michael Rock