First Against the Wall When the Revolution Came
How Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy predicted the ‘mindless jerks’ who paved the way for American fascism
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English writer Douglas Adams summed up the decline of Western civilization in this passage in his 1979 book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, based on his hit BBC series from the year before:
The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With.” The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.
Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
Douglas Adams clearly exhibits a jaundiced view of marketing, and given the depth of his insight, it’s hard to disagree.
Marketing is characterized by unverifiable and functionally vacuous statements.
Quality is job one!
For seven decades, America has been bathed in pithy slogans, masquerading as meaning, but ultimately, debasing truth.
The slogans fall just short of downright lies, and we’ve been swallowing them so long, we’ve grown quite accustomed to it.
Marketing doublespeak paved the way for the mass consumption of pernicious propaganda.
When marketing merged with conspiracy — as it has done significantly in the last decade — it poisoned the American mind, and because America is so wildly influential, so went the world.
The point is, we became easy marks for anyone who could encode their message in the language of marketing.
Sadly, the political technologists from Russia delivered their toxic cargo on rails we’d built ourselves.
Buried in a passage in Adam’s book is this extraordinary quote:
“They discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man, who claimed repeatedly nothing was true, but later was discovered to be lying.”
Turns out, he was guiding the galaxy.
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