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Tag Archives: 1970s

Class, satire & the dark art of playing the gallery.

10 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1970s, Ainslie, Boris, Boudicca, BREXIT, Brideshead, Castlereagh, Chimpanzees, Class System, Dashwood, Downton Abbey, Eton College, EU, farage, Great British Public, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leavers, Most Exotic Marigold Hotel, Nostalgia, Snobbery, Social Order, Somerset, Thatcherite, Toffs, Topper, Trinity Oxford

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At a point in history when the nuance, deft politic and human insight of a Castlereagh might come in handy – and the strong hand, fierce purpose and earthiness of a Boudicca wouldn’t go amiss; what do we have?

Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Our representative for the broad constituency of ordinary people in the UK is a comical Toff who seems to have fallen off the pages of Topper Comic (well, the 1970s version).

There is a sublime logic in this as the Brexiteers seem to have decided that, if we’re going to apply a Back to the Future strategy, 1970 seems like a good Back to start a Future from; This obviously falls far short of the idyllic late 1940s and early 1950s that some Brexiteers would rather hark back to, the zenith of our victorious pre-Windrush Post WWII Golden Age, when you could still happily and openly show prejudice against anyone you so chose while playing an Over on the Green under a Spitfire sky, eating trimmed sandwiches of fish paste and cucumber and sipping lemonade and lashings of ginger beer; all played out amidst the buzz of an endless British summer.

There are the upsides: Britain in the 70s was a crash of paisley purple and burnt orange, brilliant Bowie,  Prog rock, Punk, Disco and the chiaroscuro of British Light Entertainment: the brilliant beacons of the Two Ronnies and Morecombe & Wise peppered with the misshit social commentary of ‘Til Death Do Us Part (Alf Garnett being to the 70s what Loadsamoney was to the 80s – both caricatures being an exercise in sharp satire gone horribly wrong.)

But it was also the decade of sclerotic public services and infrastructure, lazy builders, 3 day weeks, dusty industry (why change what’s worked for 100 years), street battles between Right and Left and, of course, Maggie Thatcher, the goddess in Jacob’s temple.

So our champion – Jacob Rees-Mogg – whose first tweet was in Latin. What a knob.

One would hope that the lower echelons of the Daily Mail readership (as they choose to self identify) will welcome having a bucket of cold water poured over them and a toe swung towards their arse for good measure when they realise what’s being done to them in the name of BREXIT.

But I have a feeling they are going there willingly.

This kow-towing and fawning adulation is simply the saloon-car-driving, beige-coated, ploughman’s eating, comfortable-walking-shoe version of the chimpanzee putting their wrist up towards the alpha and bowing their head. Or arse kissing upwards to put it in coarser, more feudal terms.

Far too many of the Great British public are playing out some twisted piece of Tom Brown and Flashman theatre – and gleefully so.

It seems a large swathe of the Great British public are seemingly more than happily prepared to play ‘Jean Ainslie’ to Rees-Mogg’s ‘Graham Dashwood.’

In the film, The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel, the Jean Ainslie character is the epitome of the small-minded, deluded, disappointed and utterly class-fixated snob (a rather smarter and more polished version of Hyacinth Bucket – pronounced ‘Bouquet’ – from Keeping Up Appearances). And Graham Dashwood is the dashing, elegant, intelligent, worldly (and quietly gay) Barrister from a much higher social order.

Everything crushes into one moment where she states in a moment of professed love and adulation:

“In fact I think I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”

There is the populist voice speaking.

Right now it seems that the Great British public are staring into Rees-Mogg’s eyes and professing much the same sentiment.

So how has Jacob conjured this whorl of feeling? What is it about him, his nature or his background that makes the masses lick upwards?

Well he ticks every box, in many more ways than Boris.

He is of good stock – but not a toff by birth. Tick.

(His father was only made a lifetime peer in 1988. So an ‘arriviste’ by old money standards. And they bought Ston Easton Park in Somerset, not inherited it. So in Alan Clark’s world view on inherited class, Rees Mogg’s family ‘bought their own furniture.’)

Jacob attended Eton and Trinity, Oxford. Tick.

Jacob made an extraordinary amount of money in Fund Trading, so he can claim the status ‘self-made man’. Tick.

But most importantly he ‘looks and sounds’ the part. Double Tick.

Jacob is the epitome of the Comic toff caricature that many over 40s grew up on. He is in that way a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rees-Mogg realised long ago that image is everything (whilst still at school if the highly confected nature of the Eton College Collections portrait is to be believed). And presentation is nine tenths of the social law.

If you believe that people are still inherently feudal and like the idea of some Brideshead meets Downton Abbey world of ‘them in the big house up there and us down ‘ere doffing our caps’ model of social order and happiness – then you play to that gallery. Starting with your veneer.

