FORGET COVID. THIS IS THE KILLER VIRUS.

I was wrong. I thought that the crescendo of hysteria that’s been festering like a planet sized boil in the wake of Trump and Brexit would dissipate once a serious crisis came along. It’s like we’d been massaging a giant zit with lard everyday, kneading around it, aggravating it and daring it to erupt. Our hysteria strayed well beyond the political, of course. Fuelled by the inexorable voltage of social media, the tribes both left and right, grew angrier, louder and scarier every day. By the end of 2019 our communal frenzy had infected our views on gender, race, biology and science itself, trampling across the muddy terrain of truth, then straying further, deeper and dirtier into culture’s slippery mire.

Even Hollywood, our superstar storytellers, seemed to have lost the will to live, offering us little more than yet another regurgitated superhero that we know won’t really come to our rescue.

Then bang, Covid19 arrived. In an odd sort of way, the timing felt right. We knew we were due a dose of punishment for all our sinful excess. Greta had made that clear enough. And it’s a brand spanking new decade after all, the perfect time for a spot of self flagellation. As Spring 2020 broke, tiny green shoots of sanity could be spotted peeping above the gently warming soil. We were all in this together they said, and so we clapped, banged saucepans and awaited our leader’s daily sermon like a family huddled around the wireless during the blitz. Sadly, it’s clear now that what we were enjoying was nothing but the short, harmonious chime you hear when the system reboots. 

Lockdown made matters worse. Much worse. Egged on by social media’s relentless needling we took to the streets, raised our fists, smashed a few shop windows, looted a few sneakers and toppled a couple of guano-fied statues. Summer 2020 became an orgy of outrage. We blamed our police for brutality in countries thousands of miles away, blamed the government for doing too much…and too little, too late and too soon, blamed our race and gender, but best of all we blamed our own history for bringing us here in the first place.

And so, here we are in autumn 2020 and as the days darken and the trees turn shades of Trump, it’s clear that the script for the Twenties has been written. We’ve supped on a sickly cocktail of guilt, fear and anger, topped off with a neat, narcissistic slug of entitlement, and it’s left us wary as to where our ship is heading and doubtful as to whether there’s a ship at all.

Please don’t listen to those that tell you this madness will evaporate after the election for the leader of the free world. On the contrary, we can expect months of viscous legal wrangling and prolonged civil unrest to help ring in this decade of uncertainty. The ’twas-ever-thus’ brigade are wrong.  Powered by the vitriol of mobile we will endeavour to exacerbate every tiny irritant we can sift from the grains of our existence to cultivate into another calamity. We won’t find peace because we’re simply not ready for it yet. In short, a wave of mass masochism has infected the West. 

This is the real killer virus. 

Thanks for reading. Now please follow me on Twitter @retailfuturist for more devastating insights into where we’re all heading…

  Howard Saunders   Oct 07, 2020   Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More

THE RISE OF THE MINI TYRANTS

We all know the type. Dress a man in a hi-vis vest, armed with a clipboard and a biro, and you’ve just built yourself a mini tyrant. You’ve licensed a tiny authoritarian to impose the rules verbatim, as he sees fit, no matter the context or circumstances. It’s worrying how humans slip into this mode with such ease.

One of the most famous psychological experiments of all time proves the point. You remember. The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 divided students into two groups: the guards and the prisoners. The guinea pigs embraced their roles so enthusiastically that after just twenty four hours (of a two week experiment) prisoners were forced to sleep naked on concrete floors and defecate into a communal bucket. On the second day (ffs!) the ‘guards’ volunteered to help attack the barricading ‘prisoners’ with fire extinguishers. Experts reckoned that a third of the ‘guards’ exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. The two week long experiment was halted after six days.

Or take the equally famous Milgram Experiment where randomly selected subjects willingly administered 450 volt shocks to invisible, loudly squealing victims. Nice work.

So, were these experiments artificially skewed by an unfortunate selection of innate sadists? Were these people plucked from the streets inherently wicked? Probably not. The only realistic conclusion is that there is a mini tyrant in many, if not all, of us.

This pandemic has created the perfect petri dish in which tyrants can flourish. Both Karens and Kevins have been beckoned out from behind their twitching curtains onto the streets to help us lesser mortals toe the line. Finally, they have their moment. They can instruct us to wait behind the yellow line, order us to sanitise appropriately and force us to adjust our masks in accordance with regulations. Karen and Kevin are in charge now, and don’t you forget it. They control who comes in and out, and if you dare engage in any eye-rollery, expect to be turned away sharpish.

This pandemic is not a joke. Millions are dying you cynical, heartless bastard. They are only doing their job, you understand. All is explained at the top of their imaginary license, which reads “for the greater good”. Those key words that unlock so much needless cruelty.

