I never thought that after almost a year of not writing that a story about apple would get me back on my blog, but I’ll take any opportunity to write again.   Today, Tuesday July 27, 2010, I received this email (attached image capture) from Apple about their latest iMac computer.  What captured my attention was the subject heading “Introducing the most powerful iMac ever”.  I think by now everyone knows that Apple’s business model is to always release a computer that is faster than the previous generation – hence the notion that the latest version will be the “most powerful iMac ever” is a given and a moot point.  Then I reminded myself that Apple is very precise and calculating. Every word in an ad copy is there for a reason. Every word on Steve Job’s PowerPoint presentation is there for a reason.  These words are powerful and  incite in customers the intended feeling that they must buy this amazing product even though the words in the subject lines are utterly absurd when held against the backdrop of reality.   Why did this newsletter from Apple incite such passion in me today? I think it was a combination of this newsletter and another newsletter from a internet marketing coach  named Mark Joyner at www.simpleology.com who’s been sending emails after emails wanting people to buy his marketing program and today he was giving away couple of chapters to a book called  “Mind Control Marketing”.    As a marketing professional myself, I had to think about whether I wanted to read a book with that title.  Do I want to learn “tricks” to get people to buy stuff?  In an age where the preferred method of learning about products is through word of mouth and one’s “social network”, I’ve got to believe that we are entering an age where we don’t need mind control tricks anymore.   I’m now taking a pause to reflect on what is “ethical” marketing? Language that clearly assumes gullibility or even worse, ignorance in the part of the people interested in a product clearly is not language fitting of an advancing civilization.

If you’re wondering what may have been a cleaner subject heading…well here’s one: “Introducing the new & faster iMac.” This new subject line doesn’t make the notion of Apple releasing a more powerful iMac a new phenomena in a computer launch- every computer from Apple since the release of Apple II in 1977 has been “more powerful” than their previous generations.. Just wait another year or two and Apple’s newsletter headline will once again be “Introducing the most powerful iMac ever”.  I’m a believer that words are powerful and that the words we use when we speak to our children, partners, friends, family members and to the public in general – i.e. our fellow human beings -  should carry the highest of intentions.  I can’t say that I follow this rule all the time, but I’m often reminded when I don’t – so Apple marketers, what do you think?

Last week April 15th not only marked the day for our collective Taxes to be mailed but it was also the day where teabagging rallies/protests and tea-parties were happening across the country.   This post is not politically motivated, so I’m not going to talk about the virtues/vices of these events or whether either of the two political parties in the US are right or wrong in their position on the Obama stimulus package.  If you’ve read any of my posts on the economy you’d know where I stand on the way the government spends money.  What I want to talk about is another tea party of sorts I performed on my own last week, totally unrelated to the teabagging events that happened around the country but in a mystical kind of way it is very much related.  This particular tea “non-event” happened in fact prior to me even knowing about the tea party protests happening in the US.  This synchronous coincidence alone made it all that much more special.
Here’s how the story goes: I have been working diligently for the past few months to simplify my life and shed all attachments to the past that have been weighing me down energetically…attachments to my old jobs by keeping around old job related documents, old pay stubs, staionaries from my old company, etc.  all in order to move forward with a clean, confident slate.  Parallel to this process, I had also been looking at getting rid of clutter by identifying anything that I hadn’t used in more than 6 months to a year.  I was getting rid of these items by both giving them away for free as well as selling them on Ebay and Craigslist.   As I began to purge, I found a new sense of space, both in my physical world but also in my psychic space.  What I didn’t realize was that this new found way of bringing about a shift, wasn’t limited to all the items and junks in our storage space, but it was just as applicable to our drawer full of tea bags.  I noticed last week that we had been keeping a particular number of tea bags that my wife and I had received a few years ago during a trip to Montreal. These were all flavors that neither my wife or I liked.  Needless to say, these tea bags have been sitting in our cabinet for over a year and a half.   I can’t speak for my wife, but I had always held a belief or fantasy that one day, a guest in our house was going to want tea and magically select one of these bags. On the 14th of April, I decided that once and for all, there was no reason to hold onto these old bags of tea for the sake of some unknown future event based on a thought-form or fantasy in my head.  What made this a guilt free decision was that we have a composter in our backyard, so all the bags were “recycled.”
With the bags gone, our drawer is now more spacious and I don’t have to expend another ounce of energy thinking about those bags as I did in the past every time I came across them in the drawer.  The moral of this story is that sometimes we get things in order to fill a void in the present moment and later in the future we hold to those same things for way too long.  Our attachments to Inanimate objects and forms really get us into trouble sometime, least of which is our identification with them (ie. sense of self).  Ironically all forms and objects are transient.  Everything in time will either decay or die, either physically or in our conscious mind(at least between birth and death).  To that end, it is futile to hold on to forms.  In this particular case I held on to those bags of tea way too long and I learned that even bags of tea, the ones I held on to for so long for reasons I didn’t even fully understand, had no business staying around and taking up mental space.  How does my tea bag story dovetail into the current economic crists you ask? Our individual collective acts in buying “stuff” that we didn’t need, and holding on to them in ways that only filled up our garages, storage spaces and even tea drawers, is what got us into this financial mess.  When we can free ourselves by releasing these “things” into the world, either to people who have a more pressing use for them, through recycling or back to mother earth via composting, we will allow the circle of life to continue un-impeded.  This purging process is a great way to re-learn how to spend, what to store and how, why and where to re-distribute.

