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My New Favorite Thing: The “Blog” of “Unneccessary” Quotation Marks

I was just walking by a sign yesterday thinking, "there has to be a site that collects all these instances of mis-used quotation marks." It only took one day to stumble on it accidentally.

The more you look at the site, the more your sarcastic inner-reader voice emerges, and the funnier they become.

LOVE IT

My new blog: Hawthorne Street

In my continuing effort to start projects with little hope of breaking even, I've started a new blog: Hawthorne Street. This one is focused on my neighborhood (Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn), as well as old-house restoration tips. I'll also be writing out urban issues there (transit, public space, architecture), since that stuff doesn't really seem to fit here.

My New Favorite Thing: Catalog-Busting

We live in a two-family building and get piles of catalogs addressed to people I've never heard of. But this website, Catalog Choice, makes getting off catalog mailing lists easy, even when the catalogs aren't addressed to you personally. (The only catch is that you need to type in the "customer number"—so you can't do do it from memory.)

(Via Murketing)

Introducing the new American worker

Newsflash: kids today are self-absorbed, lazy little pricks. That's what we learned on this recent 60 Minutes episode. There have been a number of news articles on this topic: how twentysomething "millennials" raised on a diet of warm fuzzies and relentless self-esteem building are a disaster in the workplace, needing constant praise and attention. 60 Minutes focuses on how U.S-based corporations are coping by reframing old-school Successories-style motivation with new gimmicks like  "wacky" in-office parades, award certificates, and free handjobs.

A Wall Street Journal columnist blames twentysomething narcissism on Mr. Rogers (unfair!), Boomer-style permissive parenting (getting warmer), and the gospel of self-esteem (warmer still). What the press reports seem to miss, however, is the fact that this is the first generation of children raised in an environment of unabashed marketing. In 1980, corporate lobbying managed to get Congress to abolish the Federal Trade Commission's authority to regulate advertising to kids. With no watchdog in sight, an entire industry developed to market directly to kids. Full-length commercials began masquerading as TV cartoons. Channel One launched its in-school advertising "news" network. And junk food marketing skyrocketed. The most common message of marketing to tweens and teens is this: your parents are idiots, your teachers are dull, you're so much cooler than everyone else. But we understand you and know what you want. Product!

What may be bad news for the pampered white kids featured in the segment, though, should be good news for America's immigrants. Based on this segment, I'd say immigrants who've brought over a strong work ethic will have a great shot at out-achieving the coddled elites, once employers stop instinctively hiring rich whites. Let's hear it for class war!

Unmarketable: book and event

Yes, the Stay Free! Book Club just finished a meeting - my book was Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity.  The book has since come up my conversations so much that I wish I had a box of them to hand out to everyone I know.  Anne Elizabeth Moore holds the magnifying glass to a string of peculiar events from the past few years, such as Nike's copycat Minor Threat poster, Axe commissioned graffiti in Chicago, and Toyota's rubbing elbows with craft communities to promote the Yaris. All are examples of marketing towards "indie culture," cultures that have been established, more or less, in opposition to corporate culture.  Not only have major corporations targeted these various groups, but they've successfully recruited crafters, graffiti artists, and punks to participate in or even create the campaigns. 

Anne Elizabeth Moore was interviewed on Murketing last week. Also, I'm proud to be speaking with Moore and Josh MacPhee on November 14th at Ad Hoc Arts in Brooklyn.  Come on out...
7pm Wednesday November 14
Ad Hoc Arts (49 Bogart Street Unit 1G, Buzzer 22) Brooklyn. Near the Morgan Ave L.
It's free.

Buy Buy Baby (the book, not the store)

Just finished Susan Gregory Thomas's book Buy Buy Baby and thought I'd take the opportunity to recommend it highly. Though I like to think of myself as well-read when it comes to kids and consumer culture, I found the book illuminating and engaging, with a journalist's sense of balance... in the end, though, it all comes down to choice anecdotes, and Thomas delivers with plenty of scary examples of the depths that marketers go to in order to brainwash the infant set.

A couple of personal favorites:

1. The Gepetto Group, a marketing firm that target kids from age 0, hosts an annual scavenger hunt at Walt Disney World. This isn't your typical party game, though—the "items" being hunted are kids. Participants—budding marketing pros—spend the day observing toddlers and their moms as an exercise in "kid immersion."

   Though some participants feel uncomfortable with the exercise at first, they come to see it as harmless, even beneficial. Rachel Geller, chief strategic officer of the Gepetto Group, reassured participants in the 2005  scavenger hunt by stating, " It's good for kids to learn how to manipulate (people)—that's how  you get ahead in this world."

2. WonderGroup, a kid-targeting firm, created the "Millennium Mom Segmentation Model" to rank moms by permissiveness. According to the model about 40 percent of moms are one of three groups of "permissives;" the other 60 percent are divided into three "restrictive" segments.  The R3S segment, for example, has a "low response to kid requests," is the "most educated" group and has a "family focus." At a talk.... President of WonderGroup described the R3S mom as "the evil twin sister of P3... and, dare I say...a bitch?"

Not that Thomas allows all the blame to fall squarely on the shoulders of the marketers. Much of the book focuses on baby television and on the self-centered logic of gen x moms who have embraced it. Far from representing an enlightened elite, educated and affluent moms are some of the biggest chumps of all. As Thomas points out, a common marketing strategy is to first target this "class" group so that the product trickles down to the "mass" group with an educational halo. This, basically, is what happened with Baby Einstein and its ilk—a potentially harmful class of goods that parents have uncritically embraced.

Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff here, but I'll save a couple of other items for future posts.

Stay Free news

I haven't been blogging much lately for the usual reasons, but also because Jason and I are working on a Stay Free! book. The book will be published by Farrar, Straus and Girioux and some of it will have appeared in the magazine in one form or another. We're working on new material in order to flesh out a thesis of sorts. We haven't agreed on a title yet, but it's going to be about how consumer culture is toxic, makes people stupid, and gets us to believe that bad things are good for us. If all goes according to plan, it'll be out in 2009.

My second bit of news to report is that we're going to be starting a monthly event series — tentatively called "Adult Education" — in early 2008. Each show will feature four speakers lecturing on an aspect of a chosen theme.... kinda like (we hope) the Little Gray Book series, but with pictures and more of a "social studies" than literary bent. I haven't yet sought a venue, so if anyone knows of a good bar that would appreciate such an event, let me know. (It should be easily accessible by subway in either Manhattan or Brooklyn, and have a performance space that fits about 100 onlookers.)

The Military's Secret Weapon: Magic

Writer Jon Ronson, previously known to me for his segments on This American Life, has made a documentary series based on his book The Men Who Stare at Goats for the BBC called Crazy Rulers of the World. This story of the devotion of U.S. military resources to psychics, mentalists and other bullshittery is hilarious when it isn't downright terrifying.

A retired general - and former head of military intelligence - straight-facedly explains how he remains disappointed that he was unable to will himself to walk through walls. A guy who teaches ballet at a strip mall discusses his role in a project conducted by the PsyOps unit at Ft. Bragg to kill a goat with his mind. Of course, you stop laughing when you see how what began with the new age ideas of Jim Channon and the First Earth Battalion manual slowly devolved into the psychological torture techniques used in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

As I watched one serious (but clearly batshit-crazy) military man after another discuss "chakra points" and "remote viewing" I couldn't help but think that I liked it better when I thought our military was full of End Times Christians.

Google Video has all three parts: 1 2 3. It is so compelling that Carrie and I watched the whole thing while on vacation in Paris. Which we concede is pretty fucked up.

Via bOINGbOING, image from PsiOp Radio