This interview addressed below (link) is with Massimo Mazzoco, a photographer who, while speaking with a French accent, is very good at English too. Consequently, I can understand his words without the annoyance that comes with having to parse and think at the same time. His business is to debunk the debunkers – to claim that the moon landings were a hoax. There’s nothing new to discover, and no new ground broken, so Petra, our friend, please, this is not about that. I wanted to link to Fakeologist and Ab Irato since a while back I took a shot at Lynn Ertell, a regular there whom I find terribly annoying. This is a way of apology for me, to link to some of Ab’s good stuff.
So as not to single out Ertell, I am of a bent that very quickly gets annoyed at supposed experts on any subject who practice the art of obfuscation:
- Pose as an expert.
- Never answer a direct question directly.
- Control the forum. Interrupt as needed, talk over, misdirect, drone on endlessly.
- If you don’t like the question asked, answer another.
That first, control of the forum, has to do with a phenomenon we’ve all seen too often, that when a speaker speaks, s/he opens the mouth, and words roll out in a mesmerizing and monotonous fashion, so that we cannot interrupt even as we do not absorb anything. We should interrupt, but such interruptions are only temporary. The person occupying the forum knows to keep on blabbing. Another aspect of this phenomenon is that such people never appear in a controlled debate forum, never allowing opposition views to be aired.
My own personal shortcoming is that I do not have the patience to sit through such interviews, and also that I get more annoyed with women than men. Call me whatever that word is that we use for men who look down on women. On my surface, I try not to be that guy, but down a layer or two, I am that guy. Empty-headed women annoy me more than empty-headed men.
That’s not why I write here. The Mazzuco interview is very interesting, and allows for give and take and short questions followed by short and direct answers.
However, at regular intervals we are interrupted by fast talkers doing advertising at us, rat-a-tat, no time to mute it. It is so goddamned annoying! The forum in use does not allow for fast-forwarding 10 or 30 seconds, an easily-accessible technology, and not used for that reason. They do not want us skipping advertising. I moved the bar ahead on this one, and probably missed a few minutes of Massimo, but also as a result have no idea what the ads might be for. It does not help that one of the ads is a fast-talking woman. Again, break out that word used on people like me.
This goes back decades, as we all began to use the Internet in 1995 and are all witness to advances in technology. But early on, the idea that advertisers could rudely cut in on us right on our computers was a new technology. They were just then using the pop-up, and people were getting annoyed. There was so much annoyance, in fact, that a journalist, to use the term loosely, went to a Madison Avenue agency that was doing pop-ups, and asked a spokeswoman, (yes, a her) how she could justify such lack of manners. Her answer, which anyone who has read this blog for the last twenty years knows, was
“Hey! It’s our job to get your attention!”
And my response, again not new: “She was then taken to a nearby alley, and shot. A jury refused to convict.”
If only that, but advertising is far more subtle and intrusive. They know they annoy us, and don’t care – they try to minimize the annoyance with humor and sexual images, lately virtue-signaling by being all green all over, but they’ve a job to do. At the center of all advertising is behavioral psychology. I know someone who was in the business, and he would let slip now and then as they did their creative work on pitches that it all boiled down to the central theme of an advertisement, and that all pitches had to conform to that theme. It came from deep in the bowels of the agency, a psychology department.
The central thesis of that theme is that people lie. Advertisers, if they trusted us, would make direct appeals to our intellects. But they know better. Few products are new or different or as useful as claimed. Consequently, they have to make that appeal on the surface, but the message has to be layered, and the real message embedded in images that go directly to our brains while bypassing filters. Thus is all (professional) advertising a layered lie.
The image above is a famous campaign for Apple PCs from long ago, titled “I’m a PC I’m a Mac.” The message was layered, and the object as well. The message was that dorks and geeks used PCs while cool people used Macs. But it goes one layer deeper … Apple had only a small slice of the market, and needed some help. It needed a sales force far bigger than what it had available, and so recruited its users to sell its product. Every Mac user became an annoyance, smugly thinking they were using a better product than a PC, in effect saying “I’m smart. You’re not.” It was smashingly effective, probably won tons of awards not for its creativity, but for its subversive impact.
Who the hell cares if an ad is cute or funny? Does it work? That’s all that matters. After all, to this day, Macs and PCs are the same product using the same technology.
It was 2013 or so, and I purchased a Mac. Right away I got annoyed. The introductory video told me that Macs were superior to PCs because when you scrolled the screen using the bar on the right, you moved it up instead of down. It insulted my intelligence. One of the complaints about PCs of that time is they they took too long to become usable after we started them up. They clicked and whirred incessantly. Apple claimed to have solved that problem, but what I found was that indeed that screen with those familiar click-boxes would appear, but that the keyboard would not function for the exact same amount of time that it took a PC to warm up.
But worst of all, our advertising creative friend asked me, in a condescending tone as I stupidly sat aside my Mac, “So advertising doesn’t work. Right?” I never said it did not work. I only maintained that advertising is dishonest and subversive. There’s a difference.
In our living room is a chair that, if you place our TV at 12:00, is facing 2:00 PM. If I am watching something that is interrupted by advertising, I hit the mute button, and look away. As I do so, I always know when the ad has finished. They flash. The screen changes every second, or two seconds. I can see that out of the corner of my eye. When the screens stops flashing, I know the ad has ended. They spend billions constructing ads, and each second’s image is carefully crafted for a reason. But they do not want us thinking about anything, so they do not give us a chance. They change the image in rapid eye-flicker fashion so that the images, which are the true messages being conveyed, bypass our internal censors and go straight to our subconscious. That’s what I mean by “subversive”.
(Does advertising still work on me as I look away, via the flickering images, subconsciously? Possibly. Leaving the room helps too. However, in my defense, I, like most everyone I know, watched the recent Superbowl. I cannot tell you anything about either the advertisements or halftime show.)
I gave away my Mac, went back to my PC, which is so much easier to use. The technology behind the screen is far beyond my comprehension, but the interface is constructed in such a way that we can all use and understand it. If there is genius involved, it is those people making a machine useable for the average bloke. Understand, the technology behind Apple, Google, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus … all of them, is identical. Knowing that, it is only logical to assume that all manufacturers got it from the same source.
Dare and reveal please, again.
It was suggested to me recently in a comment that we don’t have real science or scientists anymore, and I was stumped to think of one area where real scientists are hard at work. If it can be called science, psychological manipulation by advertisers is it.
Piece of Mindful 