Just like the saying “be the change you want to see in the world”, then “have your own conscious tea party at home” and leave the silly politics to the poleticians and the protesters.

I saw this image today of an ad campaign by VISA.  I couldn’t help but be saddened by the image of all of the electronic stuff that is being depicted by VISA as having something to do with “Life” or the stuff of life. It made me wonder about the thinking behind this campaign.  Do the folks at VISA and their Ad agency really believe this notion to their individual cores and do they think that people (i.e. consumers) will resonate with it? Is this line of marketing similar to the slogan now written on the entrance to every Best Buy store: “You Happier”.  As if Life is all about buying stuff, stuff that requires VISA.  When will we learn our lessons that “stuff” does not equal to life or happiness, and when will corporations stop feeding people the myth.  I guess these days its Life as usual when you live in a country which can’t keep up with its own national debt, its banking system is on the verge of collapse due to bad loans, and where the value of the currency is plunging so low that the price of everything is rising to the point where most people have no choice but to buy “stuff” with their VISA cards.

The tragic irony of the image in this particular campaign is that it looks a bit like the Manhattan sky line, and ominously reminds me of the aftermath of 911 when President Bush told the nation to go out and spend in order to help America.  What a double-edged sword credit is.  It is an instrument that can both heal and harm at the same time, especially depending on whose hand it is in.  It is part of the fabric of most societies but like some of society’s other features, it is largely misunderstood, abused, and seen as natural and necessary.  Sounds like another institution/instrument that is greatly in need of a conscious revision.

I myself am deep in the process of re-evaluating and re-defining how I use all my credit cards, how I take on false labels like “home-owner” based on debt financing, and revisiting various forms of debt that on the surface seem benevolent like micro-finance(a major topic worthy of its own post in a later time).

Now that I can write with a bit more presence and humility, I do want to point out that today we still as a species need to bring greater awareness to our acts in the name of progress and sustainability. I don’t know what is the right balance when it comes to bio-fuels, the subject of my last post. Do we want to see the earth, its resources in the form of the soil to be depleted so that our cars are fueled? Do we want to see the same pesticides and herbicides that have been devastating the farm lands of the world to be used once again in creating bio-diesel? Is this where food needs to be diverted to for progress? What is progress and who decides if we’ve attained it? I find in times like this it helps to listen to as many sides as possible. In the following excerpt, wisdom from indigenous people of the world is one such viewpoint I’d like to share with you.

