Why Pinko?
Definition
Pinko: // a person who holds moderately leftist views. // (slang)
Why use a slang term like this?
I know, I know...it's quite 'out there'. I mean, anything even loosely tied to this political history is bound to be the target of some opposition. But, hey, I'm not talking politics here...I'm talking marketing and how the marketplace is changing.
My History
Before Pinko came The Cluetrain, a text that changed my life. It opened my eyes and made me think very differently about the world. I was a fledgling marketing brat at the time and, to this day, I think it saved my life.
There are 95 Theses that include such ground shaking statements as:
- Markets are conversations.
- Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
- Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
- Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
- People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
- The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
- Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
- In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
- These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
- As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
93. We're both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our converstions look like the Berlin Wall today, but they're really just an annoyance. We know they're coming down. We're going to work from both sides to take them down.
94. To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.
You should really read the whole book...it's available for free online. I buy it for everyone I love ('cause friends don't let friends do old school marketing).
Anyway! Back to 'Why Pinko?'
Hugh Macleod asked the question a little while ago, What comes after the Cluetrain? Well, I didn't really know at the time. I was still struggling to get my clients, bosses and coworkers to understand why we should stop spamming people with stupid messages about stupid stuff they don't give a damn about. The Cluetrain hadn't arrived.
All of that changed, though, when I moved to San Francisco and started working for an amazing start-up company and for an amazing boss who really 'gets it' (or at least has enough faith in me to let me go for it). What happened is that I got to apply the Cluetrain to my entire marketing plan...I turned theory into reality. 100%. And, throug it, I achieved amazing results. Uber amazing.
Now....because I was given such free reign with my Cluetrain-esque style, I had the chance to start going even further with the theory...I had the freedom to wander even further down the ethereal path of 'letting go' of the old ways. I was freed of my shackles, breathed through my own apprehensions and stopped worrying about numbers and ROI and accountability at all.
Whoa! You say. Whoa! No accountability? Well, it was experimental. When I didn't see 'results', I could panic and go back to the old ways, or I could keep moving where my gut instinct led me...where my intuition was unraveling a beautiful yarn.
And what I found was the most bloody incredible thing evar...I found community.
No longer was I merely having a conversation in a human voice with other humans, I became a mere bystander, being continually fascinated and awed by a brilliant community of people who really, really, really wanted to see us succeed. Irrational? Maybe? I mean, what the hell do they get out of it?
Then I started thinking about all of the communities out there and how they are formed. I started thinking about the cult of Mac enthusiasts (iPod, too) and the Open Source community (hell bent on spreading OS - many have openly professed they would die for the cause...). I started working with BarCamp and Microformats and getting involved with The Creative Commons. I watched this wild Web 2.0 world around me, people passionate about connecting, creating and changing the world. I saw them called Marxists and knew instantly the author was right, but the sentiment wasn't negative.
I observed Threadless and 37 Signals and Firefox and Wikipedia and the blogging community grow, not merely because of a strong community, but AS a strong community.
And it dawned on me...
Marketing isn't about you*. It is about everyone.
And when I found Riya fans defending us tool and nail (before launching, mind you) in comment sections of blogs who put us down, I wanted to cry with joy. I planted seeds, but then I just stepped off. Their messages were stronger, purer and more amazing than I could ever ever ever respond with.
This is Pinko Marketing. Marketing of the people. The commons. The community. People choose what should be supported, spread and how it should be talked about. It is the marketing manager's job now to support them in their endeavours.
So, if you haven't gotten it yet...
Pinko is a derogatory term that was used against people who supported communist philosophy during the Cold War in the US. The Pinkos were tried under McCarthyism. Careers were ruined. People were devestated. But 'Pinkos' stood strong and proud and railed against an insane witch hunt.
Pinko, tied to socialism/communism/marxism (whatever one wants to attack) is, loosely, a commons-support. As a marketer, you can never truly claim neutrality, but you can support those who support you.
