Category: Information

Dawn of the Prankster

About two weeks ago, some disgruntled friends shared a story about Urban Outfitters apparently marketing a faded and blood-stained-looking Kent State college sweatshirt.  Then, in a follow-up story reported by Jordan Sargent in Gawker, an email sent by the retailer’s CEO Dick Haynes explains that the sweatshirt shown in their marketing materials was not representative of a new, purposely designed line of clothing but was a legitimately vintage item purchased at a Rose Bowl flea market and that the red stains on the shirt are not in fact blood.  The photo of the Kent State sweatshirt, according to the email, was being used to promote a new line of faded looks being offered by UO.  Assuming Mr. Haynes is telling the truth about the sweatshirt (and there is no reason to think he isn’t), the story is a pretty good example of so much that is wrong with marketing in the digital age.  In short, does the campaign reveal stupidity or ignorance?  And at what point do such distinctions cease to matter? Do the economics of the Internet expect everyone to become a prankster in order to win?

As Sargent rightly implies, the marketing team at Urban Outfitters almost certainly knew they were courting negative reactions by using the image of this sweatshirt because in the age of social media, controversy can be a great way to get campaigns to go viral. Still, it is not yet clear that “any press is good press” is a universally wise tactic for all brands.  Certainly, a brand can align itself on the side of certain issues, which can be a great link to customers whose values correspond with the brand.  But in the bizarre dynamics of social media, even a hater becomes an evangelist of sorts when he/she shares a story for the purpose of denouncing it.  If the story or campaign offends ten thousand people but appeals to one thousand customers, cha ching.  Not only does this achieve market penetration for pennies, but the people who hate your brand did your selling for you for free.  That said, this can be dangerous territory for a brand looking to build customer relationships over time. Being a shock-jock can backfire.  More importantly, brands and their marketing campaigns are themselves creators of culture and thus feed public consciousness, which is part of why I believe our reaction is so strong against this apparent trivializing of the Kent State shootings.  It becomes a form of revisionist history, which brings us to the question of ignorance in this story.

Jordan Sargent raises the possibility with regard to this sweatshirt campaign that “…various people involved in the transaction were too young to even realize the implications of selling a Kent State sweatshirt that looked like it was bloodstained”  This may be true, and if so, it is yet another unfortunate phenomenon of our times.  Despite the fact that we treated the dawn of Internet access as a great boon to education, we do seem to encounter frequent examples of digital natives achieving adulthood woefully ignorant of some rather significant cultural icons and events.  That anyone in the United States might enter the workforce, let alone in a communications role, without ever hearing of the 1970 shootings at Kent State is both extraordinary and, at this point, not the least bit surprising.  In fact, I personally wondered many years ago whether or not a glut of data (which is not necessarily information) might result in a decline in general cultural literacy.

It was the late 1990s, and I was creative director on a photo shoot in New York.  The photographer and I were joking around, making references to the Marx Brothers, and our comments were sailing over the heads of the models and assistants who were a good decade or so younger.  Who doesn’t know The Marx Brothers, I thought?  Their films were hardly contemporary when I was growing up; they were 40 years old.  Driving home from the shoot, I wondered if the volume and rate at which we were increasingly consuming sounds, words, and images might not have a deleterious effect on long-term memory of important cultural and historical items.  Add to this the ease with which information can be manipulated through the web, coincident with a general distrust of traditional news sources, along with marketers willing to gin up controversy to sell tee shirts, and you get a digital age Tower of Babel.

Perhaps one of the worst phenomena to manifest from all this is that it feeds moral absolutism, which believes the ends justify the means.  For a business owner, those ends might be selling some product, but in the world of civic affairs, this psychology produces more serious results.  We’ve occasionally seen hacktivists identifying as Anonymous meddling self-righteously in politics or in events like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and they’re free to make a mess of things once in a while because they can’t be held accountable.  It is the same psychology that produces the bottom-feeders at Reddit and 4Chan who would share stolen nude celebrity photos and produce rape and death imagery of Emma Watson in response to her speech at the UN on feminism.  But, interestingly enough, it is also the same psychology that produced a bizarre attempt to attack 4Chan.

