“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
–Oscar Wilde
Like the kitschy “antique” phones at Restoration Hardware, this is decadence.
Nothing but a coy little pomo trick of the mind, but this is how it starts: You have no reason to prefer our product over any other, so we’ll tease you with nostalgia and cool-geek chic, instead. There’s a laptop that praises itself on the strength of its Unique Selling Proposition: Interchangeable “skins.”
You heard it here first: Computers is dead.
But despair you nothing: Particle physicists have caught a glimpse of an unseen aspect of our world, unthought of just a year ago. These are the first days of understanding mass as subatomic physics. Very cool.
The implication? Clowns to the left of me. Jokers to my right. But that says nothing about where I can take myself. The human race is Fortune’s treasured pet, obviously, and with luck we will continue to outrun outright predation, the terminal stage of cultural decadence.
Which side are you on? Are you just another gelatinous face in the mob, grasping for some way to trick people into doing business with you? Or do you have the character to bring real value to the marketplace?
