Join Bentley's Thunderclap, Why Don't You
Today's thought: the pace of change has increased, but the pace of meaningful innovation has decreased. As proof of this, I offer the Bentyaga Thunderclap.
What is a Bentyaga Thunderclap? Well, a Bentyaga is the new Bentley SUV that will be the Flying Spur of VW/Audi SUVs. Which is a nice way of saying it will be a way to spend $200,000 or more on a VW Touraeg. Another way to think of it is that it will be a Lincoln Navigator for people who have more money. As such, it has a guaranteed place on the Mount Olympus Of Loathsome Objects. The MOOLO. I just made that up. But you already know what's on there, don't you? Clothing by "Vineyard Vines". The new subdivision they're putting up down the street, the one where the homes have crown moldings made of Styrofoam and names like "The Dorchester". The Hublot Big Bang.
The MOOLO rises in its tin-plated majesty above the Venn intersection of expensive and meritless. Its Aphrodite is Paris Hilton and its Zeus is probably a pre-political-aspirations Donald Trump. We live in its shadow and we are hunted by its residents, who earn bonuses eliminating our jobs then back their whale-shaped Infiniti SUVs over our children. In this company, nothing could be more welcome than a vehicle conceived, designed, and marketed as a mobile intimidatory fortress and statement of one's recent arrival to confounding wealth. Look for one in the rearview mirror of your four-cylinder Fusion soon, pressing its supplier-milled cross-eggcrate into your mind like Laurence Olivier with a set of dentistry tools.
So that's Bentyaga, a sort of three-ton vehicular mountebank. What is Thunderclap? It's a great set of social media tools that allows someone to saturation bomb everything from Facebook to, presumably, Grindr at exactly the same time. If your Thunderclap is successful, it will result in an hour or so of your chosen message absolutely dominating everybody's Twitter and FB and Instagram timelines. Everybody signs up in advance, hands over control of their public identities to a brand-new app because why not, and then at the chosen moment, that app floods your social media accounts with the organizer's memetic vomit.
Two of the most popular Thunderclaps-in-progress: a demand to feature fat women 67% of the time in the media and something something about improving the lives of dogs, probably at the expense of children. That's the future of America, right there: lonely fat women, under-represented in the media but over-represented in dog ownership. I hope Iran's nuclear program is successful because, truly, who wants to live in a world of braying two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder Dove Real Beauty wanna-bes surrounded by pitbulls and the like? It's not safe for the kids, not that anybody has kids anymore. Why would you have a kid when you can have a dog? Your kid might challenge your opinion on something and it will almost certainly require your full involvement at some point.
* Choose a dog * Choose the Twitter Social Justice Army * Choose a wide variety of plus-size clothing * Choose intermittent sexual relationships with men who despise themselves for entering you * Choose to loudly voice your opinions * Choose a job with no tangible benefit to America * Choose Thunderclap
It makes perfect sense that Bentley has paid Thunderclap to do a Bentyaga campaign. It makes less sense that Bentley wants me to join it, but I shouldn't overthink that; they have my email address because there was a time in my life where I thought I might look dashing behind the wheel of an Arnage T.
Regrettably, I'm afraid that I must at this time decline the opportunity to be part of a zombie botnet to benefit the billionaire controllers of a German automobile company who are desirous of making additional cash from credulous idiots and, to be truthful about it, their equally moronic wives. I'd love to help them, but I've decided to limit my Thunderclapping to promoting One Direction's new record and it just wouldn't be fair to the boys if I diluted my Thunderclap integrity.
There's no small amount of dark humor to the whole thing, but if you step back, crack off the irony that you have permitted time and culture to shellac around you like a pupa from which you are meant to emerge as the perfect imago of a soul-less consumer, and consider the twinned ideas of Bentyaga and Thunderclap honestly, it is depressing enough to make your stomach drop in the sickening fashion commonly associated with a first-generation Intamin freefaller. How much human capital was spent in the creation of these worthless things, these ideas and products without value? What life-saving or soul-preserving innovation was denied the world because the most intellectually extraordinary people can earn more in the service of social-media tripe or marketing trash to the wealthy idiots of the world than they ever could in true science or art? What could the man who engineered the Bentyaga's cooling system for Saudi conditions do if he turned his mind to providing clean water for children? What could the team that perfected the Thunderclap's ability to shove massive amounts of data across the cloud at a precise time accomplish if their mission had instead been to lower the planet's temperature a tenth of a degree?
We are awash, as a society, in the ephemeral, the navel-gazing, the narcissistic. Our larger problems go unsolved while billions of dollars are spent in search of the "next Facebook" without pausing to consider if we even needed the first one. We are the rats in the experiment who would starve themselves for cocaine or an orgasm or a shock to the feelgood center of the brain. We're all told that "AGW", anthropogenic global warming, will destroy the world. And the only thing anybody can think to do about it is to make car engines smaller or put up a windmill. The reason for that is that the finest minds are elsewhere, doing other things. They aren't worried about global warming; they're busy trying to make money, and the money is found in the trivial. I can barely tell the difference between Kik and Snapchat but the fact remains that they both exist and there are more Snapchat clones coming as fast as the venture capitalists can staff the pop-up offices. Meanwhile, the major problems of our society go unconsidered.
If Thomas Edison were twenty-two years old today, he'd be working for Slack or putting together a Kickstarter for some consumer gadget. And as long as that's the case, humanity is doomed. So why not enjoy the decline in the Connolly-leather interior of the refined new Bentyaga GOD DAMN IT I THOUGHT I CLICKED NO