John Zeitler

I’m gonna try an experiment with this blog over the next thirty days (since it’s not like I have much else to do in the meantime). I got to thinking about the way I’ve spent the last week: at work I’ve been focused on my tasks, getting myself ready for this coming month or so. But outside of work I’ve been a neurotic, frazzled mess because I’ve been bombarded with advertising. Not advertising from a marketing group, or advertising from a company, but advertising from people who I’m fairly certain aren’t being paid to advertise. It’s mostly been negative advertising, too: trashing certain products, implicitly praising others (or sometimes not so explicitly). Sadly, I’m just as guilty, which frustrates me to no end.

Fortunately, I have the chance to do something about it. So, for the next thirty days, I’m not going to write about any commercial products on this blog. None. If it’s a proper noun that’s not a person’s name (and, in the case of names, the person isn’t a celebrity or brand in their own right), I ain’t typing it here. It might not make a difference in the grand scheme of things– I almost certainly know it won’t– but it’s mostly just a way for me to gauge how easy or difficult it would be to “genericize” my life.

The thing is, I’ve complained at length about how we’re not supposed to be defined by what we own. If we allow our possessions to speak about us on our behalf, we quickly become slaves to them, because not everyone has the same perception of that object’s brand, make, or model. By tying what we have to who we are so closely, we objectify ourselves more than any sleazy magazine could possibly do– we become passive objects, things, instead of individuals acting on the world, people.

I’ll still post. It’s just that I’m going to be telling you more about what I’m doing, rather than what I’m doing it with. The Twitter feed is going to go generic too– heck, I can’t even say “Twitter” come tomorrow! The only exceptions to the rule are going to be e-mail (and even then only work-related e-mails) and technical forum posts (because it’s damnably hard to get help with a program when you can’t say the name of the program). Since we’ve got two days left in January, we’ll say that the product placement floodgates re-open on the first of March. Oh, and yeah, it’s not like I’m going to stop playing games or watching TV or anything like that– any Game Clear notices are going to be post-dated to the 1st as well.

And, on the off chance that you’re a corporation, celebrity, or other interest who might think this is going to be harmful to you somehow, first, please stop doing drugs. Second, more seriously, there is a way out of this. I will “unlock”, with full disclosure on this blog, the proper nouns and trademarks related to a company if and only if that company pays me $5000, cash, up front. That doesn’t mean I’ll post about it every day– just that, if I wanted to, I could. Third, there’s a catch: each time a company buys me out like that, the price goes up by a thousand dollars for the next one. (I don’t expect to make a single red cent on this, mind. Just tossing it out there in the interests of full honesty; every man has his price, after all.) Companies considering this, ask yourself: is word-of-mouth really that important to you? I could easily turn around and say that your company is a bunch of shallow, money-obsessed drones. That’s basically what years of negative advertising has created with word-of-mouth: six billion people who will more readily drag your trademarks through the mud than recommend you to anyone else.

Believe it or not, folks, tonight’s a busy night. So I’ll just leave you all with that little thought. Have a generic night, and tomorrow have a generic day.