Toward a History of Digital Marketing

I think it started with that guru who insisted that to be a marketer
was to be a member of the most revolutionary profession.
The general intellect, a.k.a. World Spirit, had decreed it so,
even if just for our era. Others, posing as moralists, wrote
about how to be good, generating a catalogue of doilies,
useful for setting an old-fashioned table. But the marketers,
they could determine both what was on the table and how
people saw the silverware, cups, plates, the food they cooked,
how it was seasoned, how it tasted. Remember that wineglass
shaped like a Brancusi sculpture—all sleek and retro-futurist?
Even the great wine connoisseurs were convinced it made
their grape juice taste better. The bouquet a fragrant ghost.
What a blast it was to watch the snobs trip over their snoots.
Or how about when they first invented digital coupons?
Some copywriter with a PhD wrote product descriptions
in the form of digital sonnets. Okay, nobody read them;
people just cared about the discounts. But as a result,
a whole population of pricing stratagems was born.
They had invented a science that embraced failure as a path to truth.
The copywriter who wrote that stuff got canned, but the war
for the “real” always incurs a few casualties, doesn’t it?

Trolling

As if the internet were an infinite population
of bridges with an angry someone under each.
Think of it like that meditation exercise
that asks you to assume, because of endless rebirths
during an endless cycle, that everyone at one time was your mother.
And then, if we add, as the meditation master puts it, “I don’t know
about this exercise; my own mother was pretty mean,”
we might also say that because of endless searches
and encounters, everyone, at one time
has been your troll, or at least has an inner troll,
hiding under the bridge of their inner nature. Perhaps the troll
is sleeping there, a lazy troll by today’s get-up-and-go standards,
until, because of another’s rudeness or idiotic comments,
it is awakened to the truth of its being. Trolls like each other. To them
it is an act of compassion to awaken another, like a guru might throw a shoe
at a student to awaken them from their dogmatic slumber, to shake them loose
from the stupidity of common sense. So one troll tells another troll to pick up
its caveman-like fur coat, comb its dayglow hair, so it gets that “hair on fire look”
and “follow me; there’s a party going on over there.”

(Image: Trevor Paglen’s CLOUD #135 Hough Lines (2019))