Not to be too snarky, but I think this should be titled "On the Joy of Advertising Thirty Books" rather than reading slowly.
I started playing a game a few years ago--given a headline, guess whether the buried lede is an advertisement for a book. Is it about someone dead or a banal new factoid about someone dead? Almost certainly yes. At some point, it stopped being a game and started being They Live.
This, though, puts it to shame. It's like seeing a move in Go or Chess where you wouldn't think to make it yourself, but can see the implications of why it was done and sigh appreciatively in regards to the craft itself.
How do you motivate consumers to buy more books when attention is fixed, taxed, and waning? And there's a cultural trend amongst the literate towards slower, more intentional living? Convince them that rapidly multiplexing and timeslicing between ten books is actually slower than the intentionally slower consumption of one. Slyly suggest that you'll also rack up a higher book count as well.
How do you receive more product placement revenue while shying away from being perceived as a vehicle for product placement? Cloak thirty advertisements in a morass of trendy deep workism and throw in The Road as a red herring.
It's beautiful to watch in the sheer chutzpah of it all. It's a little too clever and it makes my tool-assisted sense tingle.
Susie Mesure's only other article (for the Guardian--she's freelance and a real person) was published the day before this one and is literally a deep advertisement by and for Microsoft, so who knows? Maybe we're already in the event horizon of Adverturing and its consequences.
I started playing a game a few years ago--given a headline, guess whether the buried lede is an advertisement for a book. Is it about someone dead or a banal new factoid about someone dead? Almost certainly yes. At some point, it stopped being a game and started being They Live.
This, though, puts it to shame. It's like seeing a move in Go or Chess where you wouldn't think to make it yourself, but can see the implications of why it was done and sigh appreciatively in regards to the craft itself.
How do you motivate consumers to buy more books when attention is fixed, taxed, and waning? And there's a cultural trend amongst the literate towards slower, more intentional living? Convince them that rapidly multiplexing and timeslicing between ten books is actually slower than the intentionally slower consumption of one. Slyly suggest that you'll also rack up a higher book count as well.
How do you receive more product placement revenue while shying away from being perceived as a vehicle for product placement? Cloak thirty advertisements in a morass of trendy deep workism and throw in The Road as a red herring.
It's beautiful to watch in the sheer chutzpah of it all. It's a little too clever and it makes my tool-assisted sense tingle.
Susie Mesure's only other article (for the Guardian--she's freelance and a real person) was published the day before this one and is literally a deep advertisement by and for Microsoft, so who knows? Maybe we're already in the event horizon of Adverturing and its consequences.