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“My life is made up of so many other lives…. all of them rearranging themselves.” This advertisement for the Palm Pre smartphone promotes the curious Zen of being your own Dear Leader.
Pajama-clad minions engaged in mass calisthenics; misty mountains in the Pure Land of Bliss. What’s not to like? Or, as the narrator intones, “isn’t it beautiful when life simply … flows together.” It’s the middlebrow myth of the smartphone: achieve release through total control.
But as a T-Mobile ad from earlier this year shows, it’s we who do the dance, for mobile phone companies that make handy Dear Leaders:
T-Mobile’s minions domesticate the flash mob, making a farce of wonder. “Life is for sharing,” runs the copy at the end. Another middlebrow koan: achieve release through total transparency.
No more homework, only recess, all the time! Why read Henry James when we can all do exercises? Nothing to suppress, after all, when you don’t need to think; we’ll just go straight to release! All of us except for the (perhaps virtual) DL embedded in technologies of control.
It’s like the Dream of the Ant.
Brilliant Double Take!
The T-Mobile ad makes one wonder whether domestication wasn’t built into the flash mob’s apparent anarchy and absurdism right from the start. I certainly feel this way about the cheesy antics of Improv Everywhere, as I noted in our first Quatsch Watch post.
I think that’s true–it’s not exactly levitating the Pentagon, is it? It seems like things have taken another step from advertising’s co-optation of the styles of dissent; new forms seem to come pre-configured for co-optation.
I’ve worried about that a lot recently, it’s suspicious how ideas get sold back to us almost too quickly; even viral marketers can’t move that fast. The panopticon is winning, no need to spend on a cage when we can grow the tech internally. If Big Brother didn’t already exist we would have had to love him anyway.
Of course, New Left types claimed the same thing about the Yippies, even at the time; media-savviness seemed all too close to media-friendliness, marketing-readiness, “selling out.” The 1978 movie “The Big Fix,” in which F. Murray Abraham plays Abbie Hoffman-turned–marketing-exec, is a perfect expression of the way highbrows anti-lowbrows feel about hilobrows like the Yippies. So I guess I want to preserve the possibility that theater of the absurd and situationism aren’t always already pre-coopted, while confronting the fact that — these days — they almost always are.
Peggy — aren’t you writing about 1970s movies? Check out “The Big Fix,” if you haven’t seen it.
yes, me too: “I want to preserve the possibility that theater of the absurd and situationism aren’t always already pre-coopted, while confronting the fact that — these days — they almost always are.” yes 70s, will re-view Big Fix!