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Tag Archives: smart phones

Spams, Scams, data & the clicky tricks of E-vertisers

31 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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$13000, 3D, 4K, Airplane Simulation, Amazon, Animation, Aristocracy, Back Pain, Betrayal, BitCoin, Breastaurant, Brilliance, Cheap, Content, Contouring, Conundrum, Crystal Meth, data Cache, Data Science, desire, Diet, Digital Advertising, Divinity, Dragons, Dream, Drink, DRONE, Dystopian, e-vertising, Email Campaigns, Emails, entrepreneurship, Ergo, Exclusive, facebook, Game Changer, gene Pool, Genetic Risk, GOOGLE, GPS, Holidays, Hot, IMAGINATION, Inbox Management, Internet, KETO Slim, Logo & Website Design, love, Madonna, Mist, NEW PRODUCT, Penitentiary, Pigmentation, Pro, Prolapse Disc, Relaxation, Russian Women, Sciatica, Sensation, Shark Tank, Shrinking stomach, Skinny, Sleep, Smart Phone, smart phones, Smart Watch, Snoring, Social, technology, The Boss, Tigers, Tracker, True, Ukraine, Visual Experience, Vitiligo, VOGUE, X Men, X Rated

NevScreenshot 2020-01-30 at 19.28.38.png

 

 

 

It seems we are only ever one click away from digital heaven or hell – the chiaroscuro of polluted data bases, email hijacks, scams, dark trading and the ugly beauty of spam and click-bait either flinging us skyward or casting us down into the digital lava of e-hell.

Internet searches can get dicey even with the most innocent of search terms. So staying vigilant and being careful helps. 

God help you if you’re stupid enough to glaze over while scrolling emails [that’ll be me] or even staggeringly dumb enough to click on one that reads ‘Your Amazon Order Update & Competition Exclusive’ [that’ll be me again] especially if, on thinking about it, you weren’t actually expecting an Amazon or any other kind of order for that matter!! [And yes, still Me!] 

But Lordy lord does your gut know the minute you click on that icon that you’ll rue the day you ever did. Perviously this kind of stuff would really irritate me – my inbox suddenly filled to spilling with mindless and pointless pap – honking scams, over-promise and tat. But as life goes on, I’ve started to quietly enjoy the spillage and taint of the ridiculous and spurious missives that land in my box.

And I’ve even started taking to building out a sort of emotional logic around them just to amuse myself!

So here is my take on the most recent batch of e-joy that’s popped into my world. I’ve snatched the most important first few lines just to show flavour. Enjoy! 

Erase my Back Pain

1 weird stretch DESTROYS Back Pain & Sciatica 

Pain Free!!

Delicious! Free anything is good – but PAIN and FREE and two screamers? Wow. I just feel the need to use 13 ‘screamers’ in celebration!!!!!!!!!!!!!  And this one’s actually relevant to me.  I had a prolapse L1/L2 disc some years back, and the terrible sciatica from it destroyed me. So the chance to DESTROY it back with an obtuse physical gesture makes me very happy. 

Get perfect Little toes in as little as 3 days 

Nail Vitamin Deficiency 

Mother natures recipes

But not as happy as the idea of perfect little toes. Anyone that can save me from my Frodo feet gets a prize.  And there is a certain messianic thread to the 3 day promise. And on the third day my feet will effectively rise from their calloused, shoe-stuffed grave to throw light and beauty into the world. Who knew. And that it is Mother Nature doing the raising of my dead feet, all the better. 

ACADEMIA

You read the paper Genetic Risk and Reproductive Decision Making:

Read this paper too!

Punchy. And you are correct – yes I did. But that doesn’t mean I would subsequently like you to send me an update every time someone puts out a white paper with the words ‘genetic’, ‘reproductive’, ‘decision-making’ or ’Risk’ in the title or sub-head. Or for that matter any derivative of the above, words – e.g. gene, or risk – or associated key words, compounds, synonym/antonym comparatives – or any random fridge-magnet approach to key word search stuff you may choose to push at me. Come to think of it, perhaps a peer-reviewed White Paper on The Impact on Intellectual Discourse of the Vulgar Monetisation of Academic Mediocrity might be a whizz.  

Diabetes will kill you! 

Blood Sugar Formula – Mother nature’s recipes

No shit. Will it? I absolutely never, ever knew that. My mother was diabetic – late onset, in her 60s by the time it snuck into view with its thin-lipped, mean-spirited needling and blooding. But she managed it with remarkable elegance and aplomb. And no, it did not kill her. But its presence in her life did really, really irritate her for a while, much like the reoccurrence of all this scruffy E-vertising in my life. 

XPHONE 

One of the best smart phones in the world

Offers a true visual experience at a very cheap price

Lummey. An X phone. What, like an X Men phone? Incredible. No? Oh, or X-rated? Weird. But strangely modern. Anyway. None of this matters. As this is one of the best. But not the best though? I think your ambitions are a little frail at the end there, guys. Or are we worried about over selling – in email – spam? How can this matter when a phone offers a true visual experience. What does that even mean? Are the pictures and films true to the originals? Like they actually play them without creating untrue versions of them? Do phones do that? Play unreal films? Like, swapping out original content and playing a pirated or faux version of it – to avoid licensing fees? A sort of digital mobile BeKindRewind strategy. Hmmm. This X Phone is a conundrum.

Invest in bitcoin and the life of your dreams 

Earn 13,000 in exactly 24 hours riding the bitcoin wave

Only 3 free copies still available

But not as much of a conundrum as deciding what dream life I’m going to take a run at with the 9 bucks a minute I’m earning investing in bitcoin over the next 24 hours. Get In. And, note, it isn’t 23 hours and 49 minutes – or 24 hours and 32 minutes. Be very clear – this is ‘exactly 24 hours’. And it is 24 hours with attitude. This 24 hours is no slacker – no slouch. This 24 hours surfs! This 24 hours carves off the lip of the bitcoin WAVE! How cool is that! Every minute’s worth of that $13,000  – every 9 bucks of it – comes dripping with bitcoin spume. BUT hold on. There’s a sort of Stranger Things thing going on here, no? I could have SWORN that the only 3 free copies still available went weeks ago. So there must be a universal 3 somewhere. Like deities perhaps. Eternal. Invisible. A trinity of Bitcoin Divinity existing only in Upside Down world.