In case you missed it, a site was created called emmawatsonyournext.com, which was purported to be the work of anonymous users at 4Chan and appeared to be hosting a countdown to the distribution of revealing photos of the actress.  But according to this story by Rich McCormick in The Verge, the countdown site was in fact a hoax and PR ploy designed to drive traffic toward a campaign to take down the 4Chan site for its exploitation of women.  Now, I personally don’t care if 4Chan disappears; it is of no value to anyone, and the only people who spend time on the site are either losers or FBI agents.  But this hoax of a campaign against the site is likewise exploitative of Miss Watson and the values of feminism, and even if its rather murky ends are anti-misogynist, its means are unacceptable.  Coincidentally, according to McCormick, it was Redditors who apparently identified the companies behind the hoax.

“Some Reddit users were able to sniff out the hoax before its countdown expired, and linked the company behind it to FoxWeekly, a site that plagiarizes from other news sources to solicit views and Facebook likes, and Swenzy, a company that sells followers, likes, and views.”

BUT . . .

According to other sources like The Huffington Post, the organization behind the Emma Watson leak hoax is called Rantic Marketing, except that there doesn’t appear to be any such company because, writes James Cook for Business Insider, “Rantic Marketing is a fake company run by a gang of prolific internet spammers used to quickly capitalize on internet trends for page views.”

So…

I guess what I’m driving at is that the Internet can be kind of a cesspool of idiocy, self-aggrandized hackers, and exploitative opportunists all filtered through the manipulative algorithms of social media’s walled gardens.  And I think the truth is that, even as adults, we are not innately good curators or editors of the fragments of information with which we choose to be bombarded. If nothing else, who has the time?  When I think about the digital native generation growing up in this environment, it’s hard not to wonder if the biggest hoax of all might not be credited to whichever prankster first called this “the information age.”

Kim Dotcom on “60 Minutes.” Meh.

Getty Images.
Getty Images.

Last night, CBS news magazine 60 Minutes aired a segment featuring the flamboyant internet pirate Kim Dotcom (Kim Schmitz), whose Megaupload cyberlocker site was taken down in early 2012 after a dramatic raid on his luxury compound in New Zealand.  Charged with contributing to, inciting, and profiting from mass copyright infringement as well as related charges of racketeering and money laundering, Dotcom, a German, remains under mansion arrest in his adopted country hoping to avoid extradition to the United States, where he would stand trial.

If you only understood half of what I just said, (e.g. what’s a cyberlocker?), you’re not alone. Not only do I believe relatively few Americans have ever heard of Kim Dotcom or necessarily know what he did, it’s likely that an even smaller set of those who have heard of the man are at this moment particularly concerned about his fate — this despite Kim’s efforts to cast himself in the role of Robin Hood to the MPAA’s Sheriff of Nottingham.    Fortunately, this particular message isn’t really flying with just about anybody other than those one might call internet extremists, and I was pleased that CBS’s Bob Simon did not provide Dotcom a soapbox for his bogus ideological prattling.  That said, that’s about as much credit I can give to the segment, which was a bit of a puff piece, to be honest.

While Simon did push back at Dotcom for his claims to be “just a businessman,” he did let slide the oft-repeated argument Kim has made that it’s not his responsibility who uploads what to his site.  For one thing, Simon might have pointed to the fact that the charges against him include incitement to promote mass infringement by offering Megaupload users money and other forms of compensation specifically for uploading highly-popular filmed entertainment and music.  Even if this weren’t true, though, Dotcom is effectively asking people to believe he was siting there in New Zealand just minding his own business thinking (read with German accent), “I haff no idea ver zees millions of dollars are coming from! Please tell somebody ziss is not my fault!  I do not mean to be making all ziss money!”  Yeah, but really, that’s what he’s saying, and Bob Simon could have jabbed a little harder at the assertion that Dotcom didn’t know what he was doing.

Instead, the segment did include just enough time touring Kim Dotcom’s luxury compound that CBS can probably share the footage with MTV for a Cribs episode (is that still on?). I get why having Schmitz on the show might have attracted eyeballs, but overall the journalism felt mailed in, particularly in light of the fact that the 60 Minutes demographic probably skews toward an audience that doesn’t really know much about the issue of piracy or how it works. Simon didn’t do much in the way of providing context for the viewer or explain the nature of the charges against Dotcom.  Even the segment title “Hollywood’s Villain” is a bit glib and careless, considering the issue of internet piracy goes well beyond a feud between a couple of movie studios and one man.  In fact, one might have thought Dotcom suggested the title himself since his latest spiel is that Hollywood and the USDOJ  singled him out just because his lavish, super-villain-like persona make him such an “attractive target.”  Granted, as my friend said, “He’s like Auric Goldfinger without the class,” but I don’t think anyone sane believes for a moment that’s why he’s under indictment. Thus, even the few minutes in the segment devoted to examining this proposition, while entertaining, was a waste of time that could have been spent addressing some of the facts in the case.

