February 14, 2005

The Deviant Edge is itself a bit of a deviant book. I'll admit I don't generally pick up and read marketing theory books, so I can't speak from any position of authority, but this book has a non-normative quality of media criticism, or cultural studies to it, despite all the odd business-speak phraseology and Over-Capitallization of Key Concepts.

Oh just in case you think I am reading this without any of that ever present "irony". I am not, I just don't have the time for all that sarcasm, and mostly I think it is pretty funny and amazing that at this point even deviance is fair game for our market economy.

If you want some cranky "intellectual" mining of all post-structural and cultural misappropriations go here.

Here is a nice paragraph that sums up some ideas that have been floating around in my head w/r/t technological new media activism.

"It's relatively easy to trace the path of the devox (devox = deviant voice. Hello bmw [big marketing word]) in areas like technology, where an apparently endless stream of innovations keeps making our lives simultaneously simpler and more complex. People lead different lives than they did fifteen or twenty years ago, thanks to a string of technodeviants from Alan Kay, the "father" of portabe computation, to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Linus Torvalds, and others. No sooner has a deviant idea appeared in the mind of some cyberfringist (ewww..... shudder, hate the writing hate it hate it) than it's making millions or even billions for some Social Convention digital capitalist.

This is of course, not rocket science and one could just as easily replace the idea of deviance with the idea of genius. However, I appreciate the idea of deviance replacing the cult of the lone genius, because a deviant isn't neccesarily smarter or better then everyone else, they are just a whole lot stranger/obsessively interested in one thing.

I will keep thinking/writing about this book as I read it. This morning, the subject matter and the treatment (business writing blechhh) makes me a little sad because essentially these are guys( the authors I mean) whos job it is to go and follow freaks around trying to capitalize on their freakiness.

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