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RE: Irony of ironies
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Christopher Locke
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Jul 05, 2001 10:24 PDT
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Tim
no man is an island, as John Donne told us, and it seems to
have stuck, at least in Bartlett's Quotations, so there's
that. and yeah, it's all reciprocal -- each change concatenates
with changes that came before until, viola!, we get Complexity
Theory, which makes such terrific beach reading.
what does it matter? come on! we are embedded in institutions
so obtuse they are utterly unconscious of their own origins.
and so are "we" -- if there's any sense of us-and-them in all
this, and increasingly, I believe there isn't. the metaphors
are wrong. not morally or ethically, necessarily. they just don't
hold water. so we're all working against a view of the world
not so very different from the here-be-dragons maps of yesteryear
or the notion that the earth never moves. well it moved for me,
motherfucker! should I deny my orgasm because it's not recognized
by the State? or by The Corporation? screw that.
it matters, and yeah, I *am* pissed off. but I am not just arguing
that we let our freak flags fly (though I do continue to believe
this is an excellent idea). I'm looking for the right levers to
pull to change the world into a more suitable place for human
beings to live, not to mention biological life in general, which
seems to me a value I can get behind without reservation or second-
guessing remorse.
actually, there is a THEM, and THEY are pulling levers which make
us remote-controlled marionettes to their plans for world domination
or to sell more deodorant, whichever comes first. the trick is to
show that their leverage is based on maps that no longer describe
the territory, and therefore have no predictive/manipulative power.
the better trick is to show that new levers can be pulled such that
business AND the human race can coexist without resort to mutual
assured destruction. I am an optimist in this respect and my anger
translates to a positive program of Renaissance-style patronage by
multinational corporations supporting the bottom-up emergence of
genuine voice from the nether regions of the web, thus creating
viable micromarkets which will replace mass-market advertising and
thus turn the global economy on its head and kick off a golden age
of art, humor and humanism the likes of which the world has never
seen, allowing Goldman Sachs to get hot stock tips from Peruvian
shamen. will it work? I don't know, but I haven't seen any other
models being proposed that didn't look dead-on-arrival (I give you
Permission Marketing as Exhibit A). And besides, it'll be more fun
and keep a certain dangerous element off the streets coding HTML
instead of offing the boards of the Fortune 1000, even if they
do have it coming. I'm trying to avoid a bloodbath. and as we know,
idle hands are the Devil's workshop.
so to recap... a) no man is an island, b) you cannot simply
cultivate your fucking garden, because c) if you stare long enough
into an abyss, it begins to stare back into you.
beyond that, for "The Gonzo Model," yeah, I do say, as Tom Matrullo
(who *has* read it) charges: "Read my book. (Locke)"
at a Zen-like loss for further words,
RB
October 2001 <> Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
sample chapters: http://www.gonzomarkets.com/intro.html
http://www.gonzomarkets.com/8mileshigh.html
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