Advertising and a Glitch in The Matrix
“When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” — Chapter 4, Alice in Wonderland.
Think about it, we are living in a simulation. When Plato introduced his theory on projections and simulated perceptions in his piece called The Cave, he tried to rationalise that our reality is a cause and effect of relatability. In his theory, he pitted prisoners inside a cave and let men project images via a single source of light, i.e. a fire. What they saw dancing on the walls of the cave, shadows, they assumed to be real. Until one prisoner escaped the cave and saw the real world outside, that’s lively and full of colours; and thus he achieved enlightenment.
Replace Plato’s Cave with our Work From Home situation currently, cut away from the real experiences of life, cooped up in our respective comfort zones and watching shadows dancing on our walls and mobile screens. These give us pleasure, standards and stimuli, but is this what we’ve succumbed to? The world is slowly becoming someone’s Matrix, and we are caring not, and pretending to exist. I look at this industry of mine, and the more I see it, the more disillusioned I become, even though I’ve spent a chunk of my peak fiddling with it, 10 bloody long years. Advertising used to be a place of art and sensorial domination, and has come falling flat to a simulated concept in a matter of 2 years.
Whom are we to blame? The architect, if there was any. Let me rewire The Matrix to fit the narrative. Not only is it one of my favourite films ever, but the narrative was near close to explaining how this universe was created and perhaps how it’ll go out. The Matrix was in its 6th prototype when John Anderson, aka Neo, consumed the red pill and invaded it. Each prototype before ceased to exist due to some system error. Humans had already lost the war to machines and we were the cavemen from Plato’s cave, ready to be studied and resurrected for a machine-driven civilisation in the film. Some of the prototypes were too easy on the human specimen, others were too hard, nightmarish. With the sixth prototype, the system started gaining stability, at the cost of complete human wipeout from the planet, an everlasting suffocation.
In this creative pursuit, we’ve witnessed several system shocks — the print age - primarily the long copy age and the design age, the film age, the digital disruption age and finally the social content age. The end of Matrix Revolutions was the end of the Matrix. If you ask any industry expert today, a bunch of jargon won’t necessarily lead you to a more progressive future age. This is the end-game. Bleeding money trends, alarming takeover tactics, looming replications of ideas and algorithms, and just constant dependency on simulated theories to steer us through.
The central idea of The Matrix is to preserve the core of this simulation and to overcome any external manipulations that affect the system. There is a choice right at the beginning of this defying journey — the red pill and the blue pill. One lets you ignore the circumstances and live remorselessly as the end consumer. The other encourages you to stake it all and nose dive into this complex world of capitalism and consumerism as the one who is bending the spoon, the invader, the creative spirit. The white rabbit is your college degree, that sudden urge to do things differently, even though you’ve been spending time in front of your television or computer system, trying to hack into this process, still as an end-consumer.
Neo is an anomaly. That’s what advertising and consumerism teach you in the beginning, to bend hell if needed, to deliver cutting-edge reasons why your product or service should exist. However, that sense of realism is quickly replaced by lush and myriad complex binary codes, that are fed into our systems day in, day out, flushing out the power to bend, encouraging the power to replicate and dominate other programs, that are offensive to the core. The chances of you meeting your Morpheus through your Trinity is one in a million, that’s why the greatest prototype of The Matrix waited for one genius to invade.
When Neo enters the Matrix, he is straight taken to the dojo where he meets his trainer, Morpheus, who is well aware of his skill-set, and barely unlocks the power in him, by infuriating him and hitting him. Guess how the old-school creative individuals are trained in this field of work? The Matrix could’ve well been Morpheus’ story, but even with that power and knowledge, he knew he couldn’t do it all alone. He depended on a special being to step out of his ordinariness and deliver results that only Chosen Ones can.
