Transformational Retrofitting

(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

I got this fool idea in my head a few months ago, and it still hasn’t gone away, so I thought maybe I could just write it out and then I’ll be able to forget it.

It came from a comment I made in an essay by Turkana on torture, back in April, which said, in part:

… just finished telling a market researcher who called why I don’t do market surveys.

After I hung up I thought … and not even angrily, or anything, just thought, maybe that survey company should start surveying how people feel about torturing … about a whole lot of other things than what car folks drive and their favorite breakfast cereal.

And I think of the state of the world and wonder how much of our already present industries and companies and various annoying capitalistic systems could be transformed, retrofitted somehow, to be of help rather than the insult to injury they are now.

I can’t stop imagining if our advertising industry and our telemarketing industry used their power to help people change rather than keep folks buying crap they don’t need and asking questions about their lifestyles (what is your favorite brand of toothpaste?) that don’t really tell them anything except how to manipulate them as consumers.

We know by now that there’s a lot of money to be made in turning our homes, infrastructure and industries green.

So if there’s a whole lot of money to be made, then we would also have whole new industries, and folks could be retrained to work in those industries, huzzah!

But with new industries always comes the service industries as well, thus the telemarketers and advertising industry.  And more, no doubt, if I could think of them.

I think transformational change could occur if these industries got real information from people, from their views on the enviroment, human rights (from torture to privacy and everything in between) to their views on what would motivate them to change their routines and try something new, to education, to just about every issue you could think of.

So that would be the job of the telemarketers.

And the advertising industry could use that information to help us all change.

Yeah, and I think I’d call that transformational retrofitting.

I know, this is not realistic or anything, but I am thinking outside the box these days.

Or I just have the wageslave’s typical Sunday anxiety.

YOU decide!

Mwoo ha ha ha ha ha.