Uma novela sobre Mongo (parte VII)

 Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V e parte VI.

"The point is, we’re slowly outsourcing left-brain logic to the CPU (central processing unit), not because knowing stuff isn’t important, but because putting things together in creative ways is more rewarding emotionally and increasingly more rewarding economically. Technology is creating the asset of human connection. The industrial age removed the necessity of lifting heavy objects; the technology age is removing our need to calculate stuff. It’s time we all embraced the human side of the revolution and stopped worrying about which skills may evaporate.
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The major success factor for the pre-web modern marketing era was mass: mass manufacturing, mass consumption, mass machines, mass media, mass merchants. When you bundle all of these together in an organised fashion you end up with a mass pop culture. The system itself required pop-culture hits to be self-sustaining. The system needed and supported a macro pop culture. It didn’t support niche. What this means is that we had a set of tastemakers who decided what we liked: the television program managers, the magazine editors, the news curators, the retail buyers and the marketing managers. They would decide which alternatives we’d be given to choose from. They decided this by virtue of the fact that we had no way of knowing what else was available. If it wasn’t in our personal geography, we wouldn’t know about it. All the things we did know about were hokey and local, or the same thing our entire nation knew about because the tastemakers decided to make it, advertise it and pay the price to put it on the retailers’ shelves. Only the tastemakers could afford the reach that goes with mass. We got to choose one of the options available on the shelf. We got to choose one of the few shows on free-to-air television. The system didn’t support niche like it does now. The cultural phenomena that resulted from the system were powerful indeed.
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Mass marketing was a selfish modality of marketing designed by and for the owners of capital, and not only financial capital, but mind capital. The average suburban dweller became everyone and no one. We had all loved and believed in average products with the edges rounded off."