I do occasionally consider a change of career. Lately, I've been spending some time thinking about becoming a telephone psychic, since I can read a tarot deck, and since I learned that some of them charge $600 per hour. No, that's not a miss-print. There are people in the world who make $10 PER MINUTE to shuffle cards and talk on the telephone. I'm thinking maybe that could be me. Could even work out pretty well: I tend to come across pretty well on the phone, when people can't see me rolling my eyes, nor see the mocking expression on my face. This seems important, since those would be common occurrences when addressing people who accept and rely on advice from a deck of cards in the making of decisions. I think that career could be a real possibility.
Of course, I've always been candid about my intended fall-back career: writing B-movie scripts and trashy romance novels. This is the excuse that I offer for having recently picked up and read CB's copies of 'Twilight,' and the following works. Of course, I use 'works' in the loosest possible sense of the term.
My overwhelming response is to wonder at the success of that series of books. I have considered that the average high schooler can barely read, and that their emotional state renders most of them clinical sociopaths from the ages of 14 to 22 (assuming they outgrow it at all), but still. Endless drivel about how Bella simply looks at Edward, and has to take a second or two before she remembers how to breath? How she can't imagine life without him? Endless prattling about how gorgeous he is and how she really can't believe that he's into her? How of course she forgives him for everything he does, immediately, mostly because she doesn't think she deserves him at all? Really? REALLY? This is the sort of writing that earns the author millions?
I'm not sure why this should surprise me, but it kinda does. Maybe I'm a bit of a snob about my literary tastes( or maybe not), but these books are... awful, actually. I sincerely hope that Steph Meyer is one of those authors who thinks its hilarious that her readers are as devoted as they are.
I suspect that part of the issue is my admitted problems dealing with the teens-to-early-20s demographic as a whole. Hell, even as I was reading the books, it seemed a bit creepy to me that Edward, over 100 years old, was in love with a 17 year old girl. Okay, it was more than just a bit creepy, even (or perhaps, especially) when you consider that the author is Mormon and presumably open-minded about unions spanning generation gaps. I was a bachelor well into my 30s, and - living in Las Vegas - had pretty broad dating opportunities. It really didn't take long at all for me to adopt the firm guideline of a maximum allowable age gap of 6 years or so. Really, what were we going to talk about if I had finished law school before she finished high school?
Along those lines, what exactly is it that Edward and Bella connect over? Really, I'm curious. Reading both the language and between the lines, it seems he puts up with all of the drivel and bullshit that makes up her life as a 17-year old high school girl because she smells good. She puts up with all of his condescension, control-freak tendencies, and general douche-baggery (of which there is plenty), mostly because he's gorgeous. While I'm pretty sure that these sorts of arrangements underlie most if not all high-school relationships, I'm not sure that it's healthy for girls to be willing to commit themselves to such deals for all eternity.
So while all this strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that teenage readers would eat up with a spoon, it still depresses me that this is the sort of thing topping best-seller lists. And all in all, it really shouldn't surprise me that the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob debate really gained as much traction as it did. That's gotta be right up there with Survivor, American Idol, and Seinfeld in terms of contrived drama, with the added benefit of being expressed in small words, nearly all of which are known and/or can be sounded out by the target audience.
While real literary analysis is probably not warranted, I'm not going to be able to help myself from wading into the themes. Naturally, there is the almost-universal zero-to-hero angle you find everywhere from the Chronicles of Narnia to Harry Potter, but - interestingly - I think that's one of the more believable angles of the Twilight books. As someone who moved from a big city to a small town, I have no problem believing that a 5.5 to 6 in a big metropolitan pond suddenly rates an 8.5 to 9 in a small pond.
The close corollary 'I-can't-believe-something-this-good-is-happening-to-me' theme is there, in spades, and seems to be the driving force between the Bella/Edward thing as a whole. Seriously, if you took out the drama and dialogue (again, using terms loosely here) about how they REALLY DO love each other, and remove all exchanges where one is assuring they other they they really do want to be together, what all is left?
