Posts Tagged fantasy world
Merry Christmas
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Religion and other Woo on December 23rd, 2009
I feel flustered when people wish me a Merry Christmas. I haven’t been any sort of Christian for a long time. I never know what to say. One time, I stammered, “No. None for me, thanks.” Another time, I said, “No thank you. But no hard feelings!”
When I respond these ways, the store clerk or cashier often looks confused, and I kind of feel bad. Then I thought, “That way they feel when I say, ‘no thanks,’ is exactly how I feel every time I’m wished a Merry Christmas. Confused. Not knowing what to say.”
People have said to me, “They’re just being friendly.” I think that’s the superficial intent, but the person’s response when they’re told, “no thanks,” reveals the true intent. If they say, “Oh, my mistake,” that’s fine, but if they get angry or outraged, then something else was in play, other than just friendliness.
And what was that thing that was in play? In my opinion, it’s the unspoken desire to perpetuate the fantasy that everyone in the world shares your religious beliefs and cultural practices. This is expressed in the question, “Why don’t you just say, ‘you too,’ or, ‘thanks,’ and leave it at that?” What this question asks me to do is to “pass“—to pretend to be something that I’m not—in order to save you the discomfort that would come from acknowledging me authentically.
When people say, “All you have to do is say, ‘thanks,’ or, ‘you too,’” what I hear is, “All you have to do is continue to support my incorrect belief that you are just like me in your religious beliefs and practices.” But doing that has effects beyond just December greetings. I have a whole lot of opinions that probably differ dramatically from the common conception of the “mainstream.” So do you. So does everybody! When I inform people that I’m not Christian and I don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope that I’m helping to break down the incorrect idea that everyone is just like them. I hope that plays out when it comes time to set public policy on issues like abortion, support for the military and police, drug prohibition, and so forth. If you believe that everyone is just like you, then it makes it easy to marginalize the “few outspoken” who disagree. But if people who are not like you expose that fact, it will turn out that most people are not like you in some significant ways, and I think that makes it harder to marginalize dissenting opinions.
Like Tyler Durden said, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” You and I are probably more similar than we are different. If that wasn’t true, marketing and demographics wouldn’t be so effective. But we are also different in dramatic and significant ways, and by participating in the fantasy that we’re the same, we not only erode others’ ability to be themselves, we deny ourselves the ability to do the same.
Hyperbolic advertising: cheese is never opinionated
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing on May 22nd, 2009
It all started with tomatoes. The tomatoes from my friend’s home garden and from the CSA tasted so much better than the tomatoes I got from the grocery store. I was dismayed to realize what I had been missing out on this whole time.
It’s no surprise. I’d never really even tasted a tomato. Commercial tomatoes are bred for size, appearance, and resistance to damage during shipping, not flavor. They are usually picked green and then ripened by exposing them to ethylene.
This got me thinking about the dilution and substitution of experience. My definition of a tomato had been watered down so thoroughly that I hardly knew what I was missing. Of course, the lack of substance isn’t really relevant to marketers, who are happy to supply us with other forms of stimulation to keep us from noticing what we’ve lost.
Which brings me to this commercial, from NBC:
It’s a cute commercial, no doubt, but I found myself thinking, “I really like The Office, but I hardly ever find myself actually laughing out loud at it, never mind laughing my ass off. In fact, I almost never laugh at network TV, even shows I like.”
And then I started to see it everywhere: the unbelievably hyperbolic adjectives used in advertising to describe the experience you are supposed to associate with the product. Advertising has always exaggerated the virtues of the product; that’s nothing new. The interesting thing to me about these ads is the way in which they exaggerate not qualities of the product itself, but the experience that you will presumably have when you use or consume the product. The difference between the promise and reality is profound.
An ad for Petit Ecolier, a chocolate-covered cookie, suggests that you, “Lose and find yourself in one bite.” If that’s the experience that you will have when you eat the cookie, then I want some of whatever chemicals you’re taking. Can a cookie even do that? The ad below describes one woman’s experience of eating a Hardee’s hamburger. As you watch it, think back to the last fast food hamburger you ate, and ask yourself if it “reminded you of being in high school, sneaking out before dinner to savor that sweet, spicy sauce.”
Compensation for work at burns
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Burning Man on May 20th, 2009
At a burn, there are usually tasks that someone thinks ought to get done, but that they don’t want to or aren’t able to do themselves. Picking up MOOP (Matter Out Of Place, also known as trash) is a common one. It seems like there is always the temptation to encourage desired behavior with rewards, but I worry. In my fantasy world, the people at a burn would pick up MOOP because they believed in the principle of LNT, not because they wanted a cold drink. The person giving out the drink would do so because they wanted to express the principle of gifting, not because they wanted to get people to do something that they wouldn’t otherwise have done. Wait a minute! Burns are my fantasy world!
On some level, I feel like exchanging presents for work at a burn taints both the present and the work. I have the same uncomfortable feeling when theme camps want to give organizers cutsies in the food line, or a while back when somebody was talking about giving coffee mugs to people who volunteer. God damn it, organizing Alchemy is my vacation! I love being a board member. I love being a ranger. Thanking me for those things would be like giving me a slice of pizza and then thanking me for eating it. I just want to say, “No! Thank you for the pizza! It was delicious! Do you have any more?!” Rewarding me for eating delicious pizza that you gave me just feels weird.
Have I gotten special treatment because I help organize a burn? Sure. Last year, team leads were all given a unique piece of schwag. I don’t have a problem with people gifting to whomever they want to gift to. Where I start to feel wierd is when I hear people say, “Not enough people are volunteering to do X, so let’s set up an incentive in the form of a privilege or reward.” My ideal would be for people’s first motivation to be the love of the act, and if they get privileges or rewards as a result of that, all the better. But if people need to be incentivized, then that pretty much means that their first motivation is the incentive, and not the love of the act, and I’m not sure I want to encourage that type of interaction at my burn.
At this point, you are probably thinking, “Yeah right. Like people are going to pick up trash because they ‘love it’.” I get that. Picking up trash isn’t my favorite thing to do, but I can see how acting on the principle of LNT results in things that I do love. For example, we have gotten nothing but positive comments from the people who own and live on the land that we rent for Alchemy, and LNT is part of that. We’re leaving an impression of burners as, “Those people who put on an awesome party and clean up the land when they’re done!” That’s the kind of thing that I really love.
My philosophy is that when there is a task that people don’t want to do, the way to motivate them is to inform them of the effect of doing the task and not doing the task. If, with that information in hand, they still don’t want to do the task, then the right thing to do is to allow the task not to get done, and allow them to experience the outcome of not doing it. This allows people to be fully responsible for their own experience. If you’re going around doing things for people that you think need to get done when you’d really rather they be doing it for themselves, then you’re denying them the opportunity to take responsibility for their own experience, which isn’t doing them or you any favors.
For more on the effect of rewards and external incentives, check out Punished By Rewards
-
What I'm Doing Now- Oops! No Twitter!
