House for rent on Bowen Island, BC

We're visiting my parents, and renting out our house, July 3-10.

5 minutes to the beach. Looking for a good holiday renter.

Imagine no belonging

I had a provocative conversation with the COO of a large PR company here in Vancouver. He read the Biodegredable Branding manifesto. He asked, what about the need for belonging?

Beat.

The answer is that belonging has to be more deeply realized as an expediency. We belong to little league, then we don't. We are a Lulu Lemon user, then we aren't. The big brands, from the Catholic Church, to Uncle Sam, to GM, have always been pecking at us with messaging that has taken a piece of us. They can't do this now, going forward, if they want to succeed.

Ephemeralization, in a sped up world, has cracked fundamental belonging. No-one born today will be a lifelong Mason, or Democrat, or anything else, come to think of it.

The excitement of social media can boil down to the excitement of re-living how to be a child again. We don't; can't belong in a concrete sense. Belonging, even the notion of belonging to a particular community, is temporary, an expediency. Ultimately, there is no community or state to belong to, and a sped up world rips the covers off of cocoon of belonging at increasingly regular intervals.

The critical path is managing temporary but meaningful association without excessive attachment. Crack this, and a deeper sense of belonging unfolds.

If we try, we can imagine unbelonging. And practicing this, and practicing this in the branding profession, is a next, difficult step.

Shine and fade

It's not a very complex idea, but probably needs explanation. We want to shine and twinkle, we want our projects to shine and twinkle, but forget that what gives the twinkle its twinkle is not just the shining: it is the fading and the shining, then bursting through the obscuration of light.

Shine that persists is glitz.
Shine that persists is glitz.

Glitz is on the TV, in the magazine, in the everlasting smile on Tony the Tiger's face. In reality, persistence isn't possible, of course; our life is cyclic, and uninterrupted shine that endures usually involves some toxic residue.

Suggesting that the persistent branding approach doesn't work for green products and services; it may be that it's well into the cusp of failing globally for conventional products as well.

It's an end to class as we know it, and I feel fine.

Open infrastructures mean an end to class as we know it.

Take photographers. There used to be a stereotype, maybe perpetrated by Antonioni and others, that equated photographer = the guy with the scarves and the bags under his eyes. The David Hemmings character in Blow Up was, if you like, a class archetype. The photographer class had its own brand identity, and various scarcities that helped keep people in this class in a bubble.

The photographers' bubble has recently burst, of course. The positioning of self as “photographer” was probably always a reductionist piece of foolishness, but now more than ever this kind of positioning is stripped bare. Specialized, private know-how is open to anyone with access to a browser. Camera technology is also available to most people, and, though the significance of artistry and experience still hold, amateurs and aspirants can always concentrate, and often catch a wave; anyone can take great pictures, sometimes.

If you make a living doing something, people will still say, “S/hes a [insert career brand here]” But no amount of scarves and attitude and equipment will help someone who wants to be classified as a photographer if that person doesn’t make a living at it – any more than a someone who doesn’t create or build a restaurant can be considered a restauranteur. To call someone who doesn’t make a living at it "a photographer" means he could, by the same token, be called a dishwasher if s/he washes a few dishes.

In more open systems, class barriers break down. An author was once considered truly an author when s/he was published. Now anyone can publish. The author class, now stripped of barriers, is gone. If Bob makes $4,000 a year writing, is he in the writer class? I guess, but he is, put more accurately, a "bunch of things."

Similarly, as political systems become more open, the walls of the “legislator” class fall down, and what is left is just people who contribute to legislation. Some get paid to do it, and we often call them "legislators" when they do, but in fact that is a kind of shorthand that doesn't tell the whole truth. They do other things too. The legislator class, in a world of open access, is disappearing.

We are, depending on how you look at it, getting rid of the wankers, or gaining a population sized load of them.

What the change means is not the end of the professions, but the end of the professional class. This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a decline of quality, but it is, arguably, pointing to the end of self-as-career stereotyping and the end of many other types of spurious protectionism.