On paranoia, parochialism and beige-o-philia.

Not that long ago I had written a blog about insecure employers who check their employees’ and applicants’ postings on social websites to decide the applicants’ “suitability” for job consideration. It’s no longer a secret that your online life can and will be used against you.

Well, it turns out that this insidious obsession with one’s perfectly legal activities is now escalated to a new and “improved” level of creepy invigilation. You just have to read this article. Reading it revived memories from the past I so wanted to forget.

Through no fault of my own, I had spent some time growing up in a country occupied for some decades by Soviet Russia whose government owed its loyalty to the party aparatchiks with an HQ in Moscow.

Life in some countries within the communist bloc was not quite the nightmare depicted by George Orwell in his seminal “1984″. But it wasn’t too far removed from it, either.

If you’d had the dubious fortune of being born in a country without said bloc, you were a marked man, woman or child for life. If you had spent any time away from the workers’ paradise, you were branded a traitor to the People. If you had any talent, if you had learned anything that could benefit your countrywo/men beyond the pedestrian basic beige, you were treated as a renegade for wanting your compadres to live in nice homes, with amenities beyond the ultra drab grey, to have nice clothes, to try a foreign cuisine, to travel and meet people with different histories, to exchange ideas and experiences – all that and much more was seen as evil, decadent. Dangerous.

The Peoples of the Communist Republics, you were told, would not tolerate such an aberration. Better yet, the People, i.e., your neighbours, friends and associates were encouraged, for their own good, to keep a watchful eye on the decadents. Today the the Land of the Free is promoting much the of the same with the slogan “See something, say something”.

Schools were advised to double the punishment for anything that could be labelled a transgression. Ridiculing and failing a child was seen as a good way to break said child into seeing the world according to the Party’s dictum. Basic education was the most that such a child was expected to achieve. If the child had parents who would push the child, despite the daily nightmare, to excel and be admitted to a school of higher learning, every effort was made to persuade the members of the committee supervising the entrance exam to fail the student.  If the student managed to graduate with above average grades, work was available only if the graduate would sign an oath of loyalty to the People and to the Party. If you refused to sign, work was very hard to find, most of it of the menial kind, but it was there if you elected to live according to your convictions.

A government appointed minder would enter your home, while there was no one in the apartment, to go through your family’s photographs, books, clothes, looking for non-existing incriminating evidence of a decadent, even traitorous, life. Yes, indeed, beautiful things and ideas corrupt. Even our minder liked the little luxury, like the beautiful, as delicate as a butterfly’s breath, silk shawl you may have been given by your proud Dad for good grades, so one day the shawl would disappear from amongst your belongings.

Your foreign contacts were seen as a threat to the People’s paradise. So all letters were intercepted and never returned.

Then one day, a child no longer, you are able to fly away, with the knowledge that you may never be allowed to see your family again.

Well, that system did collapse. I, and many others like me, could return to visit our families. During one such visit, Mum told me about the minder who had intercepted letters addressed to me. Some offering work I so very much would’ve liked to have accepted. By then, however, it was too late. The price I paid for not wanting to submit to the tyranny of mediocrity.

Mediocrity runs on lies, oppression and subjugation – it is terror, really. Mediocrity promotes more of the same mediocrity. It is terrified of originality, the courage to think independent ideas, to speak freely and frankly with anyone and argue with opponents in the hope of reaching a mutual higher ground where everyone can live together, regardless of one’s background, religion (or lack thereof), affiliation of the whatever kind, to buy books that suit, even further, one’s interests, to be critical of one’s government, should one be of a dissenting mind that believes that there is a higher purpose and a better life possible. To protest against injustices and cruelty. Even to dislike one’s job, if the working environment is abusive, cruel and/or mendacious. Or mind-numbingly beige.

Employers who apply Deep Searches to one’s candidates are like the moronic mediocrity from a time I wish I could forget. Mediocrity hires and promotes more of the same. It’s a cancer that festers and feeds on its host until it kills and dies with its victim.

From the article: “Peter Gillespie, an employment lawyer at Fisher & Phillips in Chicago, discourages his corporate clients from deep Web diving. Why? (…) “(B)ear in mind that employers were somehow able to make perfectly good hiring decisions before the Internet even existed.”" Amen to that Counsellor.

Will anyone pay attention to this simple piece of free legal advice? No! Fear and insecurity is the response by a great many to the insecurity of management whose number one motivation is CYA. If the source can be plumbed, it will be. Like attracts like: mediocrity attracts “safe”, if uninspiring, beige.

