Greetings, fellow humans. I was informed that some folks had missed me during my unplanned hiatus. TSM is swelling with gratitude that his screaming into the void has produced more than an echo. The story of why I had an unplanned hiatus is a whole other kettle of fish, and I’ve never really understood what good an entire kettle of fish would do anyone, so it’s the last time I’ll use that idiom.
Cold Zones & Close Calls
In one well-compartmentalized quadrant of my life, I proudly serve my country by applying some specific skills I acquired earlier, which are in high demand today. My unit comprises specialists in various fields, all of which combine to make us a very portable, highly effective team. When I was asked to deploy to another time zone over the Thanksgiving holiday, I “had some ‘splainin’ to do” at home but shipped out on the holiday’s eve as ordered. Without providing the kind of detail that would expose the mission, let’s just say that the time was spent in a cold, dark, and confined environment with limited external distractions. During our work, we encountered a situation that I can’t technically describe as “hostile.” Let’s just say it wasn’t super friendly. Fortunately, our CO and XO Jack Sparrowed the shit out of the situation, v and we escaped relatively unscathed, with a few exceptions, myself being one of them. Kinetic action sounds exciting until your unit suffers injuries.
If you’re ever hurt abroad, do what you can to wake up surrounded by Scandinavian nurses. It eases the re-entry process and mixes well with whatever prescriptions were pumping through my veins as I came out of it. I am told they kept me in that state for about a week to allow the injuries to heal without my stubborn ass demanding to get up and out of bed. In retrospect, I’m grateful for their insight into my personality. For those interested, my comrades who were in a similar state are all recovering as well and are looking forward to exaggerating the extent of their injuries at our next poker game during the Christmas break. And yes, we did what we came to do and gave as good as we got. Maybe better.
So here’s the rant I was working on during the trip out and finally finished on the way home. Not sure why this was on my mind, but here it is, and expect that as a result of this little event, TSM is even more mad than when I left.
Nancy Reagan, ONDCP, PDFA & The Propaganda Wars
If you’re even close to an age where things are starting to ache just because the temperature dipped below 50 degrees, then you’ll get this reference:
“This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs,” and you can probably visualize the commercial and even hear the sizzling as you read this. If you’re younger and have no bloody clue what TSM is rambling on about today, then watch this and this. Notice how they keep saying “last time”? It wasn’t, of course, which made it even more hysterical every time it came on the TV. Also, the recurring line “Any Questions?” which, of course, is rhetorical because back in the 80s, we didn’t have any of those, and if we did, we would have to dial an actual telephone to ask it of an actual person who would also be using an actual telephone wired into a nifty wall jack.
Fast forward a bit into the mid-1990s when “Heroin Chic” was raging and the pearl clutching of the “never inhaled” Clintonians delivered this memorable bit of filmmaking. If this reminds you of the idiocy in the 1980s of the P.M.R.C and their effort to somehow stop kids from listening to subversive music, you’re on the right path. The fact that these prim and proper holier-than-thou dipshits actually enumerated a list called “The Filthy Fifteen” is hysterical looking back since it includes artists like Prince, Madonna, and Cyndi Fucking Lauper, who is now all over the airwaves hocking mental health. You can’t make this stuff up.
Anyway, by the late 90s, the boomers had an absolute chokehold on the nation and government (which, to be fair, they are only going to surrender from their cold, dead hands) and decided in 1998 to give us the laudably named “National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign” and a cozy $1.2 Billion in media spend to get this off on the right foot. And off to the races went the usual suspects, first coming up with a plan to pay TV networks $25 Million to embed anti-drug and alcohol messaging into their programming, then getting caught for defrauding the federal government for more than 3,000 hours of billed work that never happened.
And even with all this criminality exposed, the agency was re-awarded the account. Nice work if you can get it. The moron at the head of this beast, Former 4-star General Barry McCaffery, was rumored to be shtupping at least one member of the agency account team, and he later went on to be one of your basic run-of-the mill self-promoting scumbags who sells access to power and large government contracts.
By 2002 this cabal was feeling so untouchable that they thrust themselves upon an unsuspecting populace by spending $3 Million for air time during…you guessed it…the Super Bowl. “Say No To Drugs” had officially jumped the shark, but in this case, Fonzie fell into the mouth of a Great White and was never seen again. It was the single most expensive government funded ad in history. And let’s remember the context of the immediate post-9/11 world, ONDCP decided that the best way to get folks to not use drugs was to equate it with terrorism with the tagline “Drug Money Supports Terror”. Yes, they actually delivered this ad to the 86 Million people watching Super Bowl XXXVI, you can see this ludicrous spot here.
By 2006 it was eventually acknowledged and accepted by no less of an authority than our own U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the effort was largely a waste, ineffective, and may have even had the reverse effect of its intention, with drug use slightly rising among targeted teens over a multiyear period. The D.A.R.E program that was delivered for decades in schools to reduce the use not only of illegal drugs but also alcohol and tobacco was found to be a failure on a similar level.
So what does this have to do with streaming? A lot. As streaming becomes the default way in which video content is consumed, with younger consumers leading this revolution, we can expect that propagandists will, when empowered with money and authority, attempt to use the medium in exactly the same way that traditional television was used, up to and including colluding with and paying creators to produce content that expresses the benefit of specific morals and virtues of certain behaviors. Yes, this rant is about propaganda and the insidious and sometimes clumsy way that people attempt to coerce behavioral shifts among large swaths of the population. And just to put a fine point on it, the same actor from the infamous 1990s heroin ad returned in 2017, slamming the war on drugs and its racist enforcement. Duh.
What is at stake for streaming advertising is quite a lot, given the degree of addressability and targeting that is enabled in streaming platforms. There is enormous power in these consumer apertures to affect how people perceive and feel about themselves and the issues that surround them. We know this from what we’ve seen on social media, and we stand at the precipice of amplifying this type of psychological exploitation a thousandfold by segmenting the propaganda messages just like we segment commercial messages today. Imagine a world where the most effective and moving TV ads are programmatically and algorithmically selected and delivered straight into our living rooms.
Did some of this come to me during my recent travels in a fever dream cocktail of painkillers and sleep-deprived delirium? Possibly. But that’s often when the thinking is best, emancipated from the need to not criticize for fear of losing one’s position, whatever position that may be. So beware of the well-meaning group or individual asking you to just bend your values “just a tiny bit” in the name of some patriotic or secular belief system. We are at the beginning of an AI revolution that can very easily access these streaming platforms with objectives that are neither in our national or community interests. We are the vanguard of liberty, and you shouldn’t have to get your bell rung in a foreign country to remember that.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night.
TSM
This Week’s Music: Rush – Big Audio Dynamite
The views and opinions expressed by The Streaming Madman are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Streaming Wars or its affiliates.
