Love thy product.

As he gets older he finds himself growing more and more crabby about language, about slack usage, falling standards. Falling in love, for instance. "We fell in love with the house," friends of his say. How can you fall in love with a house when the house cannot love you back, he wants to reply? Once you start falling in love with objects, what will be left of real love, love as it used to be? But no one seems to care. People fall in love with tapestries, with old cars.

He would like to dismiss it, this neolo-gism, this novelty, but he cannot. What if something is being revealed to him, some shift in the way people feel? What if the soul, which he had thought was made of timeless substance, is not timeless after all, but is in the process of growing lighter, less serious, accommodating itself to the times? What if falling in love with objects is no oddity any longer, for the soul- child's play, in fact? What if people around him do indeed feel, with the aid of their new, updated souls, in respect of real estate, the ache that he associates with falling in love? What, furthermore, if his own crabbiness expresses not what he tells himself it does- an old-fashioned fastidiousness about language- but on the contrary (he looks the ¡dea squarely in the face) envy, the envy of a man grown too old, too rigid, to ever fall in love again?

Brand Africa.

I think I have the same feeling toward the word “brand” as I do toward the word “Africa.” “Africa” is an incredibly problematic word for me. It’s a word used with great frequency to describe an intricately complex area made up of people, countries, and cultures that have no more in common than we do with Uzbekistan.

But because it’s a convenient word, and a well-known word, and a geographically defined continent, we use that word to sum up and generalize everyone who lives within the continent. In a way, it really is unfair. But we’ve inherited that framework, and I think we’d be better off if we banned the word entirely.

Getting back to “brand,” the word has similar implications. Yes, it’s of much smaller consequence—it’s a trivial example of the same problem, but it is a problem. The word gets thrown around so recklessly that I wonder whether we wouldn’t be better off setting it aside. Instead, if we could use more specific words that zero in on what we’re really interested in discussing, it would help the conversation.

Millman, D. (2013) Brand thinking and other noble pursuits. New York: Allworth Press.

The neverending story of the blockchain miner

Bastian saw a large group of people, men and women, young and old, all in the strangest clothes. They didn’t speak, each one was alone with himself. On the ground lay a large number of cubes, and there were letters on all six sides of the cubes. The people kept jumbling the cubes and then staring at them.

‘What are they doing?’ Bastian whispered. ‘What sort of game is that?’

‘It’s called the jumble game,’ answered Argax. He motioned to the players and cried out: ‘Good work, children! Keep at it! Don’t give up!’

Then, turning back to Bastian he whispered in his ear: ‘They can’t talk anymore. They’ve lost the power of speech. So I thought up this game for them. As you see, it keeps them busy. It’s very simple. If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from word sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories. Now take a look. What do you see there?’

Bastian read:

HGIKLOPFMWEYVXQ
YXCVBNMASDFGHJKLOA
QWERTZUIOPU
ASDFGHJKLOA
MNBVXYLKJHGFDSA
UPOIUZTREWQAS
QSERTZUIOPUASDAF
ASDFGHJKLOAYXC
UPOIUZTREWQ
AOLKJHGFDSAMNBV
GKHDSRZIP
QETUOUSFHKO
YCBMWRZIP
ARCGUNIKYO
QWERTZIOPLUASD
MNBVCXYASD
LKJUONGREFGHI

‘Yes, of course,’ said Argax with a giggle, ‘it usually makes no more sense than that. But if you keep at it for a long time, words turn up now and then. Not very brilliant words, but still words. “Spinachcramp,” for instance, or “sugarbrush,” or “nosepolish.” And if you play for a hundred years, or a thousand or a hundred thousand, the law of chances tells us that a poem will probably come out. And if you play it forever, every possible poem and every possible story will have to come out, in fact every story about a story, and even this story about the two of us chatting here. It’s only logical, don’t you think?’

‘It’s horrible,’ said Bastian.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Argax. ‘It depends on your point of view. It keeps these people, in a manner of speaking, busy. And anyway, what else can we do with them in Fantastica?’