The world is just getting a mite too standardized and bland for me. If you write a blog and want to get firmly
ensconced in Google’s search results, you write the first 100 blogs or so for
Google and they’re packed with the same keywords or phrases. You get traffic
quite quickly, which is terribly exciting at first, but after a while the fizz
kind of flattens. Because all that lovely traffic is reading blogs you’re not
proud of.
Plus, there’s nothing worse than getting to the point where you know that
if you stick a phrase you’ve used a gazillion times before into a sentence
that doesn’t really need it one more time
you’ll throw your laptop at the nearest breakable thing, probably the TV. For
one, how will you make it through the evening?
Here’s the thing about Google. It has a huge fan base, on whom the
original ethos of the company has become so branded that they’re hard-wired
into believing that anything to do with Google is creative. The hard-wiring
makes it impossible to see that what Google is doing with its creativity is
creating a global environment and culture which functions partly by creativity
being totally stifled by standardization. So Google gets to stay creative but
we don’t.
Hmm. They can be creative about how they put themselves in front of us but
we can’t be very creative about how we put our individuality in front of the
world. If Google is so smart why can’t they come up with algorithms that
recognize originality and give it precedence over crap? I’m sure the whole
world would give them a standing ovation for that.
A different kind of algorithm must be possible. But they’re making their
money the way things are. The more standardized we are the less we think for
ourselves, and the easier it is for them to exert their power and trample over our
rights to privacy and competition etc. I'm disappointed. Google could do
so much with its power. They could change the world. How many organizations
have that capacity?
This makes me think of Pick n Pay in South Africa, started by an
entrepreneur Raymond Ackerman. Everybody loves Raymond. I don’t, though, and
not only because on national television when asked what he does for relaxation
he said he plays golf to get away from his wife – who was sitting right next to
him. His face went into a kind of psycho-twist when he said it. She went stone
cold. Humiliated.
Apart from that, I don’t like how Ackerman got so powerful. Before he
came up with his brilliant idea to create one-stop shopping, there were
probably hundreds of thousands of Mom and Pop businesses selling the individual
goods. Competition was alive, and small people could earn a living, in a
variety of ways. Nothing standard about that.
Then along came Ackerman with, admittedly, a creative brain and a lot of
drive – admirable qualities. But of course pretty soon he could buy goods at a
discount because he bought in bulk. And if you were a small business, his
stores might stock your product, but they’d squeeze the price, and they
wouldn’t pay you for three months.
So the profit Pick n Pay made went into their lovely bank account, and
they used it to expand and get bulk goods even cheaper. As a small
producer you were left without a cash flow and unable to compete anyway. What
happened to all those people? Who knows. Now South Africa is stuffed with
ugly, standardized stores often staffed by rude, unhappy people and the quality
at least of the food and vegetables is lousy.
The marketing is creative though.