As the Creative Lead, I meet and interact with a bunch of individuals, day in-day out. I hire some ordinary folks and then some. And then comes an individual who shows some sparks, who is following a certain white rabbit, all along. That’s when I, and many more leads like me, open the dojo, for a one versus one fight. The real ones stay and win the fight, the surreal ones take a blue pill and resolve to blaming the system. It’s that simple. I object to the hustle culture, absolutely do, but I also don’t portray a false career path. Every single day, we are a different being, a different brand, a different industry, we must learn to fight harder and immunise ourselves against anything.
The woman in red, remember her? That’s called workplace distraction. That one tiny sticky projection that limits you from seeing the opportunities or dangers at bay. That happens to the best of us, we often overcome them, and those who fail, go finding their blue pill.
The Matrix, back in 1999, read the world damn right. It knew we were heading into a war with machines and AI, who were devoid of human fire, such as curiosity or dare. If you look at the world right now, especially the world of creativity and consumerism — the complete opposites married into a concept called advertising, you’ll realise that The Matrix is your subconsciousness too.
Too many ideas that are similar, too many agencies that are doing the exact same thing, too many AI tools and very few paintbrushes, too many formulas that are squeezing the joy of setting fire and watching. We have more agents today than we had in the 3 Matrix’s combined, being replicated by the absolute overlords of milking money and preserving stability in cash flow and mediocrity. They’re being born and replicated in every nook and corner of the city, country, civilisation, and the heroism of a renegade human cult is coming at a cost.
Social media is painting a frail, false picture that is, unfortunately, becoming human consciousness. We are enjoying a high tide of replication, we’ve gone further from building viral campaigns to catching the virus and spreading it ourselves. (*coughs in moment marketing*) It doesn’t take rocket science or an Oracle to tell us that we’ve failed our prototypes, the ones who worked with minimal access to the world and concept rules, and yet delivered timeless tales.
We are overpaying people who are making faces and making a living out of it, not that I do not pay attention to some of the moments of spark they present. My problem, in fact, is not even with social media or any formats that advertisers follow these days, I use it to my advantage as well. I have a problem when you count someone’s whims and fancies as strategic ways to tell a story or solve a marketplace insecurity, or when you call a glitch in the Matrix a crucial discovery in the human civilisation. That’s just some sad simulated shit telling you that you’re a marketing maverick.
In a very Trent Reznor-ish phrasing, I’m here telling you that simulation is waking up and doing things exactly the way an operating system wants you to do. People claim themselves to be wolves in this field, but ultimately everyone’s sheep. A junior executive has to respond to his/her boss’ callings, the intermediate boss must respond to the agency’s DNA, the board-room member must adhere to the industry’s growth pattern, and so on and so forth.
There are no growth hackers or business bloomers unless they’re claiming they are, it’s a figurative path that is dependant on external forces. Everybody is at the disposal of an external force. So, when a Neo emerges in the field, as an external force, as an anomaly, he/she is often targeted to be quarantined and exterminated. If you are hearing a lot of raging noise about you, it means you’re doing something for yourself. It means you are the resistance. It means you are fighting the simulation of normalcy from the inside. It’s a hard task to be the resistance in this day and era. As replication gets us better opportunities and we travel to the other side of the madness, the brand, and become our own Merovingians. Or you can always stay on the side of the resistance and backstab when needed, Cypher.
This isn’t a choice between the old school consumerism and the new age stalker-syndrome-infused consumerism. Advertising has been, and will be, pure evil till it’s here. However, stories and creative excellences are the antidotes to this necessary poison, it balances the effect and impact.
There are two kinds of veterans in our industry today — ones who believe that advertising is completely dead, and the others who are so much in love with it that they haven’t adapted and have cost them a complete timeline. I am of the third kind who still sees hope with all the flaws in it. I consume the poison with a bit of creativity, I sit in the middle of this mainstream simulation, hoping that a Neo will sprout on my radar any moment. That’s why it’s important that I tell you that we are in a simulation, right now, as you’re reading it. Leaving no room for a deja vu to have heard these things before.