Answer: pretty much all that's left is another blatantly stereotypical meme: the internal and external conflicts over the wonderful-backup-boyfriend-she-doesn't-love. Oh, Jacob is so wonderful and always there and always saying the right thing and clearly, horrendously in love with Bella. As he is clearly the 'nice' one among her dateable prospects, he gets exploited mercilessly while she languishes over the gorgeous guy she loves. She doesn't WANT Jacob, she just NEEDS him for the actual emotional parts of a relationship, and to fill her pay-attention-to-me quota while Edward is off being dark and moody. This, of course, is all part of the love held for these books by young readers: pretty much every girl (or indeed, every PERSON) on earth will at some point have a hypothetically dateable prospect who loves them, who they don't love, but from whom they love attention. (Admit it, you've put some quality people in the 'friend zone' while you chased someone just like them, but not them. Doing so does not make you a bad person, it just makes you human.) So of course readers eat it up and keep buying books while Jake loves Bella and Bella loves the attention. And since he says he only wants her company, he's getting a positive quotient out of it, notwithstanding overt emotional leeching.
This, obviously, comports nicely with the teenage female world-view. While I haven't actually been able to finish the series quite yet (I can only take fairly small doses at a time before I start getting dry-heaves) I have no doubt whatsoever about how the Edward vs. Jacob thing is going to end. Spoiler alert: Edward is going to get the girl. But I also have no doubt that - part and parcel to final resolution - Jacob will either find his own true love, or die a monumentally heroic death; those are the only resolutions that a teenage female reader would accept. After all, Jacob has been a dutiful and attentive lap-wolf, and the only unforgivable transgression he ever made - other than being a genuinely nice guy - was that he's not as dreamy as Edward. Sadly, I think a heroic death is more likely, since Jacob finding his own true love would mean him finding someone he likes more than he likes Bella. That concept would be a tricky sell to the audience in a first-person narrative based primarily on the mood swings of the narrator. How to make Bella happy about not just losing the relationship that's actually based on personal interaction, but losing that relationship TO ANOTHER GIRL? Thus, I fear that while Jacob will go out well, he is not long for the world.
Reading these books has provided me with some interesting insights in the cravings of the book-buying public, which I confess I lose sight of occasionally. Clearly, any effort I might make to become any form of main-stream writer is going to require overcoming internal psychological barriers about what is and is not publishable quality, and about what I will and will not be willing to have my name attached to. If nothing else, these factors pretty much guarantee that I will be publishing under a pseudonym.
Responses?
Monday, October 24, 2011
Friday, October 21, 2011
Jobs Loss, and the iHipster
Alas, technology mogul Steve Jobs has shuffled off the mortal coil. Besides (Steve) Jobs, the last decade has also seen the deaths of (Bob) Hope and (Johnny) Cash. With the loss of Hope, Cash, and Jobs, we seem to be descending ever faster into at least the first level of hell with the loss of things everyone loves. Given the rate of loss of the good things, I'm seriously worried that next up will be (Kevin) Bacon.
In any rate, the loss of (Steve) Jobs has of course signaled a plunge in Apple stock, notwithstanding that Jobs left the company's CEO seat in August. But he was still - technically - chairman of the board of the directors. Besides, Apple's stock, and its reputation as a whole, has historically been based on excellent marketing and hipster mystique, so was destined to drop when it's guru did. What I really wonder, like lots of other people, is where the company is going to go from here.
The initial technology developed by Apple (mostly by the Other Steve) was good, but not spectacular. Mostly, it was good because it could do about everything a PC could do, but could be produced out of the Other Steve's garage. Funny that developments in the meantime resulted in the tables being turned: over the years - and notwithstanding that the technology has been proprietary to Apple, while the PC has dozens of manufacturers - the Mac has become substantially more powerful a platform than can be provided by any popular software for the PC, but with the production cost far outstripping the PC, and the added problem that nobody outside Apple is able to provide decent tech support. Other than the computer graphics industry (which genuinely benefits from the increased processing power of Macs over PCs), pretty much everyone who uses a Mac is paying a huge markup for computing power far beyond their requirements. Really, other than playing computer games (which are processing-power intensive, because of the graphic interfaces) the average computer user needs a mp3 player, a word processor, email and internet applications, and possibly basic accounting software. Except for music and online functions, decent versions of all of those programs date back to the Commodore 64. None of those applications, including the music and online functions, really require gigacycles per second of processing power. Amazingly, the public managed to figure this out, and for lots of years (especially after the Windows OS made PCs about as easy to use as Macs), most people bought cheap PCs that could do everything they needed done, rather than expensive Apple/Mac computers that had capabilities they didn't really need.
