Believe It, They're Still In Control By Darryl Mason
Yes, some of these children may be amongst the most instantly irritating children in the history of the universe, but they are discussing a "new reality" just on a decade away and this blog was supposed to be about New Realities, so here it is :
So it's marketing to marketing? Hey marketing people, this is how it's gonna be.
Who knows.
No doubt plenty of it is scripted, but there is a tribe of teenagers who expect, already want, this level of interaction and augmentation. They want to live in a fully wired world, where any question can be answered instantly, any digital product located, bought, downloaded in a second, or in whatever kids are calling one quarter of a second these days.
Well, that's what advertisers are hoping for. They're praying these kids as 20 somethings will be so easy to reach, their minds and emotions so exposed, so easily manipulated, their target market so convinced they are making purchase decisions for themselves because We Are In Control.
Oh yeah, don't forget, some will "get rich" just by letting marketers and advertisers monitor every aspect of their work, social, family and emotional lives in data-mining megaintrusions.
But what about those who don't want to interact with the crap peddlers trying to sell them yet more shit food, furniture kipple and assortments of augmented flurd they don't really need?
Nobody in marketing likes to talk about an Offliner youth movement. Teenagers & twenty somethings who don't want to be like The Implanted (those who let themselves be constantly monitored & data-mined in exchange for points to buy more useless shit) and don't care that they don't know everything about what's going on everywhere else. Who choose to be un-informed, or less informed. Only allowing in a few hundred useful, practical bits of information a day, instead of tens of thousands of trivial, instantly forgettable, utterly impractical slivers of info shrapnel.
The dream of marketers is to know not what you want to buy, but why you don't want to buy something. They want to know the moment you decide to buy something else, not just when you've made an expected purchase.
Offliners could care less about being constantly in touch with their friends and the world. They distrust advertisers more than the news media, who they already know, as children, are now mostly an extension of advertisers into their lives.
They find out what they want to know where advertisers cannot bombard their realities with ridiculous fantasies. The debt slave traps stepped into by previous generations of their families won't be slamming shut on their ankles. Money is not be desired by Offliners, but seen as merely a practical substitute when trading & swapping cannot bring them what they want, or what they need. And they want and need for little. They believe they cannot be brought and sold because they desire nothing beyond the very basics of survival. Pleasures and leisure are simple, and easy to come by. A lifestyle of being offline, out of reach.
Offliner children number in the millions already, and not just in countries where computers are expensive and internet networks non-existent, they number in the millions in the US, Britain, Australia, across Europe. They are raised with computers, but not by them. A computer and the internet is a replacement of the Encyclopedia Britannica that would have once filled a few shelves. There is much to be learned online, but practical experience is the stuff of admiration. Online novelty is fine, but their brains know what it is instantly and grow bored with it quickly. The funny non-ad ad that Goes Viral online means nothing to them. They don't care, they won't see it, they won't miss it.
When Offliners do have to register online online or supply mandatory details, names are fictitious, birthdates are wrong, preferences are fabricated, fake e-mail addresses are used, the only tracks they leave online are false leads, valueless information, worth nothing to the data-miners and therefore worth little in a digital economy.
For Offliners possessions are few, and few mementos are cherished, everything else is temporary, maybe gone tomorrow in a brutal storm, an earthquake, a flash flood, a holocaust of flames, a breakdown of government, a sinkhole economy. Practical information is valued most highly, but only just ahead of skills of entertainment.
Survival, fresh food, fresh water, fresh air, undigital fun, is all and everything.
Offliners will be all but impossible to reach by advertisers, at least until a marketing company begins painting laser billboards on the surface of the full moon.
The lifestyles and freedom of Offliners will look very appealing indeed by 2020 to many of the kids in that table-poundingly annoying video above.
The raw fight, and it's a fight for life, in front of marketers and advertisers, is to convince a generation of media-aware, salespitch suspicious kids that they are more important than the product advertisers are trying to flog to them. And the advertisers and marketers are starting the fight now.
The message in the above video is aggressively deceitful.
It is not about The People telling advertisers what they want, instead of advertisers telling people what they need and should want right fucking now, it's about marketers and peddlers of crap trying to convince The People that They Are In Control Now and They Run Everything and You Tell Us And We'll Do It!
The video is marketing. Pure marketing. It's trying to convince the kids who identify with the kids in the video that things are different now, that Generation Y & Z are too smart, not just smarter than their parents, so smart the advertisers are surrendering control, they're on the kids side now, they just want them to live better, more fulfilled lives even if they don't buy whatever it is they're still selling....
"Augmented reality will be the new reality".
Really? For how many?
I'm going to post this video, and a link back to this story, on this blog, again, but I'll schedule it to be published on February 27, 2016 and February 27, 2021.
Let's see then how much of the above video has become The New Reality.
My prediction is Offliners will become an extremely popular movement with those in their 20s by that time, the target market for that video, and while augmentation will prove popular for a while, simplicity will be more popular, a simple life, with less useless information will be the goal. It will be much harder by 2016, let alone 2021, to engage mass audiences in advertising sales pitches, regardless of the interactivity, and subtlety. Or augmentation.
Anyway, probably by the 2020s if your robot mates don't think something is cool, you wouldn't think about buying it anyway.
Why would you? That would be crazy.
I'll also come back and update this post on February 28, 2021 and see how much of my above rant turned out to be true.
