November 26, 2004

Not only does the incident get blogged right away, but the ramee’s daughter moblogs it with her cam-phone. Then Josh is on the phone with the blogger, gives an obnoxious answer that he assumes is “off the record” and watches as his words show up on the blog while he’s still on the call.

Blogging, dear friends, is mainstream. What we do with it now matters more.

Of course, it never happened.

But maybe that’s a good thing. The older I get, the less these crazy stunts seem like career-building exercises, and the more they just seem like “re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic”.

I think the game has moved on.

Here’s an example. Ask me to name what I think is the most brilliant piece of new advertising I’ve come across in the last 5 years.

My answer would not be some big, funky-dunky campaign from a company like Apple or Volkswagon.

My answer would not be something from some edgy, hipster, in-your-face creative hot-shop in downtown Manhattan or London.

My answer would be Robert Scoble, a regular guy with a regular job who blogs regularly about the company he works for. That company happens to be Microsoft.

I seriously believe Robert, on Microsoft’s behalf, is making more advertising history at this very moment than all the creative hot-shops combined. He is changing the game beyond all recognition. The hot-shops are not.

And he’s probably doing it at less than 1% of the price the conventional agencies are used to charging.

So if you find yourself working in advertising, you now have two choices:

1. Try to prove folks like me wrong or

2. Get with the program.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences! In an attempt to secure our political hierarchy’s communications from the advances of their hierarchy, he co-developed the TCP/IP protocol in the 1970s, building on concepts developed in the 60s: J. R. Licklider’s Galactic Network memos. The purpose was straightforward enough, to harden our nuclear command & control system against nuclear attack. But the architecture does something more profound. Essentially, it lets messages have their way with the network.

That’s heady stuff because it gently erodes the very thing it was built to protect, the underpinning of all human societies: Hierarchy. Practically speaking, that means patriarchy. Most of us know how a patriarchy works. The alpha male, no matter how absurd the hovel he rules, dictates what may or may not be discussed in the household. As long as everybody toes the line and tiptoes around the Barca Lounger, everything’s fine. But cross that invisible line and the snarl emerges, often with the hickory switch. We discover the line by observing our Alpha Thug’s reaction, not by an explicit set of rules he’s taught us so we can stay out of trouble. Indeed, sudden, terrible trouble is the operating protocol of domination:it keeps the vassals on their toes. (Every alpha male is in turn a vassal to some other male: .)

No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be.