Connectivity, Trust and Authenticity

A few posts ago I was (somehow poetically) pointing my analytical finger at an apparently inadequate behavior: talking about consumers in the midst of the New Era. The capital letters celebrate the enlivening time when the silently consuming robots broke free and claimed their humanity. Oh, what a moment (although I haven’t quite perceived the exact breakeven point -- a bit like the Middle Ages commencing on a sunny day in 476 A.D. -- the dramatic shifts in preaches and praised practices retrospectively assure me I witnessed one). Some even called it a Revolution, and what happened certainly doesn’t fall short of such a bold designation. Millions took their iron components to happy connective clouds where, liberated from gravity, assembled them into free, responsive and authentic selves, time and again. Under the soft guiding touch of recently reborn peers, selves opened up to one another, started sharing and – in short, and probably quite unexpectedly – everything apparently snowballed into a power takeover. No other real or would-be era seems to have had such liberating effects on the sons and daughters of the Earth, not even a bait recently thrown by servants of a fake New Age promising painless deification to just about everyone (but who wants to be God anymore: the dude has been reportedly found dead somewhere in Germany). I’m sort of divagating here, drifting on the wings of such lofty adjustments.

Coming back to my ache. (...) It just seems to me that brands, at first cautiously blending into the unattentive crowd (then quickly throwing away any concern), joined the exodus and arrived, along with everybody else, in the same new place where things now happen. Of course, with newly forged souls, proven with clothes bearing the newly worshiped signs of openness, trustworthiness and authenticity. Maybe some of them acquired these signs in an honest manner – repented their all too material sins (both in product offering and in bottomline observance) and promised to serve the communities’ interests from now on. I mean, who knows? Some would say though that many of them are just busy catching up with tricks and schemes on how to properly – and quickly -- fake the signs. Don’t quite go for that although occasionally, professional advices on -- for example – how is the “content to achieve an authenticity” attempt to yank my new trusting nature.

Ok, maybe the Earth hasn’t turned into Paradise after all (good news for those who need to heroically dream on their saving the world). Besides, why would progressive business sense need to disappear: people need relationships? -- brands at their service. It’s only natural for the production of relationships to become a lucrative business, where cold calculations of ROI still apply – who can joke around with figures? We all socialize through computers, and it’s rumored that behind the luminescent curtains there are large (but exact) quantities of 0's and 1's. Joke around, and errors can occur – like birthday wishes turning into curses, etc. So much with the trustworthiness. Cold pursuit of numbers is essential to maintaining any progressive order. Brands know that. So they produce nourishments for our new social cravings (sometimes along with some objects, previously called “products”), and responsibly do the numbers all along. If the intense social effort translates into a somehow unreligiously fat bottomline, they’ll even go further with an extra “giving something back to the society”. Of course, some – again – comment on this affability as being specially designed to multiply into hard currency for (fiscal) years to come. Even if so, it’s understandable: with all the help of volunteers producing social fibers (UGC), nurturing a world order sounds like a costly endeavor.

Hmm… I have the feeling I got even further away from where I was initially heading to. Insofar I’ve only managed to chop the world into potentially devilish brands and unsuspecting humans – those that some still refer to as “consumers”. Now I remember, that was the seed of my annoyance. But, thinking again, if these – for now – people swallow fake relationships (even if skillfully prepared), doesn’t that demote them from being authentic humans back to well behaved consumers – only recycled for new kinds of intakes? Maybe all is a whole new game designed to take the consumption order to spiraling heights. Jean Baudrillard signaled these “new” developments decades ago (now in my approximate translation):

“The consumer society is a society of both goods production and accelerated relationships production. The latter aspect is, in fact, characteristic. This production of relationships, still artisan-like at interpersonal or primary groups’ levels, nevertheless tends to align itself to the way goods are produced, and thus follow the generalized industrialized model. (…) The consequences of this evolution are still hard to predict: it’s difficult to admit that you can produce relationships (be them human, social, or political) the same way you produce objects and that, from that moment on, relationships can be objects of consumption, just like any other. But this is the truth, although today we’re only at the beginning of a lengthy process.”

So maybe it’s true we’re in full Economy of Relationships, and -- in order to be part of its metabolism, whether aiming for the riches or for mere survival -- we feel more or less obliged to conform and grow crops of openness, trust and authenticity. Or simply fake it. But, even if most of us – brands and people alike – are faking it, the prospects aren't necessarily bleak. Just imagine: what if, in the frantic process of mimicking it all in an ever more authentic way, we lose sight of our initial calculations and, not remembering what else to do, we just act in the manner we’ve dissected and studied in its tiniest components for so long – that is open, trustworthy and authentic?... ba da ba ba ba…
I’m lovin’ it!!!

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