Number two, Pinko Marketing is about the commons itself. It celebrates the rise of the 'consumer' voice. It strives to tear down top-down power and message structures. It does away with classes and celebrates the impact of the tiniest voices. Yes, these principles are very tied to Marxism. Deal with it. [i.e. Let's stop fiddling with our political biases and start thinking about the theory of the commons - commons-based models, et al]
7 Comments:
OK, I will deal with it.
Continuing to use Soviet Hammer and Sickle symbolism in this project is just as offensive as using swastikas would be.
I'm not asking you to read The Gulag Archipelago, or the collected essays of Orwell, though I think both would enhance your thinking a great deal, I am simply asking you to stop tainting the flourishing emergent world of the net that we both believe in with the symbolic and philosophical baggage of the ideological movement that made the 20th century the bloodiest the world has ever known.
If you find that offensive, you deal with it.
I think WRONG is the best assessment of yr energy base. All things are semantics, you rejoice in redefinition, why go back. Bad marketing, illogical, not correct, and misses the very brilliance of American creative power. You betray your roots.
The post WW II American history is more complex than bad McCarthy's and good liberal socialists. The U.S. had just gotten through dealing with the horrors of war and saw what totalitarian regimes like Nazism where capable of. Stalinism did prove to be as horrible as many thought. And there was some basis for concern over communist influence though it was taken to an extreme.
If the commons decides, well, your services are no longer required. Marketing Directors are no longer required. Manifestos are no longer required, because they're really just marketing pieces to share with others who think exactly like you do.
Everyone doesn't live in San Francisco. Everyone doesn't work in tech. Everyone isn't a serial conference attender. And this kind of self-referencial exercise in narcissism is the hipster equivalent of the boys on the bridge in Deliverance waiting for Burt Reynolds to float by. It's inbred and completely lacking in perspective.
No worries. You've got a spiffy job. Everyone agrees with you at those conferences you attend. Your an influential. You have stickers on your laptop.
And it is all meaningless. Utterly meaningless.
I'm a Canadian, generally left-wing, and generally sympathetic to the Marxist ideals (but rarely to their implementation.)
However, I'm going to have to agree with the previous comments. I totally agree with your identification of the parallels between the Marxist utopia and the Web utopia, but there are huge differences as well. Adopting the 'Pinko' term means alienating the many people who have bad associations with Communism - and where's the benefit?
It seems like you're trying to use the success (or potential success) of the cluetrain ideas to provide post-mortem justification of Marxist ideas.
Furthermore, I'm not sure what you're adding to the cluetrain manifesto that justifies creating a new label for the movement.
I think a good look at Foucault is in order. Your understanding and application of Marxism is thin, and it shows. Marx and Engels produced a rather brilliant description of industrial society. However, their theories on how a revolution could change society never came to fruition. Claiming that what you see happening around you is Marx and Engels' revolutionary vision in action only confirms your myopic view of the world. As another commenter stated, not everyone is in tech, not everyone lives in SF. Your theory, of sorts, crumbles outside of your bubble. It's a hard sell to claim that garment workers in S. Asia are my peers and that what I produce (ethnography) is matched with what they produce for me (garments). I produce writings for an elitist group of academics, which is a self-referential, arrogant enterprise (and a whole lotta fun). And clearly, garment workers are not producing clothes that they actually have access to.
Now, on to Foucault: Marx and Engels produced the need for the revolution because their theory could not overcome two things: (1) you have to work for a living and, (2) the superstructure. If Marx and Engels are correct as you claim then your revolution is nothing short of the ideology of those in power -- meaning, that those who hold power have planted the seeds for your revolution. Which brings us to Foucault who believed that revolution best serves those in power by providing them with new knowledge of how to continue to assert their power.
Tara,
I've really enjoyed reading your posts on 'Pinko Marketing', the ideas are interesting in conjunction with your work with Riya. I see in a later post to this one that you are going to re-visit the semantics.
But like Anon. has mentioned above, one point I never really understood is why this is the post-Cluetrain era.
I just read the Cluetrain Manifesto and I still think much of what they predicted is only now happening in a broad way.
If you could visit that point in a post or on your Wiki, I would be interested to know your thoughts.
siobhan
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