DRONE 4K Camera

Best affordable drone just hit the market

Adventure unfolds with the MACVAIR

Got it. I know how to find out whether the Trinity of Bitcoin Divinity exists in Upside Down world – send in the DRONE 4K camera. And not any old DRONE 4K. We’re talking the most affordable – which means cheap, right? As I really don’t want to be splurging even one cent more than I have to of my 13,000 bucks – no way. But MACVAIR gets that, right? They know that searching for a Trinity Divinity of Bitcoin in Upside Down internet world is an ADVENTURE, right? And that shit is going to UNFOLD. And let’s face it – if I pull this off, find the trinity of bitcoin divinity, convert the 13K in 24 hours [exactly], I am hot stuff. I am off the scale desirable. EVERYONE will be chasing me down. Wanting a piece of me…

Positions available – YOU’RE HIRED

2 position available GOOGLE & facebook

So let’s put it another way GOOGLE. Lets re-frame this facebook. I’ll decide whether YOU’RE HIRED. Hows about that? Not the other way around. Do you know who the actual f%&* I am? I am the wave-riding, drone-flying Bitcoin Trinity Divinity Slayer. I have the last 3 copies, purged from Upside Down World. I DECIDE who hires and fires. Not you. And just by-the-by, if you are going to even dare approach me, I suggest you make that 100 positions available – as I am now obviously worth a hundred of your usual talent quality. Just saying.

Lillian

This drink is the answer to becoming skinny

Your stomach will shrink fast 

Shark Tanks new product is a diet sensation!

Oh I see. So you’re implying that I not only carry the intellectual mettle and heroic weight of one hundred people but also the physical mass of them? Well, if the Shark Tank thinks it’s a diet sensation, how could I possibly refuse. These people are the leading, bleeding edge of entrepreneurship and business nous. Sharks, Dragons, Tigers. They are a menagerie of business brilliance. And if they say that this will indeed be the answer to becoming skinny, how could I question that – other than asking on which planet the originator of the delusional waffle lives? A dystopian one liberally scattered with Crystal Meth and freely available prescription opiates, punctuated with double-fronted fixed trailers lying unnervingly close to a breastaurant, a breakers yard and a penitentiary I’d wager. But hell – let’s try it! 

Track

Rest easy and never worry about your car being stolen again

Richard Berg says

It works like a charm! CAUTION  Make sure you really want to know what you might find out. This thing tracked my wife and her boyfriend into the middle of nowhere

If this push email trail is anything to go by I probably NEED to drink myself skinny, as my united-state-of-largesse has patently rather put off my other half, potentially to the degree that, much like Mr Berg here, if I were to track them to the middle of nowhere I might otherwise find my loved one in fiercely repeated receipt of someone else’s largesse. But hey, you know what? Knowing the exact GPS location of that rutting betrayal completely takes the sting out of it. In fact, it allows me to rise above it all through smartly applied technology. Track allows me to be the bigger person and take the bigger view. Thank you Track.

Stop Snoring device

The mist that stops you snoring

New invention gives hope to all of those suffering from chronic snoring 

And now that we’ve broached the issue of the fading and faltering nature of personal desirability, this email allows me to embrace the wider ambition. Why stop at just getting skinny quick to alleviate the possibility of philandering and betrayal. That over-carbureted nasal exhaust is hardly likely to get the lower engine running and the pheromones firing, unless one finds oneself lying furtively next to a member of the Sus Scrofa family. So the misty blue yonder of non-snoring hope is beckoning me.   

SMART WATCH

The smart watch that watches out for your health 

The smart watch that big tech companies don’t want you to know about

Have you been wanting a smart watch. Well now you can afford one!!

Now, fatuous, fat, snoring, dream-life-living greatness aside, I have never claimed to be smart enough for my phone. I am indeed a stupid man in charge of a smart device. At most recent reckoning I have estimated that I use, at best, about 3% of the functionality of my phone.

So IMAGINE what I felt when I saw that a watch, smarter than my phone even, will look after my health. And what’s more, it will do it TO SUCH DEGREE that Apple and Microsoft just won’t want me to know about it. Wowsers. Could it get any better?

XonePhone

Theres a new smart phone. You can’t ignore its performance and price

Wow-wheezers. It just did. Game change! I agree. It is night on impossible to ignore the words performance and price. Well, that’s what it says in Killing it in the Email Sales Dept 101 Guide to Successful product sales. Helluva key word focus. How do they do it? It would be so easy to stumble into mediocrity in this game, sliding down the greasy chute of indifference towards lowest common-denominator schtick and sleazy selling – but all these guys manage to keep that quality bar so high it makes me dizzy.

Drone X Pro 

Limited time sale on drones

Foldable quadcopter with wide angle batteries [US]

Speaking of which, the DRONE X Pro just feels like its going to take me up to a whole new level. Foldable! What the wahoo is that all about? But it sounds really exciting. But if I’m really brutally honest, the thing that hooked me through the lip like some digital grouper is the idea of ‘wide angle batteries.’ Frankly that is simply genius. Not only is the lens wide-angle but the batteries too. I’ve no idea of the technical nature or material build or the power engineering required to enable a battery to both power the unit AND expand the retinal capacity of the lens on the on-board camera. But that’s got to be worth stacks! Thats worth swag-money. 

KETO SLIM DIET

Shark Tank Investors LOVE miracle weight loss pill

50 lbs. in 61 days: No New Exercise Skinny Pill melts Belly fat

And swag money is the name of the game with these Shark Tank kids. KETO slim diet is feeling like my kind of miracle weight loss pill. And the Sharks LOVE it. That makes this one hot. So hot in fact, that it ‘melts’ belly fat. ‘Melts!’ How cool is that. A kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Nazi-Face-Melting moment…but for belly fat [national socialist or otherwise]. You’d need something pretty powerful if you’re going to lose 50lbs in 61 days so something akin to the power of the Christian faith’s Almighty God as vested in the Ark of The Covenant seems like a pretty sensible choice. I mean it could be a scam but there’s something so trustworthy in phrases like No New Exercise Skinny Pill. It just SMACKS of integrity and professional discretion. I’m in.

Ryan Oliver 

Get this new diagnostic Tool and Save Money 

Prevent car repair scams …as opposed too online ones…

Hang On. Ryan. You beauty you. Scams! You read my mind. And not just those of the car variety. Car scams. Diet scams. Technology scams. Bitcoin scams. Ryan you are the man of the moment. So, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to suggest something. Might you ever consider getting together with Sheila, MACVAIR, the Shark Tank guys, Richard Berg and Lillian and create one universal Diagnostic Tool that prevents all and every kind of scam? That would be thrilling.

Meet a Lovely Russian Woman Today

RussianWomenDate.com

International Russian And Ukranian dating

Free membership will close in 01:02:47 

Now this is fascinating on three levels. First of all I sense there may be a role for the Universal Diagnostic Tool here as the countdown clock seems to be stuck at 01:02:47 – so free may not be as free as you think anymore. Secondly, I find it remarkable that one needs a site to meet Russian ladies. There was a perfectly charming young Russian lady on the train the other day, travelling to the airport with her father I believe. [It demonstrates just how conservative and old fashioned the Russian culture is.  A young 20-something Western-European woman wouldn’t be seen dead going on holiday with her father!] And thirdly I am quietly surprised how blatant the Russian Annexation of the Ukraine has become. I mean land is one thing but appropriating the woman as yours seems rather arrogant and presumptive if you ask me, especially if you then flaunt them on a dating site.   

