10 Membranes

» Corporate Bullshit Leaked

It can be easy to forgot quite how depthlessly psychopathic corporate culture can be, so it’s refreshing to see a nice leak from the heart of the “web content generation process”. Business Insider have managed to get hold of a massive AOL strategy and workflow document that is as interesting for the nature of it’s content as for the content in itself. 

Firstly the content confirms what you might expect: that motives of profit weirdly construct web content in a hyperreality of keywords and analytics; it would surprise no one in the media to see how vacuous and pointless yet pseudo-scientific this whole process is. Incredibly people like to say that amateur bloggers are ignorant, irrelevant opinion farters yet this kind of targeted gormlessness is far worse. IMHO, natch. 

More interesting than the content is the style. Somehow this document manages to be enormously rich and compex whilst at the same time completely empty and stooopidly obvious. Some slides are like paeans to late corporate capitalism, blizzards of buzzwords in arcane syntaxes twisting through the strip lit halls of a open plan vista of MBAs and technocratic meetings and over-priced over-strength coffee.  These brittle, intricate linguistic structures make no sense to the lay man but are no more opaque than the labyrinthine flow diagrams whose seemingly arbitrary forms are mandalas of process. It’s like looking at a cross between the art of Mondrian and a physics dissertation; between a robot and a mural from a religion yet to be discovered. 

So of course the substance is depressing, unsurprising; but aside from that let’s glory in the sheer anthropological enjoyment of this hugely bizarre and massively telling record of 21st century life. It also goes without saying that the hierarchy behind this document are douchebags of a planetary scale.