Jacob realised the value in looking like you are from central casting’s stable of fragile toffs with a wilful streak and a stubborn self-righteousness born of an irrepressible Right of Entitlement. People look backwards at times of volatility and chaos. They seek older orders and touchstones to reassure themselves – even comic book ones. Nostalgia is a powerful opiate.

But that on its own is not enough. There is a darker, smarter judo move in Rees-Mogg that points to a very media savvy individual ‘playing the moment.’

Rees-Mogg has self-selected himself to be parodied, lampooned and satirised – he has made himself the butt of his own jokes. Genius.

This garish characterisation delivers on two counts. It makes him highly visible and discernible. And it presents him as self-deprecating – a faux proxy for humility in this case.

Everything he does presets him to ‘control’ the satire against him. (Sound familiar?)

So while Boris attracts all of the rockets with his stamping politic and straw-haired buffoonery – and Farage continues to present himself as the self-interested, small minded provincial barracker that he is (noticeably still collecting his MEP cheque and watching the World Cup from another EU subsidised bar in Brussels), Jacob slithers into every vapourous opportunity and out of anything solid or substantial with a whiff of the snake charmer wafting about his overly-combed head (brilliantine wouldn’t go amiss).

He is the quietly sneering, self-preening critic sitting in the corner seat at the dinner party, using the compound effect of his coy theatre of fragile child, his ‘blinking’ intellect and uncomfortable pauses to be eviscerating while seemingly ameliorating.

Some would venture that we get the politicians we deserve. If that is the case then the UK is generally suffering from a desperate case of ‘doffing’ – junked up on the need to be ruled by some retrograde smugness of the ‘Big House’ variety.

Thank heavens for that. There was a danger there for the briefest moment of us looking like an advanced, enlightened society with a clear understanding of the diversity of humanity that shaped us and a clear line of sight on the delicious collision of natures, skills, outlooks and open optimism we need as a nation to evolve and thrive.

But sanity prevails. And with the rise of the Rees-Moggs of this world we show ourselves for the fawning, recidivist, class-riddled, insecure ‘know your place’ society we really are.

Irritatingly I have to take my hat off to him. He knows his audience and their fragile desires intimately. He’s good. Really good.

So I’m off to buy a new cap to doff!

Swapsies, sharesies, half eaten Apples & the joy of the digital yard sale.

23 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

1970s, Adam Werbach, Apple, Collaborative Consumption, Consumer Insight, Consumption Behaviours, Cradle to Cradle, Great American Songbook, Hoagy Carmichael, i-phones, i-tunes, Life Cycle design, Shared Economy, Swapsies & Sharesies, Trends, Vinyl LP Sleeve Notes, Waste Not Want Not, Yerdle

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To be fair the first time I ever heard the phrases Collaborative Consumption and Shared Economy used to explain the new consumption trends of collective barter and re-use I was no more enlightened.

One painted the picture of a co-operative of tubercular poets and the other sounded like a euphemism for a low effort-short-duration-hi reward act of coitus.

Not that I don’t find the concepts they represent amazing and inspiring.

I am in awe of the platforms that are conflating the social culture of sharing and swapping stuff for free, great distribution and logistics providers, a higher purpose of light touch collective action and the target of substantially reducing the purchase of consumer durables by doing so.

The likes of Adam Werbach and the people at yerdle are blazing it.

The whole social marketplace of give and get for free reminds me of the sheer excitement and pleasure of swapsies and sharesies, with everything from player cards to lego pieces to Action Man accessories furiously exchanged  – the smart thrift of a great trade and the thrill of an unexpected treasure.

I just wish more brands figured out how to build this kind of community-making, life-affirming idea seamlessly into their systemic selves.

I am especially irritated with the brands who know full well that a whole load of their junk is in someone else’s trunk (and I don’t mean that as a euphemism)

I have already mentioned in a previous blog the fractual tech landfill of the Man Drawer. Drawers filled to brimming old tech kit, some barely used. The orphanage of every tech fling we’ve ever had.

The other junked up trunk in my life is sitting on my lap top right here and somewhere in the ether out there.

i-tunes. Or should I say specifically the deselected i-tunes in my library.

Now I love Hoagy Carmichael. A honky-tonk swoony blues songwriting band leading pianist of the finest order. His Hong Kong Shuffle, Riverboat Blues, Georgia On My Mind and Old Buttermilk Sky are basically liquid golden pools of genius soaking through the pages of the Great American Popular Songbook.

You cannot fail to love a man who when asked to describe his own voice referred to it as sounding “the way a shaggy dog looked”.