What is happening to this country? where a legal, if  risqué photograph on one’s social website can destroy one’s chance for employment. Or an adult toy meant to enhance one’s PRIVATE sex life, or a book bought online, or an opinion in response to a blog – can be seen as detrimental to the employer’s party line.

Are you really looking for employees as bland as you are, devoid of original thought and ideas about anything, afraid to have an opinion, fearful of pursuing the unheard of, untried, new, even controversial? How do you think we got the internet?  Take a cue from the Super Geek, Steve Jobs. Mr. Jobs is no shrinking violet with a temper to match (or so I’m told). To go up against this man, the raison d’être and principal engine for Apple’s massive success, requires serious nerve. Oh, yes! Show up and speak out without having given your idea serious thought, and the Man will put you thru the third degree for wasting his and his crew’s time, for being unprofessional and unprepared. That’s just it: good, innovative ideas come from people who have well thought-out opinions and who are ready to engage in a challenging serious constructive dialogue.

Once you self-censor yourself, you’re doomed to join the bland beige masses obediently shuffling in and out of your place of business in tedious silence, eventually to be put out to pasture by the prickly, hungry, ambitious and opinionated smart people in India, China and other countries where business is booming, who want the toys that fewer and fewer can afford in the USofA. Sic transit gloria mundi…

Contradictory vocal opinions, freedom to disagree, to be openly and constructively critical, all are essential in a thriving society. Being controlled by omnipresent cameras, microphones that record office telephone calls, being dismissed over a tweet about one’s disliked boss or refusal to commit perjury to save a boss’s posterior – these are all signs of organised dumbing down into mediocrity of a society once catapulted into unprecedented  prosperity by progressive ideas, for decades envied by the world at large.

Mediocrity is a truly ugly place. It breeds ugliness. It lives in eternal fear of being found out. It brainwashes its victims by insisting that ugly is the new beautiful.

I have paid a high price for fighting mediocrity. It looks like I’m not yet done. This blog will no help me get a job, but I refuse to back down and recite: “black is white, up is down, beige is beautiful…” I’ve witnessed an equally paranoid system, albeit with a different label, destroy my parents and a great many of their friends. It is in their most sacred memory that I will keep speaking out against stupidity, cruelty, wars, prejudice… and paranoid poverty of pedestrian banality.

Whatever-the-ism – they all suck. They are designed to clip wings, to force the majority to submit to the rule of a petty minority that rules by fear, because that minority understands and is motivated by fear itself.

FDR once said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Amen to that Mr. President.

Oh, and fear doesn’t work long-term. Have you heard about the recent events in the Middle East? Walk like the Egyptians, anyone?

Update: If you value your privacy beyond the price of $2.99-$4.99 assessed by data mining companies, consider giving your support to Jackie’s Speier’s Do Not Track Bill, recently introduced in Congress.

©2011

The Idiot

A curiously hard to put down book  about a society divided and trapped by its own social definitions. Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky’s  late-19th century Russian somnambulistic society looks very much like a precursor of early 21st century USA, slowly beaten down by a sinking economy that has lost its rosy specs.

The novel’s wide array of mundane personalities, calculating opportunists and manipulators, men and women looking to latch onto a figure that may become a vehicle for their own peculiar social ambitions, have their modern-day replications in our own world.

There is the desperately lonely world of the older members of society, their maddening mirage of a life spent on chasing illusory achievements that ultimately no one cares about. Can anyone wonder that so many sought then, as they do now, an escape in booze? Even suicide?

Daughters trapped in a loving home which, nevertheless, makes them into neurotic victims within their parents’ boundaries of obsessive control in fear of a cruel society that is so quick to demonize a girl or woman who would dare challenge the social mores. Society’s desire to control women may have been relaxed somewhat during the intervening century, but not for those with strong views and willing to upset the apple cart stuck in a rut. Most women in our society still have to trade their femininity for butch toughness to prove themselves as strong and decisive individuals. I do, however, have high hopes for the incoming generation who, hopefully, have paid attention to the generation of their mothers and will build on that capital.

And then there is the novel’s eponymous young, naïve hero, clueless to the world of adults into which he is thrown having had spent most of his life away from the maddening crowd of adult intrigue and hypocritical customs and conventions; who never learned the “art” of lies, connivance and underhanded game-playing with the lives of others.

