Kat Rosenfield, whose work I've linked to at least once before, has a good new article on the pretense that the corporate world--and especially the tech industry--values individuality, even eccentricity. This is something that was very big around the turn of the millennium. Free thinkers and mad innovators were supposedly the new royalty because they just might change the world.
It was always and empty sham, of course. These companies were only interested in a very narrowly defined kind of visionary, the kind that could foresee and nudge developments in their own field. And even this may have been devalued in the ensuing years, as the CEOs figure they already know everything worth knowing. Better to save up and buy a few politicians.
Anyway, one of the big relics Rosenfield talks about is Apple's Think Different™ campaign, a representative poster from which is shown below.
Notice anything that all or at least most of these people have in common? Yeah, kind of a brilliant touch, actually. They had the cachet of having shuffled off this mortal coil, and Apple didn't have to worry about them doing anything new that might be off-script or which, in today's parlance, might get them canceled.
2 comments:
Honoring people who are dead for having been free thinkers is easy. Hiring someone like Antionio Garcia Martinez and keeping him on despite the complaints of the mob is more difficult, although the company and society at large might be better served through such a resolute example. Employers may talk all they like about being inclusive but when it comes down to brass tacks it appears as if, in reality, devisiveness is their goal. You don't have to expend energy controlling people if the those people find satisfaction in crippling outsiders.
I guess none of them ever heard about the advisability of not throwing stones in a glass house - or the biblical admonition: Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
As for the famous deceased in the picture, the latest iteration has been to denounce famous historical figures for not being 21st century culturally aware. sheesh..
Just like the scientific establishment can resemble the sixteenth century Vatican more than it has anything to do with Galileo, it's easier to honor people in the past who rebelled against the powers that be than to admit there's something to be said for people doing the same thing now. Or if there is someone worth defying in the present, it's safer just to put conservative strawmen in that position. And of course diversity is always a good thing, as long as you wind up with a roomful of people who all talk, think, and act the same.
Those are both very good sayings. As is the old statement of talk being cheap.
Hitchcock and Picasso have always had detractors of both their work and their personal lives, so nothing new there. Now everyone from the past seems to be potentially unacceptable: Dr. Seuss? Abraham Lincoln? Being out of step with the craven ethos of this century may be a good thing.
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