Sheila Andrews

Logo and Website design for my business

Attract more new customers …

But bless Sheila for being the absolute antithesis of all that arrogance and sleaze and complex Ponzi style selling schtick. Simple. Straight up. Honest. Logo and Website design for my business. Do you know what Sheila – if I had a slew of small, low-level, low-grade slightly shady, grubby businesses all scrabbling to make a good impression in an on-line world, before I let them send one email, I’d have them sitting in front of you talking logos and websites. And that’s a promise.

 Ergo Relax

Best travel pillow that ever hit the market

Rest even in difficult conditions

Phew. All of this typing on trains is making me rather sleepy. Can you imagine then how thrilled I was when I saw this. I am in a chair. I can sit back. It is possible to close my eyes – ergo, I can relax. But what really snagged my curiosity on the broken fence of promises is the fact that Ergo Relax tells me that I can rest even in difficult conditions. Holy Moly. So, though I may have made an inappropriate slur for which someone chose to press charges, I would still sleep like a baby! I could tuck in for 40 winks with flood water rising about me. And a good night’s sleep in the midst of a climate crisis beckons. Amazing. Ergo Relax is not to be sniffed at, either with or without Snoring mist.

3D Airplane games 

ProFlight Simulator 

Presenting the most realistic flight simulator ever created 

I can’t pretend to be anything other than a tiny weeny bit suspicious of this. I have a lot of love for simulation tech in all of its guises. And I know that the track records of the USAF and Boeing leave a lot of room for people who might create superior flight simulations and trainers that prepare people to a] not crash and b] not bomb the wrong people. But when I’m told that this is the most realistic flight simulator ever created I am stunned into humble silence. Perhaps this is the issue. The real geniuses are to be found not in Bomber Command or Boeing’s testing team but here, discreetly and humbly selling the most realistic flight simulator ever quietly in the furrows and margins of the internet and my inbox. No accolade chasers or plaudit junkies them. A small profitable stipend from an email campaign is more than enough.  

Herpes Simplex

Medical Mystery. How did their Herpes disappear

Hi If you or a loved person suffer from herpes simplex it is urgent that you do not go another day without the powerful information in the following lines

Didn’t you see the news? Its a revolt!

Perhaps this might explain the shyness of our majestic simulator designers. They may have been so busy creating the most realistic flight simulator EVER that they missed the revolt, the news passed them by and they continued to live another day and another day without this powerful information in the following lines [whatever that might mean.] Can you blame them for choosing to stay rather discretely out of the glare of fame and fortune.

Canvas Print Ads 

Add to your holiday collection

Hmmmn. I wonder whether our reclusive simplex flight engineers might just be a little down. Perhaps they might just need a lift of some sort. Something to jolly them up a bit. Digging out a picture of favourite holiday moments and suchlike can be a real tonic especially when rendered across the highest quality synthetic canvas. I know someone whom has two rather fetching canvas prints of themselves throwing what someone mistakenly referred to as a VOGUE shape at the Casino club, Guildford on MADONNA NIGHT, while sporting a wet-suit and a rather fetching fedora. An easy mistake to make but, for the record, they report that they were simply gesturing to the fire exit due to the fact that the person in front of them looked so HOT they thought they might well burst into flames. That the person happened to be both my associates boss and also their bed mate probably explains why said associate got a raise and was fired, all in one 24 hour period. But to be clear, it wasn’t EXACTLY 24 hours. No bitcoin investment there. Nor a professional Reference for that matter   

Professional Who’s Who

Nominated for inclusion

On the subject of professional credentials, imagine my surprise when the e-call came to join the rarified ranks of the professional aristocracy. But Who Knew Professional Who’s Who even existed? And a nomination for inclusion no less. I am always up for inclusive action. Diversity is a really strong suit at the moment in corporate circles so nominating people for inclusion strikes me as a very enlightened action on Who’s Who’s part. Thank God their email arrived frankly. I was starting to think ‘What? Is every email a scam or a prank?’ So here’s to your professional rigour and enlightened inclusivity programme Professional Who’s Who.  

Ultra Boost WiFi

No More Buffering! WiFi boost speeds up your internet 

Your cure for spotty internet

Buffering. I must confess I LOVE this word. [Note to self: beware excessive use of screamers, capitals and absence of punctuation induced by protracted periods of time looking at push emails from shite businesses, products, faux brands and personalities.] Buffering implies a fierce circular attention to something, involving friction and some form of rotation or animation. So I can imagine that once someone’s stopped buffering this liberates a massive cache of energy to apply in some other direction – to power the WiFi connection for instance. That we can give that surge of redirected energy a boost just fills me with utter joy. Currently my wi-fi wheezes along at barely a breath. If I was of a mind to take up contouring as a new face-forward make-up solution, I’d be stuffed. It would take an age to play even the smallest section of a 2 hr 32m Contouring Tutorial – to such degree that I would probably take to spending enormous tracts of time seemingly in a creeping state of tribalism – given that, at any point in the day, the marks on my face would have developed in some really slow flick-book animation of an abstracted patch pattern effect – a sort of snail’s pace Tyson-face tattoo – part Maori part Bobbi Brown part Shrigley.

But nonetheless, all’s well with Ultra Boost. And that it cures spotty internet is a matter for religious level celebration. Hallelulia. No more teenage internet angst. No more screen scrubbing. No more microbeaded bandwidth. Internet spots are gone forever!    

De Pigmentation

I am vitiligo free and so much healthier and confident overall.

Vitiligo Miracle

Cure Vitiligo holistically

Much it seems as will be the ones on my hands face and other extremities, very, very soon. As the words set out, I may well be Vitiligo free with this holistic miracle. I have had Vitiligo for a few years and it is spreading. Though I am aware of it, especially when I have been in the sun, it has always been a visual thing for me. So LORD, I never knew that I might be unhealthy because of it? Unhealthy? How? Herpes. But I’ve got news on a natural remedy revolt for that. Obesity? Screw that, as I’ve got two Shark Tank approved skinny making pills and something from a lady called Lillian for that baby. Diabetes? I can kill it before it kills me. Back Pain? Again, one ninja move and a weird stretch and that baby’s history – so not that. Which leaves me little to worry about. My anxiety seems to have ebbed away.

And how amazing – my confidence… has soared! It’s true. I am going to be absolutely fine!

