By Tom Flynn

Meditations on Inauthentic Luridity

I’ve been trying to write a scab entitled Old People Can’t Do Ads, which was a lurid misnomer I only half believed in. I was attempting to write something deliberately inflammatory and rage click inducing in the hope of making some semi salient rug pull point which would make the angry clickers feel good about themselves and smile on my true humble nature as I revealed it.

What a load of wank, I’ve literally been complaining about tactics like that all week. Not a rug pull or inflammatory work, but presenting oneself in a false light to get some attention you wouldn’t otherwise get.

See I fucking hate that new Gillette ad, sentiment is lovely, nice one, but it’s so inauthentic and insincere it’s sickening. It’s insulting, patronising and detrimental to movement it’s trying to write itself into. A fucking Procter and Gamble brand, who use child fucking labour to source their fucking palm oil, telling men to be better human beings is farcical. Cunts.

I had the same thing kind of rant about fearless girl. A division of State Street (investment bankers) put up a fucking statue of a girl facing the Charging Bull to symbolise female empowerment and then six months later settling for five million in a lawsuit brought against them for pay discrimination against women. Get the fucking boat.

I get it, I understand, effective pieces of communications, everyone was talking about them. WIN.  And I know it’s almost impossible for anyone in the first world to live a fully ethical life, and I’m certainly not a social justice warrior, or any kind of warrior for that matter, but if something in you doesn’t find that kind of manipulation sinister and inherently wrong, we’re not on the same team.

I will advertise anything, expect maybe child porn or the Daily Mail. But I won’t lie to people and that shit is lying. That scab I was trying to write would have been lying too, old people can do ads. Almost all of the ones I know, do them a hell of a better than I do. I know this. I am in fact achingly aware of this, and that’s why I was struggling with that scab. I knew I was lying, even if I was planning to come round to the truth in the end, I was still leading people down the garden path under false pretences. I couldn’t do it, I’m incapable of lying in writing.

I was trying to hurt someone’s feelings. Get them to click on my little arrogant look at me piece and make them revel in the majesty of my edginess and later wit. That’s fucking disgusting. I’m better than that.

If you don’t believe in what you’re creating with every fucking inch of yourself, if you’re not willing to go out on your shield on this one, why do it at all?

Easy,

Tom