Dreaming 5GW

Yesterday, while earning a little cash as an election judge in a local election, I had the opportunity to begin reading a book I’ve owned for about six months but had put off reading: Pattern Recognition, by science fiction and technology guru William Gibson.

So far, I’ve only made it to Chapter 9; but Chapter 7 surprised me, because Gibson, through the character of advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, describes 5GW, with a little help from the main protagonist Cayce Pollard:

[Bigend] “This business of ours is narrowing. Like many others. There will be fewer genuine players. It’s no longer enough to simply look the part and cultivate an attitude.”

Cayce has imagined something like this herself, and indeed has been wondering whether she’s likely to make it through the narrowing, into whatever waits on the other side.

“You’re smart enough,” he says. “You can’t doubt it.”

She’ll take a page from his book, then. Caltrop time. “Why are you rebranding the world’s second-largest manufacturer of athletic shoes? Was it your idea or theirs?”

“I don’t work that way. The client and I engage in a dialogue. A path emerges. It isn’t about the imposition of creative will.” He’s looking at her very seriously now, and to her embarrassment she feels herself shiver. She hopes he didn’t notice. If Bigend can convince himself that he doesn’t impose his will on others, he must be capable of convincing himself of anything. “It’s about contingency. I help the client go where things are already going. Do you want to know the most interesting thing about Dorotea?”

“What?”

“She once worked for a very specialized consultancy, in Paris. Founded by a retired and very senior French intelligence type who’d done a lot of that sort of work on his government’s behalf, in Germany and the United States.”

“She’s … a spy?”

” ‘Industrial espionage,’ though that’s sounding increasingly archaic, isn’t it? I suppose she may still know whom to call, to have certain things done, but I wouldn’t call her a spy. What interested me, though, was how that business seemed in some ways to be the inverse of ours.”

“Of advertising?”

“Yes. I want to make the public aware of something they don’t quite yet know that they know — or have them feel that way. Because they’ll move on that, do you understand? They’ll think they’ve thought of it first. It’s about transferring information, but at the same time about a certain lack of specificity.”

And there’s so much more. Cayce is a “footagehead,” a member of a worldwide subculture cutting across other subcultures, who are addicted to analysis of a series of short, anonymous video releases appearing on the Internet. No one knows who is creating those videoclips, whether a full and completed feature is being released piecemeal or is being continually created as each clip is released. The MSM has largely ignored the phenomenon; or, when trying to present coverage of the phenomenon, fails utterly to reproduce the same excitement elicited by the release of the footage. Bigend, being the marketing guru he is, wants to learn more about the author of those clips; i.e.:

[Bigend] “…I’m not asking vis-à-vis segments of a narrative, but in terms of the actual sequential order of uploaded segments.”

Cayce isn’t used to thinking of the footage in those terms, although she recognizes them. She thinks she knows where Bigend is probably heading with this, but opts to play dumb. “But they clearly aren’t in a logical narrative sequence. Either they’re uploading them randomly—”

“Or very carefully, intending to provide the illusion of randomness. Regardless, and regardless of everything else, the footage has already been the single most effective piece of guerrilla marketing ever…”

So far in the book, the footage is being characterized — by Bigend — as “guerrilla marketing.” But many chapters are left, and the novel’s introductory blurb gives a fuller picture:

“…Cayce is soon traveling through parallel universes of marketing, globalization, and terror, heading always for the still point where the three converge….”

Filed in The Vault and tagged Guerrilla Marketing, Pattern Recognition, Science Fiction, William Gibson