As all of the wonder emails have told me. I am the answer. I only need act. Perfect.  

Seems simple enough to me. But hang on. Just got to read the 347 emails that have just popped up in my inbox.

But then I’m getting RIGHT to it.

 

er compromising on quality

Being  organised with time and resources

Utilising available learning

Taking care of EHL property

Making productive use of available technology

Being productive with time

Sharing knowledge

Living the 7 steps of service excellence every day

Ensuring processes are implemented and followed

Meet your deadlines

Understand our business

Be a champion of sustainability

Measure and evaluate the impact of your decisions

Never compromising on quality

Being  organised with time and resources

Utilising available learning

Taking care of EHL property

Making productive use of available technology

Being productive with time

Sharing knowledge

Living the 7 steps of service excellence every day

Ensuring processes are implemented and followed

Meet your deadlines

Understand our business

Be a champion of sustainability

Measure and evaluate the impact of your decisions

Tragedy, humanity & the power of together.

16 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Belonging, certainty, Climate Change, Cocaine, Collective Action, Decency, faith, Frodo, Grenfell Tower, Hubris, Humanity, Humility, Industrial lager, Instagram, Kardashian, London Bridge, Manchester, Mortgages, Paris, Personal Debt, Politicians, smart phones, Social Responsibility, Together, Tolkien

27-storey-grenfell-tower-engulfed-fire-west-london.jpg

One could wonder sometimes where the nobility and civilisation went – given half an eye on our glorious species (though many question whether it was ever there).

Far from the heroic ideal of small people saving the world – of Tolkien’s Hobbiton and Frodo’s sacrifice – we’re all a little disappointing down the small people end of the telescope.

We’re all lascivious, low and feral and we’re all off to whichever hell is trending currently.

Left to our own devices all we do is sprawl, brawl, rut, piss, shit, heave and fuck like the beasties we are, on the streets, station concourses, on buses, on planes, alleys: in doorways and up against walls, wrapped up in cheap-as-chips slave wear bought in multipacks of 5. Nascent young Motherhood lies collapsed like a sack of charity shop clothing on a pavement, steeped in their own sick. Nascent young fatherhood stamps on heads till they pop on an empty shopping precinct floor, sweating industrial lager and cheap cocaine.

We use £500 state of the art smart phones to film everything from our genitals and instagrammed inanities to humiliations, threats, gang rapes, beatings and murder.

We use state of the art, government-toppling social networks to circulate a ‘shag on a plane’ film to anyone bored enough to care or the next cat film to those who don’t.

We live lives way beyond our means. We inhabit houses and drive cars we can’t afford. We bullshit ourselves into believing that the debt we carry is a right of entitlement – part of the glory of being human, here and alive.

We convince ourselves that communities don’t really need our help, there is no society other than our own; that ‘doing a Kardashian’ is desirable, that knife crime and landfill will miraculously resolve themselves, that climate is an inconvenience, and of course, the real biggie, that we need 5 holidays per annum. Which is why we need 5 credit cards.

Bu But BUT

Look at us when the sky comes down and the thunder rolls. Look at us as we respond to the percussive blows and crises that envelop us.

Look at how we have responded. In Manchester. In London. And now to the Grenfell tower disaster. And not just to our own. Paris. Another coming together. Another standing side by side. Across generations, cultures, tribes, classes, regions, borders.

Suddenly, it is as if we see each other again. Beyond gender, race, religion or persuasion.

See each other and remember – we are just people amongst people like us. We remember who we are, what we are capable of. What our co-existence demands of us all. And rise to it.

And we remember that deserving is not about cars and phones and watches and holidays. It’s about people deserving a sense of belonging, to not be left behind or marginalised: a decent quality of life, affordable and accessible care, social support. And that as people we deserve politicians and the public and private sector to be responsible to us not the spreadsheet or the Poll – responsible for our social well being, not our financial success.

We remember that life is OK. And could be far, far worse.

And that there by whichever god, mantra, metric or quantum equation go us.

We realise that the precious things are the living breathing things connected to us by genes, community, friendship, accident or serendipity. And everything else is just tat and jewellery. And party small talk.

We realise that the most precious things are the living things like us. And that we should wish for them what we wish for ourselves. A safe, secure and supported life, everyone looking out for each other. A sense of belonging the right of every human being.

Suddenly we see that people are looking to each other. Helping others. Keeping an eye out.

Perhaps, for just a moment, we prove yet again that when push comes to shove we can rise up out of the self-obsessed pit we all live in.

For a moment we remember that, in the middle of all of this uncertainty, the only thing we can be certain of is ourselves – our actions, our beliefs and our values. What we give a shit about and what we’ll do and what we’ll put on the line to hold up those values and beliefs. When collective humanity and humility transcend individual identity and hubris.

Perhaps it does take the madness for us to remember what we seemed once far more  certain of – our best selves both individually and collectively – and when to apply them in the world we live in.

Here’s to that.

Living memory, resilience & the art of not forgetting

02 Monday May 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Alzheimer's, ard drives, Arts, company culture, data points, degenerative disease, desire, drama, Elegy, Evolution, Gladiator, Identity, Language, literature, Living memory, Maximus, Nock Payne, resilience, self expression, smart phones, Social Memory, technologies, telecomms, The Book Of Life, Virgin Accelerator

Screen Shot 2016-05-02 at 12.03.31.png

Funny thing memory

We tend to pay little attention to it; until it starts to fail us.

Sometimes its reason for failing us is a conspiracy of genes + environment – creating a disposition to Alzheimer’s and other forms of degenerative disease – the desperate creeping extinction of everything that made us one the whole beautiful living breathing loving human being we are.

At other times it’s disappearance is to do with the impact of new technologies. Recent technologies tempt us to dispense with our need to ‘remember’. Or they diffuse or diminish our natural ability to remember those things most important and valuable to us. In his book the shallows, Nicholas Carr points to how excessive immersion in the internet and the digital world disturbs our ability to transfer and store working memory into our deeper long term memory, reshaping our neural pathways.

Unlike language, art or drama – older human technologies designed to mine, explore, capture, elevate and replay memory and the experience and impact of living – our most recent technologies sometimes seem to seek to simply mathematically atomise our lives and the memory of them until human feeling is viewed as nothing more than a data point – something to be measured calibrated and engineered.

The idea that consciousness, identity and the precious value of memory is a form or condition of existence that can simply be dissected, measured, data pointed, and reengineered by science is a theme explored in Nick Payne’s play Elegy. A woman raddled by a degenerative disease that will eventually kill her is told her condition can be halted by ‘life saving’ surgery – the miracle of science – but only at the cost of catastrophic loss of memory. At which point one has to ask: ‘What life are you saving if not the recollected one; the one filled with precious riches and experiences?’