And there is nothing one dimensional about Hoagy. Hoagy is not easily set aside. Hoagy is loaded. With him comes the daisy chain memories of that period in the early seventies where everyone from fashion designers, to musicians, artists and filmmakers just couldn’t resist the cultural signatures of the Great American Era from the 1890s to the 1930s – especially the speakeasy chops of the old joanna.

Enshrined in Films such as Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kind, Bonnie & Clyde, The Great Gatsby, The Sting and The Man With The Golden Gun, the jaunty jazz keys chimed through everything. Even popular music stole a march from the zeitgeist with Bowie drawing in the haunting chops of the good old days into his anthemic tracks Time and Aladdin Sane (accompanied by jazz pianist Mike Garson) and in the fashion of his Man Who Stole The World Zoot Suit come Speakeasy look.

So Hoagy, Genius. But the purchase decision on my part was badly planned. I wanted a download with the 9 or 10 tracks I really liked. What I got was a download of forensic depth and scope. The download included interviews, 7 separate recordings of Riverboat Shuffle alone, and much more.

In the absence of a retro vinyl moment of in-depth sleeve note reading accompanied by the sharp petro-tang of print varnish and PVC this download is old school in its detail. An enthusiast would adore it.

But it’s wasted on me. Which brings me back to the point with our grandparents words ringing in our ears:  Waste Not Want Not

So to that end, Apple, if you’re listening, all I want is a button on my i-tune genius panel marked Yard Sale. And all I want that button to do is allow me to select all the deselected tracks in my library and put them into a special open market.  Where I can either swap and share them for others, or sell them at tuppeny prices and donate the cash to the cause of my choice.

BOOM happiness – and all in the spirit of Yerdle et al.

I am sure that there are many ways of passing around music whose stealth tactics and moves teeter on being a martial art. But I am taking the simpleton tack here. And I am pointing to a Brand’s responsiblity for cleaning up their own back yard, laying waste to waste and leading by example

I want a massive brand like Apple to do it for me – in fact, especially a brand like Apple, with all of its ‘we’re a Purpose Driven Business’ Love Me Love My 4th Upgrade i-phone schtick’.

Workout the IP issues with the artists and publishers – I am certain that the idea of sharing deselected, de-listened and de-loved tracks in some second-hand music platform form of barter is not so satanic an idea or impossible a task.

The criteria that the user only sells the quantity that you have (no multiple sales of individual tracks) and that once sold it’s gone forever seems wholly reasonable.

Now, if there ALREADY IS is a device/trigger/button/easter egg somewhere on my machine or in the software that does allow me to do this, PLEASE SHOW ME WHERE IT IS, along with the other half billion users on the i-tunes system.

Counting down to the one billionth download is all well and good BUT I would be a lot more excited if i-tunes started counting up to celebrating a billion deselected tunes shared and a petaflop of cash raised.

The guys at Yerdle are aiming for a 25% reduction in consumer durables purchases.

My challenge to Apple is to commit to reducing the number of dormant tunes sitting in libraries by the same percentage – by introducing a swopsies and sharesies meets yard sale mechanism into i-tunes.

(That would of course require them to be arsed to do it in the first place. And not just um and ahh their way out of it by distracting themselves and us by counting up to their billionth pointless upgrade I-phone sold.)

I want the spiritual zeitgeist to be carried at scale and across oceans by someone of Apple’s reach and influence. Its a role model thing.

Speaking of zeitgeists, one of the most powerful things about the Yerdle kind lies ironically (given how NOW it is) in the shape of things to come.

As platforms like Yerdle develop, they will become an increasingly valuable partner for any one in the consumer durables markets because they will have first hand insight and data regarding the post purchase behaviour and utility of those consumer products – far richer than any service programme report. The broadened view of the landscape of use would give real meaning to Consumption Insight as it would reach far far beyond the increasingly one dimensional framing of consumption and what it means to consume a product or service over time.

They would have an independent viewpoint of which products leave the home (or favour) as quickly as they enter it, lose their cache, or simply fall redundant. They would know which items travel where, where the sharesie hotspots are and when swopsie communities are most active. They will know what types of profile user gravitate to which type of ‘thing’ – data to cross refer against the company eye view of their segmentation and dynamic customer behaviour.

That kind of knowledge could reshape the nature of the consumer companies’ distribution partnerships and networks as well as their models of Customer Relationship and Service Management.

What’s more it could start to change the shape of Cradle-To-Cradle design in a number of sectors – even to the point where consumer durable manufacturers start to build the share swap barter life stage in the cradle to cradle life cycle design and planning.

Not that any of that helps me – or Hoagy, who is currently sitting mostly deselected and dejected in my library.

So here’s to Swopsies and Sharesies, digital yard sales and Hoagy Rides Again

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