We’ve grown accustomed to a certain level of tyranny in our daily lives. The receptionist at the local council offices, the occasional post office worker and not forgetting the legions that work in airport security. But in a funny sort of way, these traditional MTs represent a kind of charming throwback from simpler times. A hangover from the days of Arthur Scargill, or Peter Sellers in ‘I’m Alright Jack’. The low level hum of authoritarianism was not only limited and manageable, but actually rather reassuring. Today however, with the promise of Covid Marshalls and governments encouraging neighbours to snitch on children’s birthday parties, it’s clear a torrent of totalitarians are about to be unleashed on us. And perhaps most concerning of all, they’ll be at the frontline of retail and hospitality.

It was only a year ago that the hospitality sector was threatened with the prospect of robots taking all their jobs. Now that we’ve seen those off, the last thing we need is humans emulating them.

Have a nice day.

Thanks for reading. Now please follow me on Twitter @retailfuturist for more devastating insights into where we’re all heading…

  Howard Saunders   Sep 16, 2020   Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More

TRUMAN SHOW

Oh shot, shot shot! Flicking hell. Ever noticed how desperately hard Apple’s predictive text works to stop you swearing? Of course you have. No matter how many times you adjust the o to an i, it will never learn that you simply want to write shit. We all know what’s happening but we just tut silently as we change the o for the fourth time.

Yes, this is the world’s richest, most influential company telling you you shouldn’t say shit. Apple knows best and simply wants to adjust your oikish language in keeping with its own, much holier, principles. And it’s not just swearing. Try writing the word urinate, for example. Apple would much prefer you replace it with ruination, for some reason, while goddamn offers us goddaughter or goddess. Apple has become a Victorian prude. If this isn’t Apple playing God, then God knows what is!

Now try Googling images of ‘knife crime’. Despite London’s knife crime epidemic, overwhelmingly an urban, male, black on black problem, you will need to scan past forty plus images before you find a black hand brandishing a knife. There are dozens of white hands, gloved hands, conveniently silhouetted hands, everything apart from the stereotype…a stereotype that just happens to be this crime’s most accurate representation. We know why this is, too. It’s Google re-educating us, attempting to eliminate a stereotype, sacrificing truth for the greater good, of course. And it’s not a universal distortion as Google will adjust its algorithms to offer you different images in different countries. Googling knife crime in Japan, for example, presents us with a fully indigenous line up. Google is curating reality, nation by nation. 

This has echoes of the scene in the Truman Show where our hero catches a glimpse of the reality behind the scenes. Swiftly, just like Apple and Google, the bit part actors rally around to reassure and distract him in order to pull the narrative back on track. Phew. 

At one level social media has undoubtedly opened up our worlds, allowing us to exchange images and ideas instantly with friends and family right across the planet. Just seventy odd years ago a lonely soldier would clutch a crumpled black and white photograph of his lover close to his heart, flattening and kissing it before sleep. Today we thumb-swipe past a hundred videos of people we barely know dancing embarrassingly in their gardens. Portals directly into other’s lives have never been so open, and yet, paradoxically, our individual worlds are closing in. 

As a bit of a motorcycle enthusiast I find myself inundated daily with adverts for anything and everything remotely associated with bikes and biking: accessories, jewellery adorned with skulls (bikers love skeletons apparently) and even merchandise that has yet to be made, (see ridiculous bot designed T shirt below) in fact, anything the algorithms believe will whet my appetite. I find it not just tiresome but cringesome. Algorithms have boxed me in. My universe has shrunk to the size of a suffocating and vacuous echo-chamber. The digital platforms that do their utmost to avoid reinforcing stereotypes have turned me, and you, into exactly that: a stereotype. 

It gets worse. 

Those cheeky little algorithms are ganging up against us. Each platform, each brand, is rating you as a consumer: how consistent you are, how often you return things, how much you complain, how much you’re prepared to pay for specific products, how punctual you are, how loyal, how long you dwell on images of certain products and how often you ‘like’ them. Tinder, for example, knows precisely where you sit on the scale of eligibility and exactly the sort of partners you’re looking for, of course. But it also knows what time of the month you’re most likely to be looking. Yes folks, Tinder knows when you’re horny. 

As each of these platforms and brands exchange data to enhance their profile on us, we are each being ranked in exactly the same way as the Chinese social credit system: our behaviour is being judged, and nudged.

Like Truman we all enjoy the level of comfort that comes from living in a protected bubble, the routine of grabbing a newspaper from the cheery news vendor every morning. It’s reassuring to be surrounded by like minded people with a similar world view. But it’s when we discover the vendor is fake, a bit part actor in our specific narrative, that we get angry. Ignorance, of course, can be bliss. As Truman’s wife Meryl explains to camera, ‘his is a noble life, a truly blessed life’. Controlled, protected and utterly fake, but blessed.

So like Truman we face a stark choice: we can stay in the safety of our own controlled and constructed mini universe, happy in the comfort of our curated reality, or break free into the dangerous, dirty, complex and contradictory real world. 

It’s up to you.

Thanks for reading. Now follow me on Twitter @retailfuturist for more devastating insights into where we’re heading…

  Howard Saunders   Aug 17, 2020   Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More