As I type these characters on my screen, the Super Bowl broadcast is beginning. I don’t like TV, and I’m in another room. But equally important is, while I might be willing to play a little football, I’m not willing to watch it if there’s enough money involved for the players to wear uniforms.
What I can’t stand is the hype.
I’m an iconoclast by nature. I can’t stand the hype in any other part of life, either. Grandly staged satire is great, but too many people take this stuff seriously. It gets old reading Linux distro reviews loaded with all the same marketing bilge terminology confronting me in other parts of life. Don’t try to tell me what I want; tell me what you’ve got. I don’t care about your goals and thoughtful philosophies, but how well it works for me. Tell me about some nagging old driver issue you finally got fixed, or how you’ve made the same old reliable interface a good bit quicker with fewer bugs so it doesn’t pack my error logs with meaningless complaints. Stop making it so damnably hard to make bug reports and I’ll gladly test your stuff and contribute to the process. My life is not wrapped around the OS on my computer, nor the next car I dream of buying, and scantily clad cheerleaders don’t help me decide.
Want to sell me something? Tell me how it makes life better for people. More ornate is not a human value. More convenient but taking up precious counter space is not a human value. Tastier but loaded with FDA approved toxins is not a human value. Highly certified and utterly useless is not a human value. Solving imaginary problems not felt by any real person is not a human value. Adaptable to any of the billions of unique individuals in this world is a human value, while seeking to force them to fit a mold serving your commercial bottom line is evil.
Telling me you are going to relieve my boredom is boring itself. Don’t offer me the next new thing which will make me feel like an insider in a world where everyone is an outsider because the entire cultural orientation is isolation from our real selves. Don’t tell me it will make pain go away; tell me how it will make the world more tolerable in spite of the pain which never really leaves. Tell me how you are going to help me discover the source of my pain, then let me decide for myself how to balance the priorities you don’t live with, but which I do.
Hype is the chains by which we imprison ourselves more tightly to emptiness. Hype makes a handful wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else. The true revolution will not be televised and will remain utterly unmarketable. But there will always be a few looking for it at any given time. Tell me how you plan to offer that freedom freely.
