Back in 1992, there was a televised Vice Presidential debate. But because this was a unique election that had 3 Presidential candidates who garnered significant support, we had 3 Vice Presidential candidates on stage. There was Al Gore who, depending on your worldview, is either famous for suggesting he invented the internet* or for an absolutely chilling movie about impending climate change. There was Dan Quayle, who somehow was actually Vice President in spite of thinking the word potato as a singular noun had an ‘e’ at the end of it** and a whole host of other things that made Saturday Night Live portray him as an actual child when they put him in a skit. The third participant was an almost entirely unknown former naval officer named James Stockdale.
* I don’t think I need to clear the record here, because so few people read this that it hardly matters. Gore didn’t exactly do himself a service regarding this, but he never said anything resembling a claim that he invented the internet. If he did invent the internet, I’d like a word with him.
**This is this man’s entire legacy. I defy you to name a single thing about him other than this or something related to this - and being from Indiana doesn’t count.
Jim Stockdale ultimately retired as a Vice Admiral in the Navy and he was a remarkably brave man. I’m not going to list his credentials, but he was shot down over North Vietnam (at 40 years old!) and spent 7 years as a prisoner of war. If you do one thing as a result of this ridiculous newsletter, read his Wikipedia page.
So Stockdale is on stage with the two main party candidates and he opens with a joke - the joke being the title of this newsletter “Who am I? Why am I here?” - and that joke went over pretty well initially. It was also pretty definitively the highlight of the entire debate for him. As a result of injuries sustained a prisoner of war, he couldn’t walk very well and needed hearing aids, which were on and off during the debate and resulted in him not hearing questions terribly well. His performance was uneven, and I’m being extremely generous with that characterization. The jokes he made ultimately turned from a clever opening to a sign of his (perceived) senility and he became a pop culture joke* for what Dennis Miller** pretty insightfully called “the unpardonable sin of not being good on TV”.
*The kids today would call this a “meme”
**One day I’ll spend a whole newsletter talking about the rise and fall of Dennis Miller, because I hate myself
Who am I? Why am I here?
These two questions are very interesting ones to ask. If you think of them rhetorically, the way Stockdale meant them, the answers are a relatively straightforward explanation of your presence wherever you are - I’m here because there’s gridlock* in Washington and I know how to fix it, for instance. And if you think of them metaphysically, well, brother, I don’t have enough time or space to walk you through that**
*TBH, if you could fix the gridlock by my house when the school lets out, you’ve got my vote
**Incidentally, I took a lot of philosophy classes in college - nearly enough to double major in it - and I can confidently say that there are a lot of answers to that question and none of them make any sense
However, if you write them as questions about the advertising and media ecosystem, then we have a very topical conversation on our hands, because one of them is about identity and the other is about behavior. And both of those things are very useful, very differentiated things to have access to and understanding of.
Who am I? Why am I here?
I’m gonna jump to the end: the entirety of the internet doesn’t work without at least reasonably serviceable answers to these questions. I’ve said this before - I know that people instinctively get their backs up when you scare them with capital P Privacy and the violations therein. But if you remember the internet before things like ranked search, you know that the internet needs to know at least a little bit about you to make it even moderately functional. I’m not saying cookies are the right way to do that and I’m also not saying that it should know everything about you*, but for the amount you actually volunteer to say, picking something out of the thin air, buy a t-shirt online to get 20% off, you’d think people would be a bit more comfortable with this.
*I realize I’ve personified the internet here, but bear with me
Rewinding, there’s a few ways I think about this:
What does the medium tell us about the person?
What does the content tell us about the person?
What does the association of their usage to an identifier of some kind tell us about the person?
If you’ve read Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage*, well then #1 has some primacy for you. McLuhan is all about the medium - the message itself is an afterthought, it’s the medium delivering it that is worth studying. I’m not gonna go too deep here either, but his book is worth reading (it’s short and also pretty weird) and his ideas are interesting - to McLuhan, everything is a medium: light, speech, print, images, etc. And those media inform the message they transmit. In these examples, light is a medium without a message - unless you’re talking about the Madison Square Garden marquee or something where the light actually forms the message. It’s pure information. Super interesting.
*This is not a typo. That’s the name of his book - massage, not message. There’s thought behind the pun, but I mean, I don’t know
And what does this have to do with anything? As usual, I’m glad you asked. If the medium is the message, the message is the less interesting thing - people who focus on the content providing information look past the more subtle shifts that the delivery of it creates. Think about it this way: if you’re watching a newscast about a protest on a campus (I’m trying to keep this apolitical and judgment free), rather than focusing on the information (the protest), the important thing is the shifts in perception having the message delivered into your house while you’re watching*. The same is true for the advertising delivered - like 12 years ago, BP had a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. After that they released a bunch of advertising that showed all of the things they were doing to help clean up the environment. The point of those commercials wasn’t to tell you what they were doing; it was to give you confidence and shift your perception of them to be one who participates on the promulgation of a clean environment, and not a polluter of said environment. They understood, or at a minimum someone convinced them, that the medium is the message.
*And again, posited without judgment, no one understands this better than Rupert Murdoch
With that context, the questions “Who am I” and “Why am I here” take on a whole new meeting. Who you are doesn’t matter as much as why you’re there. You’re there for the message, but to get the message through (or in the case of Fox News, shift the Overton window as far right as possible), you need to harness the power of the medium.
Rather than write a 20,000 word screed here to dissect the other two, I’m going to save my thoughts on #2 and #3 for following newsletters. Selfishly, this will get me to write on a more regular cadence for a couple of weeks. Stay tuned for Parts II and III
As I think about what to add to my little postscript here, I try to sort through what’s top of mind for me - and this week, it’s either too much or too little for me to think of anything poignant, so we’re gonna cut it here
That’s all for now. Until next time, friends
I love your comments and thoughts. I get to think and evaluate the complexities of your commentary. You bring objective thought to my front lobe. I love the way you express and how your mind skates through the tulips of perspectives. I love your work .
Mike m.