In some ways the diaspora of memories and recollections once housed in picture frames diaries sketchbooks letters and albums into the lost vaults of smart phone devices and hard drives is robbing us of tangible tactile living memory. This functional un-remembering allow us to abdicate the responsibility for maintaining those experiences, memories or recollections and synthesizing them.  The machine nature of calling up data is very different to the human nature of recollecting memory – the former is perfect, linear, modal and cached, the second, imperfect, linear, messy and overlapping, every journey into it opening up the possibilities of new revelation – as opposed to the same data cache relentlessly replayed like the locked loop in a stored file.

One of the most powerful drivers of our progress and evolution and of our astonishing resilience as a species is personal and shared recollection. Perhaps memory is a just a simple evolutionary trait mythologised – of collected wisdoms and experiences of fear pain survival and joy, regurgitated in fire side stories, tales, mementoes, symbols artefacts and dramas.

But to connect memory or remembering to some higher order of existence – to have created the thread between what is, what has been and what will be via the technology of memory is some proof of our ability to transcend the claw and scratch of base existence.

That the memory of us and what we do may well be a vanity particular to our species – a desperate need for our life to be more than some nihilistic little blip on a cosmic scale.

Nonetheless, our need to try and reach beyond the brackets of birth and death and seize immortality; whether it be through our beliefs, by our actions, the legacies we leave, the children we bear or the blunt tool of extending our physical and conscious existence, is a defining trait in us.

Gladiator’s Maximus demonstrates our need to be remembered as an inspiration of improvement and achievement when he states: “What we do in life echoes in eternity”

To be forgotten is a terrible thing. Immortality, until some scientific trickster or data consciousness A.I. guru makes it otherwise , is mostly an exercise in seeding a process of relentless remembering.

We have a number of simple systems already in place, some rooted in thousands of years of repeated doing and some rooted in immoveable belief systems, and some developed through more recent technologies.

Some forms or remembering have until recently been seen as the sign of mental distress or illness. Take Nostalgia. Sneaking off for a quick youtube binge of TV theme tunes from childhood or rummaging through pictures of old Y Front adverts (love Retronaut!!) and a desperate yearning to watch the infamous Ziggy Stardust Top of the Pops is usually seen by the up-tight ‘its all abut the Now man’ zealots as some mawkish sentimentality BUT recent developments in psychoanalysis have shown that nostalgia is a powerful human tool – and can actually strengthen our sense of self and centre our identity, enabling us to weather greater shifts, turbulence and transition.

Look Back In Joy, a recent Guardian article looking at the power of Nostalgia, focuses on an Greek Born American academic, Constantine Sedikides, who had left the University of North Carolina to become Professor of Social & Personality Psychology at the University of Southampton. He realised that he was using nostalgia to manage the turbulence and dislocation of changing continents. This led him to exploring in far more robust academic terms the role and facility that nostalgia provides us with. His findings are liberating. Sedikides talks of nostalgia as the “perfect internal politician, connecting the past with the present, pointing optimistically to the future” and a mental state “absolutely central to human experience”.

For me this quick blog journey through the Art of Remembering was bough on by a recent collision of banal choices, a profound realisation and professional curiosity.

First up.

The banal. Sky movie choice time with my children. “What about The Book of Life?” – a simple, beautiful whimsical story with a simple point by the master Guillermo Del Toro. Yes, its about greatness. Yes, its about the illusion of courage. Yes, its about true love. yes, its about belonging – but really, it id a film about not forgetting. Relentlessly Remembering is about Not Forgetting. Memory and the act of remembering are the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal. We are all kept alive in the hearts and minds eyes and memories of those who love us and have lived out some part of their lives in around and about us.

Second up.

The profound. In a simple exchange between my brother and I, we reminded ourselves that the effects of my beautiful but now dead mother will eventually need to be shared out between my he and I – the next step in the atomisation of her living memory into our lives and eventually the lives of my children and so on. Each effect vibrates with associated memory – sodden with the context which arrives like a steam train every time they are recalled into being – expressions, sounds, smells, feelings, times and experiences. The atomic truth that an atom never dies – and that the world vibrates with the atomic echoes of every one who has ever lived needs to include the more ephemeral but still equally powerful atomic nature of the vibrations of memory that run through the effects of those we have loved. Their atomic nature is indirectly imbued by their having been part of a life. They are rendered ‘animate’ by those vibrations. This belief in this form of conscious osmosis doesn’t stop at the effects and belongings of those who have passed out of sight. We also apply it to sites and buildings – from Stone Henge and battle fields to the blue plaques on buildings. We make pilgrimages to the hallowed halls of here and there, wishing for the conscious greatness and wellhead of wisdom and learning steeped in their walls to pour out into us.

Third up.

The professional. This curiosity arose while exploring the purpose of one of the Virgin Accelerator businesses I have had the pleasure of working with. In a world of zero hours and the death of the social contract between large corporations and their employees, their idea of a platform that links previous, present and future employees creates a simple and compelling way for rebuilding a powerful and precious social memory into a company.

Social or Living Memory in a corporation or business is increasingly left to chance and the random foray into face-book pages, LinkedIn and the odd Instagram surge. Fully connecting with a company’s Now – amongst its employees, the communities it touches, its customers, its partners and suppliers – is only part of true socialisation

Socialising a company requires more than just acting in the Now. But few companies actively connect their past with their present and even fewer attach it to their future. The anti-socialising of a company – the active dislocation and rupture the social threads that run through it – the ties that bind it from its past to its future – are not just an oversight on the part of the social strategy or HR.

It is not just economic pressures or the trend for zero hours that destroy the social contract and living memory of a business. Many ambitious and venal execs actively dispense with the ‘dead wood’ and not always for the right reasons. This forest fire approach is often simply a way of removing those with a greater living memory of the business than the ‘new’ order now prevailing and controlling it .

Agreed, often the human nature of getting stuck in our ways: fixing things: securing them and subsequently seeing all change to them as alien or dangerous can kill a business; sucking the light and life out of it. But the baby & bathwater approach to removing people who’ve been around too long can rob corporations of a vital cornerstone of their resilience. When done wilfully this kind of action should be seen as an aggression against the business and in turn the shareholder – because it is purposefully eviscerating a source of memory and knowledge that though in its linear and previous form may be obsolete, could be re-tasked and transformed into a new and more powerful resource to greater long term value.

All of these impacts, however great or small, can create a form of Corporate Alzheimer’s – the degeneration of the social memory of the company, and with it the very thing that made the company burn so brilliantly for so long.

