Gonzo Marketing :: Reading Assignment

Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices

In 1962, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote a book called The Savage Mind, in which he says "Language is a form of human reason and has its reasons which are unknown to man." Man, I don't even know why I quoted that, except that it sounds pretty cool.[4] More to the point, he talks about a concept for which English has no equivalent: bricolage.[5] In essence, bricolage is what tinkers do -- collecting odd bits of stuff they think may be potentially useful, then using whatever bits seem to work in the context of some later repair job. Simple. And yet profound. Because the bits the bricoleur ends up using were not designed for the use they end up being put to. Figuring out which bits to collect and how to apply them to some task at hand requires a completely different kind of thinking than the procedural algorithmic thought processes business has become so dependent upon. While the Internet may have convinced some businesses to think "out of the box," most are still not even sure what box they’re in, much less which way to turn for emergency egress. If some unprincipled individual were to yell "fire!" right about now, the entire edifice of global commerce might suddenly collapse[...]

Gonzo Marketing - Eight Miles High

The net is like a vast global city packed with displaced persons, refugees fleeing the insanity of mass media. "The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel," wrote William Gibson in the opening salvo of Neuromancer[2], the book that coined the word "cyberspace" in 1984 before anyone had ever been there. Artists are outsiders. But artists are also outriders. A dense and crowded matrix of rainy street corners, the net offers little shelter from the elements. But you can pick up your guitar and play. Just like yesterday. Or your sax or your word processor or your graphics or film editing software. Like tens of millions of disaffected kids with more time than money and more brains than most record company executives, you can crank up your MP3 encoder and your CD burner. As the music industry learned from Napster -- just a few days late and a couple billion dollars short -- you can change the rules.