Much of the world described in the compelling novel is mostly long gone. Girls and women need no longer fear their sexuality. A smart and enterprising person need no longer depend solely on powerful and privileged members of society to realise his/her own ambitions. There remains, however, to this day, the need to hide one’s true persona. Very likely even more so today than 130 years ago. Our omnipresent parallel world of the fishbowl of social websites and the gradually disappearing respect for one’s privacy is insidiously corrupting the population of its users into two-faced actors:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts (…)
(Will Shakespeare, As You Like It)

The play’s monologue refers to the seven stages in a person’s life and how they shape one’s personality. Living simultaneously in the two divergent worlds requires quick personality changes. At which point does it warp the performers for whom the act is a relentless, daily, 24-hour routine?

I wonder what Will would have said today of the Idiots who would rather see themselves just as they are, and not a reflection of society’s expectations?

I also wonder, had Fyodor Mikhailovich written his story in our time, would have he retired his reluctant hero into an asylum for gamers rather than the one for the mentally impaired? Into the solitude of a world crowded with invisible players living in their own fantasy worlds?

©2011

The ads that don’t add up.

What’s with the trend in advertising that presumes and/or shows adults to be terminal idiots?

That some US companies disavow their grown up compatriots the ability to discern between their armpit and that certain rear asspect, is not surprising. That a Japanese company, specifically Toyota, would embrace condescension as humour, is sad.

What am I on about, you ask?

Have you seen Toyota’s ads exhorting American adults, the lucky ones who still have jobs, to buy Toyota’s Highlander SUV? Those ads that feature an obnoxious 8-year old snobby kid, the malcontent and misanthrope in the making? The nasty piece of work full of contempt for his “idiot” Dad, and schoolmate whose parents do not drive a chi-chi car? Chi-chi, i.e., Toyota Motor’s latest in auto manufacturing, of course.

Nor do I understand American advertisers who have zero compassion or respect for their fellow wo/man. We also get it daily from our politicians, business “leaders” and their sycophants. Now Mr. Toyoda is piling on with an ad campaign that is supposed to be buy-buy “funny”. In reality more like bye-bye offensive.

Toyoda san, I’m confused. If adults are such cretins, where do you get the idea said adults will want to part with a lot of money in order to earn praise from their own kid? If that is too complicated an idea, let me ask you a simpler question. If the “Dad” of the “genius kid” (in the ad) is such a moron, why would you trust this “imbecile” with a potential weapon of death and destruction where the occasional left turn (right turn in Japan) is part of the obstacle course known as the daily commute or summer cross-country trip?

Better yet, why should I consider your product? Your ads seem to imply that I’m too much of an idiot to ask about, let along comprehend, a few tech details around which I might want to wrap the feeble neurons in my cerebellum? (sarcasm)

To be fair, it looks like most car manufacturers submit the advertising reins to flash-in-the-pan Madison Avenue, NY, and gee-whizz wanna-be action film directors gunning for that tent-pole, multi-million dollar job in Hollywood. You know, the one with … car crashes.

Has anyone bought his/her car on the strength of a 15-second ad with a car spinout? Indeed, a situation no one ever wants to experience while inside their own car? Those filmed spin-outs  performed by stunt drivers according to a carefully choreographed and well-rehearsed plan, then edited to perfection by yet another movie professional with the ability to cut and splice multiple takes into a va-va-va-voom second or two?

Instead, what I would rather see in car ads, is where Toyota, Mercedes or (here your favourite brand) have spent their R&D budget. Gizmos like video screens and GPS devices are a nice touch and expensive add-ons. The former are indispensable for people who don’t know how to talk to their kids, the latter for the itinerant sales force and/or the growing army of those who do not know how to read maps.

One idea might be to turn the ads into a mini mini-series touting, e.g., the dashboard features, the under the bonnet/hood goodies, the boot/trunk possibilities. For those who face ice-covered roads: how to, with proper handling, avert a nasty crash (a wee teaching moment, anyone?)

Show me how your product will handle hydroplaning on water-logged streets. Challenge the editor to make a slo-mo clip clearly showing the interaction between the driver and the motor car’s breaking mechanism. Your engineers have worked hard on that feature – so, flaunt it. Aren’t you proud of the smart guys who work so hard to keep us safe in a vehicle that is a pleasure to drive?

Show off the features that’ll pry the cash from a bank account. I’m sure you know that wives usually accompany the men to the showrooms. Women are the ones who hold the purse strings in their tightly clenched fists and are not impressed with cars racing on streets, spinning out in empty parking lots or roaring around a curve, on two wheels. That is for teenagers who conflate driving with a death wish. I rather doubt any carmaker will accept a wide-eyed “Wow” as payment for its product; not even as first installment.

Oh, and for those who like entertaining ads: consider the subtle yet amusing absurdities known and loved by the entire world, i.e., British humour that laughs with you as it giggles at itself.  Just ask Alexandr Orlov. Seemples, no?

©2011