In a conversation with a large American telecomm business about how they might help High School kids resist dropping out, I was surprised to find that they struggled to see the value in connecting their ex employees – a truly universal and multitudinous cohort of living memory and life experience – with the young high school crowd via a weekly skype roulette. The idea was simple – for a massive telecoms and connectivity provider to create a showcase of meaningful connections by using social platforms to randomly connect high school kids and oldies to share moments of life and experience to mutual benefit. I realised that to grasp the value of this and institute this type of initiative requires an innate understanding of the power and value of being remembered for ex employees and of memory to those just staring on their journey.

Regardless of what a company gets wrong, and many get much wrong in regards to how they treat their employees over time – the truth is those companies still invest an enormous amount of time and money into training up and expanding the capabilities of their workforce (self interestedly granted but in that mutual self interest lies the truth of the social contract between an employee and an employer).Why let it all walk out the door when the employee leaves?  Because sometimes their tenure was bumpy or you didn’t act in the best manner towards them?

At the close of the Theory of Everything , when Steven and his ex wife Jane watch their children playing in the garden, their exchange summarises the value and potency of connected imperfections perfectly.

“Look what we made”.

For all the mistakes. For all the disappointments. For all the pain. Would you have it any other way? Memory can hurt. But is can also heal. Forgetting is a cop out.

Some people and the companies they run would be all the better for taking this view – and in doing so commit to rebuild their ability to relentlessly remember – drawing a long line from their past to their future. Social or Living memory is not only one of the most powerful human facilities. It could also be the cornerstone of a companies greatest resilience in our accelerating atomizing world.

Purpose, the north star of any company, is one of its tools for Relentless Remembering  – and it becomes meaningless if it is only socialised in the Now.

A purpose must be part of a continuum that reaches from the beginning of a company to its end. And to do that it must exist inside a structure that values and facilitates everyone’s ability to relentlessly remember and be improved and enlightened by that remembering.

 

Frothy Identity & the dark art of ‘my name is…’

30 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

Anakin, Anonymity, batman, Consumerism, Customer Life Time Value Modelling, Daniel Sturridge, Darth, Eminem, Frank Sinatra, Gotham, Hostages, Identity, Individuality, Infinite Growth, Personalised Interface, Punk, smart phones, Spaghetti Westerns, Starbucks, Sub, Super Dry Cappuccino, the American Dream, The Man With No name, tmblr

Image

“Skinny dry Triplefrappacrappercccinolattechiato for Julian”

What’s in a name? My ridiculous and highly needy coffee order for starters. This should be ridiculed in public. That I have managed to get myself to a three dimension coffee order indicates a pestilence of the spirit at work.

Skinny. (I wrestle with Cholesterol) Extra Shot. (I need more help in the morning these days) Super dry (I don’t like milk).

The source of this madness unsurprisingly rests in the heart of galloping consumption and endless retail growth. (And the ease with which my fragile ego can be manipulated!)

Quite simply, our ‘rapacious’ corporate friends have seized on a good thing – the socially levelling model of respecting individual particularity that lies at the heart of the American Dream – and turned it into First Name My Order strategy for Growth.

The long journey of the customer service model that began with starving penniless immigrants arriving on the Island under the frozen gaze of Liberty, nameless or without papers, ends with the coffee order leaving my lips in public in central London suffixed or prefixed with my first name.

The Dream has taken those immigrants from scratching scraps in the poor streets of Dublin, Palermo, Krakow and Juarez to applying a ‘let me tell you exactly how I want this sub sandwich’ selection system loudly directed with almost papal absolutism.

This is not exclusively the domain of 3rd and 4th generation immigrants in the US. We’re all at it.

“6 inch teriyaki sub with extra green peppers” says Daniel Sturridge (the British footballer) because he likes things ‘his way’.

With the help of our emollient, predatory NBBFs (New Best Brand Friends) now everyone can, as Frankie (that’s Sinatra, not Goes To Hollywood) sang in those golden years, “do it my way”.

If you want a triple-tofu-Chilli-cheese-string-dog in marmalade marinade, white sauce and whipped cream in a floury bap, you’ll find that it is your absolute human right.

You are not a faceless, nameless, choice-less drone any more.

You are majestic, singular, powerful: the text of you illuminated by every infinitesimal nuance of particularity you can cook up in one simple order.

The American Dream has delivered us a service culture that promises, hand on heart, that never ever again will you be told what to eat without some recourse to asserting your ‘identity’. And not just in ingredient or format choice.

The game raiser was in the appropriation and use of every customer’s first name ‘with a slightly creepy familiarity’ as part of the service process.

Direct Mail of the utter drivel variety was suddenly ‘ok’ as it sported our name on it, printed in ‘handwritten’ font.

Our mail pages wi-fi logins and every other device interface we have uses our own name to welcome us back. The existential labyrinth presented by the cautious expression Welcome back Julian (Not you?) should not be underestimated.

Not me? What do you mean ‘Not me?’ You know it’s me. I have given you secret-squirrel passwords, a saliva sample, three hairs off my head, some of the earth from under my first den in the garden of my youth and the DNA strand of my first pet. Surely you should know whether it’s me?

And to expand this interrogation, how would I know if ‘I’ was not me? What other clues are you giving me? Nope nothing.  Zip. Nix. Nada. Niente.

But for these NBBFs of mine it seems that as long as my name’s there, everything is OK. Which I suppose it is; Isn’t it?

Our first name is now used freely by everyone from call-centre staff, the man at the garage who I’ve never met before, strangers in Health Clubs and the shifting sands of receptionists at various dental clinics.

In fact the only person who seems reticent to use my first name in the world these days is me.

I am becoming rather protective of it. And getting a little ticked off that it gets demanded from me so often and used back at me so easily.

When I make my ridiculous coffee order and hear my name tabbed on the end I feel as if I have been quietly mugged.

I am starting to see where the sublime logic of the nom de plume, nom de guerre and alter ego.

‘My name is… my name is… my name is… Slim Shady’ sang Eminem…AKA Marshall Mathers. Smart move. At least he can amuse himself with three names to draw down on at the coffee shop. I don’t see Batman with this problem. Though seeing him turn up at a rather self-conscious Gotham Coffee shop, ordering a Chai Latte and being asked ‘What’s your name?’ would help me to begin to navigate the age of absurdity I feel we have now entered. Batman? Or Bruce. You decide.

Perhaps it’s not just me. Perhaps we are all quietly plotting for when our ‘Anakin’ will turn. When the burgeoning malevolence and negative feelings towards people we don’t know from Adam using our first name willy-nilly, will prompt our ‘Darth’ to answer the question  ‘Welcome Back Anakin (Not You?) with a sharp swipe of a light sabre and a dash of keyboard-melting force.