But Apple and Mac computers re-entered popularity - not through financial or technological advance, but rather through hype and pop culture - when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997. After helping found the company in the 70s, Jobs left Apple in 1985 to become the controlling shareholding of Lucasfilm's computer-animation spin-off. (Pixar. You may have heard of it. I think I might have mentioned the historic connection between Apple/Mac and the computer animation industry as well.) Getting him back as CEO resulted in substantial changes in Apple's operations, which we still see today. First and foremost, Jobs kicked off some truly spectacular ad campaigns, with a very specific target demographic. Way back when Apple was first successful, one of Jobs' programs was to get kids using computers: Apple donated thousands of Apple IIe desktops to public schools. I grew up in Sunnyvale, California (Google it). My elementary school, my junior high school, and my high school (which is the same high school that the Other Steve graduated from) had an Apple computer in every classroom which was almost never used, as well as a dedicated computer lab, where there were 20-30 more machines. This dates back to 1981, when ANY computer was really expensive, so this was not just a token outlay by Apple. But it turns out that one megacycle and 64 kilobytes of RAM was more than enough to get kids turned on by (or at least interested in) computers. Getting kids involved was explicitly part of Jobs' grand plan, based loosely on the Wayne Gretzky-ism of "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." Jobs is on-record as a huge fan of this quote.
So guess who Steve targeted his marketing towards when he re-took the helm at Apple? While Steve was busy at Pixar from 86 to 97, lots of kids who tinkered with Apple computers in grade school/junior high/high school grew up, got degrees, and started earning disposable income. People who who can't remember a world without Apple computers, finally at an age where they're climbing ladders, and making headway in wresting control of The Establishment away from the older generation(s). Chords were struck by commercials with young, hip, Justin Long - sporting zip-up hoodies and facial scruff with roots in Pearl Jam's 'TEN' tour - poking fun at a stodgy Bill Gates look-alike with pure dialog before a plain white background. Other ads were released on the exact opposite tack: purely technical (and spiffy) blue-screen transition work, set to catchy tunes from indie rockers, without even a voice-over. All of it was - in typical Steve Jobs fashion - innovative, fresh, and beautiful in subtly nuanced simplicity.
People ate it up, and we saw the culmination of Steve Jobs' decades-old efforts. Under the light of the Jobs 2.0 marketing campaign, and out of soil seeded with lavish outlay of the Apple IIe 20 years ago, we saw the birth of Steve Jobs' greatest and least appreciated creation: the iHipster. Apple under Steve Jobs pulled off the Oceans Eleven heist of the business world: it created a product, and then created the market for its own product. Sure, Apple made neat stuff, but lots of companies do that. That's not the remarkable part. The remarkable part was convincing the public that the iHipster was something they wanted to be, and that paying the premium for Apple stuff was TOTALLY worthwhile.
You know the iHipster. Odds are that you might be one. The young, savvy, technology user. The 20-40 year-old upper crust (and/or any pretenders thereto) of the Fight Club generation. Traveling light, fast, and green, thinking outside the box, and trying to break free of stagnation and stereotype. Nothing except Apple products will do for the iHipster. The iHipster thinks nothing of paying the markup for Steve's computers, phones, and other electronic toys. It's Apple. This is THE company of the generation. Started in a garage by a couple guys. Built from nothing except innovation. Non-establishment at its core. Dude, haven't you seen the commercials?
Brilliant.
Alas, alack, the King is dead. While he has already been cannonized in the computer world, Apple is now back were it was in 1985: with a good product and excellent goodwill, but without Jobs. I'm curious to see where things go from here, since the reality is that the iHipster image really has nothing to do with Apple's actual operations, or with any other reality. Indeed, Apple is every bit the corporate monster that the iHipster purports to rail against. Example: have you ever actually read the iTunes user agreement? All 68 pages of it? Suffice to say that if you have ANY worries about Big Brother, Dystopia, or the New World Order, you should be a hell of a lot more concerned about Apple than about the United Nations.
While Apple hesitates not at all to recruit talent with the innovation of its founders, and loves to point out that the company made millionaires out of lots of people, that's fluff. The truth is that Apple treats its employees like absolute dog shit. People are hired, assigned absolutely outrageous quotas, worked until they burn out, then fired based on their failures to meet the original outrageous quota. Oh, and any ideas that employees come up with while working at Apple (even those developed in the employee's own time, say, for example, while tinkering in the garage with their high school buddies) are contractually the property of Apple. Didn't you read that fine print? Their standard employee agreement is shorter than the iTunes contract. A bit.