There are interesting people in the world doing some extraordinary things with technology, some who even propose to address numerous challenges faced by millions just in their daily struggle to survive.  Against this backdrop, 60 Minutes has to work a little harder to make a guy seem interesting because he got rich by enabling already-privileged kids to watch Transformers: Dark of the Moon for free.

Probable Causes

iStock_000008641273XSmallIn his book At Home, Bill Bryson describes how the English clergy system, through the 18th and 19th centuries produced a local renaissance in the sciences and arts.  By that time period, the English were not an especially pious bunch, and as such the clergy system fostered a generation of well-educated and financially comfortable young men who ended up with a great deal of time on their hands. According to Bryson, most of these sons of the gentry studied classics rather than divinity and many of them were not expected to do much more for their rural parishioners other than recite an unoriginal sermon on Sunday mornings.  As a result, many of these otherwise idle hands produced a flowering of discovery, ideas, inventions, and creative works.  Or as Bryson describes, “Never in history have a group of people engaged in a broader range of creditable activities for which they were not in any sense actually employed.”  This period yielded, among other things, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; the power loom; the Jack Russell terrier; numerous first works on botany, paleontology, and other natural sciences; the economic principles of Thomas Malthus; the first aerial photography; the invention of the submarine; and the theorem of Mr. Thomas Bayes.  All the result of time, financial security, and curious minds.

There is a lot of discussion lately, including comments on this blog, about open access, which was of course central to the activism of Aaron Swartz; and the subject got me thinking about this particular revelation in Bryson’s book.  In a sense, we could think of the English clergy system as an incubator much in the same way we’re meant to think of digital technology today as a catalyst for innovation.  There is even a parallel in the democratic aura in which these rectors and vicars became the amateur, DIY scientists, authors, and inventors of their time.  In simple, idealistic terms, recreating this phenomenon on a global scale appears to be a foundation upon which the principle of open access is based — that the next life-altering idea might come from anywhere and, therefore, keeping a running spigot of data is of paramount importance.  To quote the start of Swartz’s manifesto, Information is power…

But is it?

What, for example, would the aforementioned Bayes’ Theorem tell us about the probability of achieving some of the more utopian aims of open access?  (Let’s be clear, I’m personally on the side of allowing especially publicly funded data to flow to the public; but this is a different question.)  Bayes provides a means to predict probabilities based on limited data, and as Bryson points out, the theorem was intriguingly of little use at its conception given that there were no computers to perform the calculations.  Today, Bayes is applied to work like climate change models and financial markets, but could it predict the probability that is the underlying question of this entire blog — i.e. will more access to more data produce more social benefit?

Naturally, we’d have to agree on what social benefit looks like, but assuming we’re using western notions of freedom, social justice, well-being, and enlightenment, does it stand to reason that adding more content into the pipeline must inevitably serve as a catalyst to improve or increase these humanistic goals?  It seems clear that there are far too many variables to accurately make such a prediction.  Even in a broad sense, consider how polarized the U.S. is, then spend about five minutes on the Web searching any number of topics. It becomes self-evident that data aren’t even data — that one man’s fact is another’s government conspiracy and vice-versa.  Or as Big Think posts here, even one man’s exercise can be another’s road to perdition.

Aside from the fact that data interpretation on a macro scale is a total crap shoot — we still have school boards fighting evolution for crying out loud — we might keep in mind the three conditions that were necessary to produce the innovations described by Bill Bryson:  they were education, financial stability, and time to indulge. There are ways in which digital-age tools provide more time, as in the Kurzweilian sense of adding additional brain power; but I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel that sometimes the constant flow of disparate information and social media ephemera can also become an obstacle to focused contemplation.  Additionally, there are aspects of the open access idea that are disruptive to existing economic models, particularly affecting the financial well being of some of the leading producers of quality information and cultural content.

I think the principles of open access are fundamentally good, and often principle alone is reason enough to demand support for a social agenda.  But the principle should not necessarily be confused with the reality that application in this case does not guarantee a renaissance. (The new era could look like 4Chan, too, which is the Web equivalent of the Dark Ages.) History is full of unintended consequences; and while the next big idea can indeed come from anywhere, this includes the possibility that it will originate in the mind of an individual as removed from our digital wellspring as an 18th century English clergyman.