The liberal use of your first name by every brand and business you even glance at is actually doing the opposite of its original intention. At the outset all of this was to empower the individual – to give the customer a sense of being more than just a consuming machine who was expected to turn up at the supermarket in their 343 instalments-station wagon, fill their trolley with 1/3rd Unilever 1/3rd P&G and with the last third a shared cornucopia of Nestle, Coca Cola, Kellogg’s and Kraft consumables.

But as the consumption grew and the giants who purveyed the products that fuelled that consumtion also grew, the people felt further and further away from the things that secured them – the old touchstones of shops, bars and diners where people knew your name.

As the shopping malls got bigger and the diners got franchised. As the towns splintered and the cities and ‘burbs bloated, people stopped knowing anyone’s name. They barely looked them in the face.

The odd island of camaraderie appeared – between till 3 and till 4 and that nice man at the newsagents. But mostly accelerating faceless consumption ruled.

Cheers, the Boston bar based sit com was a master-class in reassurance television. And its theme tune summed up the age. We like places that know our name. It stops everything feeling so bleak on a wet Wednesday in mid February having just returned from said superMall.

It took a little time to realize that the more faceless the sale the more important it was to make someone feel like they were really important. But we all got there.

For a while it was delightful. The truly entrepreneurial people who did actually give a wholesale shit about the customer as a person turned the others’ heads – creating a new culture that aimed to actually understand and communicate with people like they mattered in the transaction.

But the infinite-growth monsters of the old world simply saw that you could screw a few bucks more per person out of a life time value model by using the person’s first name and by being their new best friend

Soon enough, mass personalization, a rather fetching term for how to industrialise degrees of knowing and intimacy, poured into the world: into every shop, call centre, mobile interface, airport lounge, and restaurant.

Once you have spotted the potency of Names and the wielding of them, a world of endless opportunity reveals itself.

There is also the dark art of Reverse First Naming in the entertainment & leisure sector. Like Reverse logistics in the parcel delivery services, it’s a stroke of mirror loving genius.

If you have been in a franchise restaurant in the last 12 months and had someone tell you ‘hey, my names Siobhan and I’m your waitress for this evening’ – you have just been Reverse First Named. Instead of using your own name against you, in this particular instance they use their own. Genius.

Reverse First Naming is a new brutal and unflinching practice to wreak havoc in the unsuspecting consumer.

It is, first and foremost a method for the suppression of free speech – especially if the speech was going to sound something like the following: ‘this place stinks, the service is crap, this burger resembles something that’s been kicked around a barber’s shop floor and there’s chewing gum stuck to my tights’.

It is a well-documented fact that this first name first mover advantage can be life saving.

In potential situations of violence against the person by strangers, people are trained to ‘humanize’ themselves to the aggressor – telling them your first name, or nick name, tell them about your children, your wife waiting at home – to create a connection that triggers sentiment, guilt, shame and conscience – and ultimately responsibility for hurting not a faceless stranger, a piece of collateral damage, but someone ‘known’ to you.

So suddenly you are responsible for Siobhan’s well-being and job satisfaction. Whether she gets a good tip – or a pay raise or not. So the chances are you’ll be a little more considerate and a little less caustic.

But we cannot simply point fingers in this. We were all so wrapped up in looking at and hearing our name in lights, furiously opening letters inviting our handwritten first name self to the opening of another envelope and buying our own name in an email address, that we missed the moment when marketing Insincerity stole our name.

Now it feels as if one has walked through a time space continuum to a hometown we didn’t know we had, populated by people who’ve never met us before but who feel really really friendly like they’ve known us for years. Our own brand built Truman Show.

And there right there in the middle of it all, is our first name in lights surrounded by bands cheerleaders and fireworks.

So right now, anonymity is the real rock n roll. Now that we’ve illuminated the text of that first name by embroidering it with face-book postings, riddled with tweets and pins. Now is the time to get punk and take our first name back.

The first rule of data confidentiality? Take back the little big data! Starting with your name.

Surname is the new Sex Pistols. Ample use of Mr, Mrs or Ms is where the real anarchy lies.

But right up there at the top? Anonymity.

The Man with No Name, an America Colonies Ronin with a Latinate rasp, walked through the Spaghetti Western Trilogy to the chirp of penny whistle, a guitar twang and the crack of a whip utterly devoid of a name.

When standing at the counter of certain Coffee Shops I am tempted to relive The Man With No Name’s short conversation with the barman when asked ‘I didn’t catch your name…’ ‘I didn’t give it’.

Hearing my name repeatedly chiming out of the person delivering it up to me from behind the cawing frothing barista station with faux hoaky bonhomie is getting a little ‘old’.

To understand quite how powerful the imperative to ‘personalise’ the service proposition is, when you are next asked for your name, try saying No.

Along with the right to order ridiculous coffee combinations, to not give your name is a basic human right.

Try it. You may find your No might just be met with a gaze not dissimilar to that of a rather tired Customs Official when confronted with bag full of hand-guns cocaine and Marmite.

This ‘local global’ serving culture that speaks to me like a regular at a corner coffee shop, liberally uses my name to fulfill a number of functions: as a clearing house dispatch mechanism; as an metronome of service excellence (listen to all these good people we’re delivering coffee to); as a ‘personal touch’ and as a piece of service sophistry. And to render human and real the faceless corporate swaggerdaccio of the global brand providing it.

Sometimes just to lighten this moment, I would love people to be confronted with their gamer names perhaps or their tumblr tags just to see how ‘real’ we want all of these separate personas to be to us.

“Dry frappacinno for #kongworrier”

“Triple chai latte with sprinkles for #foxytankbuttgirl”

Our first names are taken in vain by more than just ourselves and the brands we allow to speak to us through them.

Voice activated dialing on smart phones is a source of infinite street theatre. Watching for example someone saying the name James repeatedly into a phone standing on a street corner shouldn’t be funny. What’s funny is when the phone responds by telling the person she’s calling Mary.

I don’t want Mary. I want James.

CALLER: “Call James”

SMART PHONE: “Calling Mary”

You see the person wonder, ‘what am I doing wrong’? They move the phone to different angles askance of their mouth.

CALLER: “James” “Call James”

SMART PHONE: “Calling Mary”.

This then descends into a dulcet opera of different pronunciations. Maybe they’re just saying it wrong. Perhaps in the last week they developed a speech impediment. A cold sore might be ‘smudging’ the sound file. Or perhaps they were drunk when they made the sound tag and sober now. Whatever.

If only James knew how often his name was being called out in a public place.

And therein lies out perfect existential storm.

At a coffee shop counter: having ordered your identity-asserting ‘eat my individuality World’ coffee with 3 complex dimensions, just at the moment when you are asking your smart phone to ‘Call James’, the lady asks your name.

YOU: “Call James”

SERVER: “James?”

YOU: “No Julian”

SERVER: “Not James”

SMART PHONE: “Calling Mary”

YOU: (To smartphone) “No, James”

SERVER: “James?… not Julian?”