Apple is currently green(ish), but only after it (and Jobs) was repeatedly and thoroughly lambasted by people who are legitimately green. While I don't doubt that Jobs owned a Prius, that's primarily for press-release purposes. (His usual ride was purportedly a $130,000 Mercedes.) Yes, he was paid ONE DOLLAR per year by Apple. But he also owned 5.4 million shares of Apple (currently trading at $405.80 per share) and another 138 million shares of Disney (currently: $35.39) from their takeover of Pixar, so bragging about earning just a dollar was really just a flaunting of how little he really needed payment at all. Without going into details, suffice to say that Jobs spent at least his share of time acting like a petty asshole (google 'Lisa Brennan-Jobs'), and really only got around to being charitable when he had so much money that he literally couldn't spend it all.
So, given that Apple's business current sales model is based largely on perception and/or illusion, and given that, while there are plenty of businessmen capable of running Apple, none of them look nearly as natural in a black turtleneck, 501s, and running shoes, I wonder what the future holds for Apple. Because while they are currently amazingly successful by any measure, the guy who made it all run is gone. Absent their guru - and setting aside the questionable points of the iReligion - is there someone ready and able to step up and convince the iHipsters that they need to keep paying the Apple markup?
In any rate, the loss of (Steve) Jobs has of course signaled a plunge in Apple stock, notwithstanding that Jobs left the company's CEO seat in August. But he was still - technically - chairman of the board of the directors. Besides, Apple's stock, and its reputation as a whole, has historically been based on excellent marketing and hipster mystique, so was destined to drop when it's guru did. What I really wonder, like lots of other people, is where the company is going to go from here.
The initial technology developed by Apple (mostly by the Other Steve) was good, but not spectacular. Mostly, it was good because it could do about everything a PC could do, but could be produced out of the Other Steve's garage. Funny that developments in the meantime resulted in the tables being turned: over the years - and notwithstanding that the technology has been proprietary to Apple, while the PC has dozens of manufacturers - the Mac has become substantially more powerful a platform than can be provided by any popular software for the PC, but with the production cost far outstripping the PC, and the added problem that nobody outside Apple is able to provide decent tech support. Other than the computer graphics industry (which genuinely benefits from the increased processing power of Macs over PCs), pretty much everyone who uses a Mac is paying a huge markup for computing power far beyond their requirements. Really, other than playing computer games (which are processing-power intensive, because of the graphic interfaces) the average computer user needs a mp3 player, a word processor, email and internet applications, and possibly basic accounting software. Except for music and online functions, decent versions of all of those programs date back to the Commodore 64. None of those applications, including the music and online functions, really require gigacycles per second of processing power. Amazingly, the public managed to figure this out, and for lots of years (especially after the Windows OS made PCs about as easy to use as Macs), most people bought cheap PCs that could do everything they needed done, rather than expensive Apple/Mac computers that had capabilities they didn't really need.
But Apple and Mac computers re-entered popularity - not through financial or technological advance, but rather through hype and pop culture - when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997. After helping found the company in the 70s, Jobs left Apple in 1985 to become the controlling shareholding of Lucasfilm's computer-animation spin-off. (Pixar. You may have heard of it. I think I might have mentioned the historic connection between Apple/Mac and the computer animation industry as well.) Getting him back as CEO resulted in substantial changes in Apple's operations, which we still see today. First and foremost, Jobs kicked off some truly spectacular ad campaigns, with a very specific target demographic. Way back when Apple was first successful, one of Jobs' programs was to get kids using computers: Apple donated thousands of Apple IIe desktops to public schools. I grew up in Sunnyvale, California (Google it). My elementary school, my junior high school, and my high school (which is the same high school that the Other Steve graduated from) had an Apple computer in every classroom which was almost never used, as well as a dedicated computer lab, where there were 20-30 more machines. This dates back to 1981, when ANY computer was really expensive, so this was not just a token outlay by Apple. But it turns out that one megacycle and 64 kilobytes of RAM was more than enough to get kids turned on by (or at least interested in) computers. Getting kids involved was explicitly part of Jobs' grand plan, based loosely on the Wayne Gretzky-ism of "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." Jobs is on-record as a huge fan of this quote.