Last week 3000 worldwide delegates met at the seventh session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues where Bolivian President Evo Morales gave the keynote address. I wanted to provide you with an excerpt of an interview session with Democracynow.org and Evo Morales regarding bio-fuels:

[Link to entire interview - text and audio/video]

JUAN GONZALEZ(Interviewer): You have raised some criticisms of some other Latin American leaders. You didn’t name any, but it’s obvious to many that some of your questioning is directed at presidents like Lula of Brazil, who has pushed biofuels. Have you talked to President Lula about this? And what’s been his response, if you have?
PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] We have had discussions at summits of heads of states, sharing some of our experiences. I am certain that these presidents will understand the cry of the people of Bolivia, of the people of Latin America and the whole world, which wants to have more food and not more cars. First food, then if something’s left over, more cars, more automobiles. I think that life has to come first.
But the most important thing—and this is the first time that I find I’m in agreement with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—they’ve publicly stated that if food prices are going up, it’s precisely because of the biofuels question, and it has a major impact. So if we have these points of agreement, then we have an obligation to together explain and persuade these international organizations, together with the social movements, so as to be able to change the policies of some governments or some presidents.

Yesterday, on a local SF bay area radio station, I heard an interview with Martha E. Gimenez, a retired professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The interview centered around her essay in the December 2007 issue of the Monthly Review magazine titled “Self-Sourcing: How Corporations Get Us to Work Without Pay!”. I’d like to preface that I am not endorsing this particular magazine, the radio program on which this interview aired or for that matter the author. I say this because I wouldn’t want the left leaning, pro-labor ideologies that may surround this person or this magazine distract you from the point that I’m wanting to make or for that matter the key points that she tries to make(not to mention that I know very little about this magazine).

We’ve all used self-checkout systems at grocery stores, Homedepot, even airline counters by newcomers like Virgin America. We’ve fumbled through the learning process of scanning our items and prayed that when we’re at the airline ticketing counter that we don’t screw up our flights and that our luggage makes its way safely back home. In the name of cost cutting and getting a “deal” we’ve also bought furniture from places like IKEA, where we’ve had to figure out how to put together furniture. In her article Gimenez defines Self-sourcing as the “intensification of the process of transferring work from the sphere of production, where it is visible and paid, to the sphere of consumption, where it is invisible and unpaid.” In this essay she talks about the erosion of low skill jobs where labor that was previously employed to do this work is now born by us. I actually don’t want to debate her article, but I want to bring to the open this notion of Self-sourcing and it implications. Once we are conscious as to what is truly happening and why it’s happening then we can direct our opinions and energies in the right direction.

Human progress seems to come in many shapes and sizes and sometimes it comes in the form of innovation and what economists refer to as “productivity”. This may well be an instance of that. I’d like to leave you with this question: At the end of the day, are we getting a better product, or better service when we lose our “privilege” as the consumer and find ourselves more and more a part of the production and sales process? What are the true costs or the true savings of this trade-off? Is it any more efficient if in the future every checkout line at a grocery store is a self-checkout line? Aren’t we ultimately helping companies increase their revenues on our unpaid labor? Are we hoping to get a discount in return for our labor(if we’re lucky)? How much further beyond self-check-out machines are we willing to go to get a discount? I don’t know about you but when these self-checkout kiosks appear in stores, they don’t pass the savings on to the consumers. We are initially seduced to thinking that we can save some time by using these self-checkout lines but at the end of the day even these check-out lines get longer and longer. The value back to us is diminished while the company continues to reap the rewards of not having extra staff to help us. As long as consumers feel that they are getting a better deal as a result of self-sourcing, companies will continue to move more and more of their labor intensive processes on to them. Is this a good trend or a bad trend, it’s clearly not a black and white issue and clearly not even on the radar of institutions that are looking at what is meant to be a socially responsible company.

Labor, economic and product/service quality implications aside, is this trend creating a world where we only interact with computers, machines, kiosks and no longer interact with people who are our neighbors or our friends? At a time in human history where we need to connect more, love more, care more, interact more so that we can appreciate each other in our own unique ways in all possible settings, this trend is symptomatic of the erosion of society’s soul … and erosion by definition happens slowly yet steadily.

Here is the link to the article…..