DISTANT BARISTA:  “GrandeToffeechinolatte with whipped cream for #saucyleatherboy

SMART PHONE: “Calling #saucyleatherboy”

So the next time you find yourself being asked your name, pause, take a breath, consider the consequences; and then answer. You might be surprised by what comes out of your mouth.

Hip bone’s connected to the i-phone & the evolutionary curve of a trouser pocket.

27 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

American Eagle Jeans, behavourial change, efficiencies & economies, Evolution, Hot Sexy Love Strides, Human resilience, Ilipsoas muscle, RSI, smart phones, software programmer, upgrades, Wired

pocket-iphone-jeans-650x0

Okay; hands up who recognises this everyday irritation:

You’re faffing about, and then suddenly you need to crouch down or lean over: to tie a shoe-lace, pick up a child, smell a flower or rescue a shish kebab you’ve dropped on the pavement.

As you tip forwards, the space between your upper thighs and abdominal muscles decreasing, you are suddenly aware of the top and bottom of the glamorous, chic, multifunctional atmospherically connected smart phone tucked into your front jean or trouser pocket digging into your hip and thigh with perfect synchronicity.

Whoa! No thanks.

Ping. Up you go again, straightening up, digging out and transferring said chic smart phone to a, well, slightly smarter storage place – a back pocket or perhaps a surface near by.

And down you go again to complete the original action.

(This particular form of RSI – Repeatedly Stupid Inclination – is not to be confused with the lavatory based RSI suffered while turning and leaning over to flush said lavatory and watching said glamour phone slide out of your top pocket to plunge into the satanic stew below you for the fourth time in 3 weeks.)

So let’s have a closer look at this particularly ‘drinking bird’ RSI – three aspects of it to be precise: specifically; the efficiency, ergonomics and evolution of it.

Firstly, efficiency.

The repetition of the action of bending down, straightening up, reordering the phone to a back pocket or some other place, and bending down and straightening up again in pursuit of one simple action is simply inefficient.

Any Time-and-Motion or statistical geek will clearly set out in no uncertain and equated terms how, regardless of from which vantage point you view this: either that of time and motion or that of consumption of physical energy (body muscle mass and the liquids salts and sugars required to ignite and drive them) it’s simply a waste of time and energy.

Secondly, in ergonomic terms, it is all wrong, in so many ways. From a physical design aspect, having something repeatedly digging into your iliopsoas muscle at the top of your hip joint creates imperfect motion, impairs good posture, decreases cognition, creates irregular or anomalous strain on lower back muscles and therefore, ergonomically, it is flawed.

It is bad design: from the point of view of the phone design, the trouser pocket design (position) and ultimately the design of the human body.

To be fair the latter only really becomes an issue if the two former design concepts render themselves impervious to change, immoveable in their conceptual (and physical) position due either to some crushing fashion mantra insisting on the pocket’s placement being ‘just so’ or our digital compulsive-obsessive need to view ever increasing amounts of content of ever decreasing quality and charm on increasingly bigger screens continues unabated.

Yes, for the observant out there, the science of ergonomics does collide with that of human behaviour at this juncture. The behavioural scientists would point to the fact that, if we keep putting our phone in ‘that front pocket’; if we continue to simultaneously squat and bend forwards to try to pick up the pair of discarded whatevers off the floor, said smart phone will continue to jag into our hip, continue to hurt and irritate and frustrate us; the chances are we will eventually stop doing it.

Current subjective research group of one (me) and some close friends seems to point to the opposite of the evolving learned behaviours law occurring though.

So, this all brings us nicely to the third aspect of discussion: Evolution.

The question in this pocket-meets-mobile-meets-human triangulation is not so much how it will evolve but rather which pillar of it will evolve.

So, one might suggest that the phone tech companies should be the ones to evolve (given that they spuriously upgrade stuff once a week roughly as it is so why not). Perhaps they could look to ‘soften’ the line of the phone, round the shape out, or perhaps even go the extra mile and create some breakthrough flexible tech – a mobile with a flexing hi res super screen set in a pliant, rubberised polymer with built in ‘give’: but I doubt it.

So what about the apparel companies? What about the fashion brands? American Eagle developing mobile friendly slung-front pockets jeans? Patched pockets constructed specifically to off set the jagging mobile mauling? Only if you could convince the mass wearer that they were still going to look as hot as a Hawaiian chilli and be able to sashay along life’s catwalk with no loss of WOW.  Otherwise, open stitched slung pockets might get a little niche action from the software programmer in Shoreditch but otherwise Uh! Uh! I don’t think so.

So if we can’t rely on human intelligence to offset the problem, and for some reason the tech companies and the apparel companies get in cahoots with each other, and apply an intransigent and frankly fascist line in the sanctity of their existing design, the impacts on the human body could get kind of funny and kind of expensive kind of soon.

Given that 5 or 6 years typing from a bad keyboard position with an imperfectly height adjusted screen is about to plunge most developed economies, employers and insurance providers into a mire of RSI absence, claim and therapy (Last year 5.4 million days were lost in sick leave due to RSI and, every day, six workers left their jobs because of RSI) underwritten by a particular crisis in generational diversity (most of these sufferers are under 45, and just over half of them are women.) imagine what this could auger for the mobile mauled hip.

If the we continue to turn a blind eye to this issue what are the consequences for us physically, spiritually and culturally?

What would happen to our bodies? How would the iliopsoas and gluteus muscles adapt given that the gluteus alone connects the ilium, sacrum, and coccyx to the femur? What would happen to their shape and muscle type?

Would our core muscles adapt to compensate? OR become corrupted in their current form?

What would the offset or ‘referred’ symptoms and impacts be? Given that, especially in the hip and lower back, conditions induced by ‘referral’ from pre-existing conditions elsewhere is quite commonplace.

Would the impaired compression and twist incurred in every repetition of the action lead to greater likelihood of prolapse discs?

Would there be an indentation, or a coarsening of the hip bone just at the point of contact developed over time? Would that coarsening be so particular as to able to be identified in the skeletal remains we leave behind? One hundred years from now would a cold-case pathologist be able to know whether Jane Doe wore a particular style of American Eagle jeans and used a Samsung Notes III just by the nature, bevel and texture of a dent in her hip?

And then we have the socio-cultural impacts!

Would there be a new development of specific Pilates and Yoga instruction and Courses for sinus coxae, or ‘Pocket Hip’ as it would become colloquially known.

Would a cache develop around having or not having Pocket Hip? (or i-hip as the Apple Disciples would call it). Would i-hip suddenly be honoured with a Double Page Spread in Wired magazine?

The mind toggles!

Anyway, just putting it out there for you.

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