Someone Else’s Plan

More frequently than we realise, we are part of someone else’s plan.

I’m sitting watching the third India Jones movie. It’s obviously showing as part of the pre-publicity for the last one, which is about to be / showing at the cinema.

There is a whole marketing plan around this film. Now I’m part of it. I’m part of a schematic, a system not of my making.

Unfortunately for them, I’ll slip through the net, not be infected by the marketing-virus. But others will, they’ll go see the movie or buy the video. Dunno what merchandise there’ll be. But many of them will buy.

This is just one of numerous plans / webs I am a part of. Most of it via the media, some via my bank, my insurance company, my business, organisations that we do business with. I’m communicated with as part of their plans. Sometimes I’ll fit in with them. Most often I won’t, though others will.

Marketing is about lassoing groups of people that may be susceptible to infection by their virus/meme, then releasing money from them in exchange for a change of state.

Is this right? A change of state. If we are to abstract ourselves totally – what happens when we buy something? We get something. We have more stuff / knowledge / something than before. That must change us. Though often it’s just temporary, the changed state slides away, we revert to our original state. The more temporary it is, the better for most businesses – that means more selling.

People have become so clever at selling. It’s no longer always a straight exchange. It’s an ongoing relationship, the exchange continuing for as long as possible, smaller amounts over a longer period of time. Don’t just sell the book, sell chapters of the book and get people to pay a monthly subscription. Is this because there are just so many people? We have to construct society in order to keep the largest possible number of people occupied.

This is the curse of the modern world. The really great products of course induce a permanent change of state. But that doesn’t facilitate the flow of cash in the same way that useless stuff does. The definition and scale of wealth has changed – it has changed because of this phenomenon. Now there’s all this virtual cash sloshing around – mostly in the form of debts to banks / other lending institutions. And we are slowly being sucked dry.

This is why infographics / visualisation could be so important. People are completely out of touch with the meaning of money and the value of things. (What a phenomenal trick! To distance people from this.) It’s the only way to remind them of what the true picture is. What’s really going on.

And I guess that’s why I’m so interested in the idea of creating animations / works of art that show what’s truly going on. To search for and then represent underlying patterns via both info graphics and film.

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