So guess who Steve targeted his marketing towards when he re-took the helm at Apple? While Steve was busy at Pixar from 86 to 97, lots of kids who tinkered with Apple computers in grade school/junior high/high school grew up, got degrees, and started earning disposable income. People who who can't remember a world without Apple computers, finally at an age where they're climbing ladders, and making headway in wresting control of The Establishment away from the older generation(s). Chords were struck by commercials with young, hip, Justin Long - sporting zip-up hoodies and facial scruff with roots in Pearl Jam's 'TEN' tour - poking fun at a stodgy Bill Gates look-alike with pure dialog before a plain white background. Other ads were released on the exact opposite tack: purely technical (and spiffy) blue-screen transition work, set to catchy tunes from indie rockers, without even a voice-over. All of it was - in typical Steve Jobs fashion - innovative, fresh, and beautiful in subtly nuanced simplicity.
People ate it up, and we saw the culmination of Steve Jobs' decades-old efforts. Under the light of the Jobs 2.0 marketing campaign, and out of soil seeded with lavish outlay of the Apple IIe 20 years ago, we saw the birth of Steve Jobs' greatest and least appreciated creation: the iHipster. Apple under Steve Jobs pulled off the Oceans Eleven heist of the business world: it created a product, and then created the market for its own product. Sure, Apple made neat stuff, but lots of companies do that. That's not the remarkable part. The remarkable part was convincing the public that the iHipster was something they wanted to be, and that paying the premium for Apple stuff was TOTALLY worthwhile.
You know the iHipster. Odds are that you might be one. The young, savvy, technology user. The 20-40 year-old upper crust (and/or any pretenders thereto) of the Fight Club generation. Traveling light, fast, and green, thinking outside the box, and trying to break free of stagnation and stereotype. Nothing except Apple products will do for the iHipster. The iHipster thinks nothing of paying the markup for Steve's computers, phones, and other electronic toys. It's Apple. This is THE company of the generation. Started in a garage by a couple guys. Built from nothing except innovation. Non-establishment at its core. Dude, haven't you seen the commercials?
Brilliant.
Alas, alack, the King is dead. While he has already been cannonized in the computer world, Apple is now back were it was in 1985: with a good product and excellent goodwill, but without Jobs. I'm curious to see where things go from here, since the reality is that the iHipster image really has nothing to do with Apple's actual operations, or with any other reality. Indeed, Apple is every bit the corporate monster that the iHipster purports to rail against. Example: have you ever actually read the iTunes user agreement? All 68 pages of it? Suffice to say that if you have ANY worries about Big Brother, Dystopia, or the New World Order, you should be a hell of a lot more concerned about Apple than about the United Nations.
While Apple hesitates not at all to recruit talent with the innovation of its founders, and loves to point out that the company made millionaires out of lots of people, that's fluff. The truth is that Apple treats its employees like absolute dog shit. People are hired, assigned absolutely outrageous quotas, worked until they burn out, then fired based on their failures to meet the original outrageous quota. Oh, and any ideas that employees come up with while working at Apple (even those developed in the employee's own time, say, for example, while tinkering in the garage with their high school buddies) are contractually the property of Apple. Didn't you read that fine print? Their standard employee agreement is shorter than the iTunes contract. A bit.
Apple is currently green(ish), but only after it (and Jobs) was repeatedly and thoroughly lambasted by people who are legitimately green. While I don't doubt that Jobs owned a Prius, that's primarily for press-release purposes. (His usual ride was purportedly a $130,000 Mercedes.) Yes, he was paid ONE DOLLAR per year by Apple. But he also owned 5.4 million shares of Apple (currently trading at $405.80 per share) and another 138 million shares of Disney (currently: $35.39) from their takeover of Pixar, so bragging about earning just a dollar was really just a flaunting of how little he really needed payment at all. Without going into details, suffice to say that Jobs spent at least his share of time acting like a petty asshole (google 'Lisa Brennan-Jobs'), and really only got around to being charitable when he had so much money that he literally couldn't spend it all.
So, given that Apple's business current sales model is based largely on perception and/or illusion, and given that, while there are plenty of businessmen capable of running Apple, none of them look nearly as natural in a black turtleneck, 501s, and running shoes, I wonder what the future holds for Apple. Because while they are currently amazingly successful by any measure, the guy who made it all run is gone. Absent their guru - and setting aside the questionable points of the iReligion - is there someone ready and able to step up and convince the iHipsters that they need to keep paying the Apple markup?
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