Archive for the 'Bad Products' Category
Saturday, February 4th, 2012
Sheryl Sandberg Sucks
The New York Times today runs a shameless butt-kiss piece on Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Contrary to the thesis of the NYT, which is that Sandberg is somehow a new sort of feminist as well as a “self-made” (a word used twice in the story) business genius, Sandberg might actually be even more odious than either Facebook or its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, both heavyweight champeens in the field of being hard to take.
According to the story, Sandberg considers it her mission to deny the impact of social structure and political policy on women. “[I]n her view,” the Times reporter explains, women “must take responsibility for their careers and not blame men for holding them back.”
Ms. Sandberg sees herself as more than an executive at one of the hottest companies around — more, too, than someone who will soon rank among the few self-made billionaires who are women. She sees herself as a role model for women in business and technology. In speeches, she often urges women to “keep your foot on the gas pedal,” and to aim high.
And, as she engages in such trite talk about “men” and fails to mention social class or the backward state of U.S. family welfare programs, exactly how self-made is Ms. Sandberg?
According to her 2004 NYT wedding announcement, “She is a daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg of Miami. The bride’s father, an ophthalmologist, is a partner in Eye Surgery Associates, a group practice in Hollywood, Fla.”
Well, there you have it. Aren’t those the same basic conditions facing all little girls? Daddy’s a surgeon and I’m prepping for Harvard — I refuse to slip and have to go to FSU! And baseball starts at third base, right?
And is Sandberg spending her every hour trying to turn Facebook’s billions into better services, as her creepy CEO would have you presume? Um, unless you’re a major Procter & Gamble shareholder, not quite:
Part of Ms. Sandberg’s role has been to cultivate relationships with large advertisers seeking new ways to engage with customers — particularly female ones — online. She was instrumental in signing up advertisers like Procter & Gamble. After several meetings with Facebook, Procter chose the platform for a new Secret deodorant campaign aimed at young women.
“P.& G. wants to be where the people are, and more and more people are spending their time on social sites,” says Alex Tosolini, vice president of Procter’s global e-business unit. “The purpose of our Secret campaign was to inspire women of all ages to be more fearless.”
It’s a message that sounds similar to Ms. Sandberg’s. And it bumped domestic sales of Secret deodorant by 9 percent in the first six months of the campaign and raised Secret’s market share by 5 percent from the period a year earlier.
Glory, glory hallelujah! What great times we live in!
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
Dishonest or Dumb?
It’s a timeless question about overlords both ancient and new. Are they lying or do they actually believe their own ideology?
The issue popped up this past week in this howler enunciated by Mark Zuckerberg:
“We don’t build services in order to make money,” he wrote in a personal letter to shareholders included in [Facebook's IPO-related SEC] filing. “We make money in order to build better services.”
Rofl-Lulz.
One might ask if Facebook would be willing to appoint a majority of ordinary Facebook users to its corporate board, so as to assure itself of the authenticity of its supposed efforts at “better” services. Should there be ads on Facebook? Should Facebook accumulate the world’s biggest marketing database and make money for Mark Zuckerberg and other rich people by selling the scraped, uncompensated information to other corporate capitalists? Who votes “No”?
Yeah, didn’t think so…
Friday, January 27th, 2012
The Obama Proof
Back in 2008, your humble TCT blogmaster still retained some pretty big illusions about the existence of democracy in corporate capitalist America.
Since then, events have proceeded in such a way as to push TCT to proffer a new thesis, one that TCT hereby states as a 97 percent serious, 3 percent hyperbolic claim: In corporate capitalist America, electoral politics is a mere marketing operation.
Selling is the foundational reality, market research and advertising the basis for every peep of the communication and action that comprise an “election.” Brands never change, though their respective sales trends wax and wane. Choice attaches entirely to the minutiae of style and microscopic difference that undergird almost meaningless product differentiation. The degree of democracy involved is perhaps — a big perhaps — 3 percent greater than in economic marketing of goods and services, where it is vanishingly small. In both processes, the odds of the masses changing the range of choices offered by those with the money and the power is exceedingly low. Coke or Pepsi. Jack Johnson or John Jackson.
And, just as in regular product marketing, the amount of money spent from above always increases.
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Archdruid of Ideology
Back in April, I said “there’s no way John Michael Greer has read Karl Marx.”
That’s confirmed today, as the Archdruid writes this howler:
Marxism reached its high-water point in the 1950s and then receded, as the golden promises of Das Kapital gave way to gray bureaucratic inefficiency and, in time, total systemic failure.
ROFL. What “golden promises” would those be? Anybody who had actually read Capital would be well aware of the fact that it contains exactly zero promises of any kind. Seriously. Take a look.
In reality, of course, Karl Marx was hugely affected by the work of Justus von Liebig, the coiner of “Liebig’s Law,” which points out that ecosystems are only as strong as their weakest links.
The Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids, however, can’t be bothered to crack an actual book he doesn’t like for entirely a priori and conventional reasons, despite his claim to value rebellious thought and varied opinions and analyses.
The degree to which even the wildest forms of green thinking remain utterly captive to conventional American dogma is truly astounding, and not a little scary.
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
POTUS, aka MOY 2012
The line of the week comes from Ad Age Digital, which reports:
Puma, GE, Red Bull, Marc Jacobs, President Obama, and 200 other brands are on Instagram.
Instagram, of course, is yet another vanity-based marketing ploy on what the Robber Barons at Facebook call “the graph,” aka the data mining trick that is “the social net.”
The fact that Ad Age sees Obama, aka MOY 2008, as a mere brand is about as honest and apt a piece of information as you’ll get from the U.S. corporate media.
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
Political Marketing Update
“Politics,” John Dewey once observed of the normal state of corporate capitalism, “is the shadow cast on society by big business.” As this normalcy has grown and the methods of big business marketing have been increasingly applied to selecting and selling candidates, Dewey’s shadow metaphor has seemed less and less adequate. Politics is now the scientific management of society’s macro-choices by big business.
For those interested in this topic, check out this new report from the Sunlight Foundation. Its main finding:
If you think wealth is concentrated in the United States, just wait till you look at the data on campaign spending. In the 2010 election cycle, 26,783 individuals (or slightly less than one in ten thousand Americans) each contributed more than $10,000 to federal political campaigns. Combined, these donors spent $774 million. That’s 24.3% of the total from individuals to politicians, parties, PACs, and independent expenditure groups.
For those still laboring under the illusion that the Democratic Party is somehow an exception to the rule of capital, the report shows that:
Over time, the share of all individual campaign contributions coming from The One Percent of the One Percent has increased for both parties, increasing from 17.8% in 1990 to 32.1% in the 2010 election cycle. Consistently, Democrats have been slightly more reliant on The One Percent of the One Percent than Republicans – relying on The One Percent of the One Percent for, on average, about three percentage points more of their itemized campaign receipts.
TCT would suggest that aspiring progressives and radicals can save themselves a great deal of precious energy by keeping this fundamental reality in mind.
