I don't usually go back and read the commercial work that I do, because I just don't really care enough about it. However I did have the occasion to survey some of the edited pieces I had done, and what I found was very strange.
The pieces were completely mangled. I don't mean this stylistically, in the way that someone ruins an artist's original work by altering it in some impure way - and this certainly isn't art - but in a basic sense of the work's intelligibility and purpose.
There are whole paragraphs that are simply nonsense. The language is very bad. And some of the pieces I saw no longer communicate what their titles suggest. I have no idea what the nature of this editing process is, but it has become apparent that this company has done the equivalent of setting up a machine to process raw works for their clients' consumption, and the works, when put through the process, become completely mangled.
And the clients seem to gladly consume this mangled material. Indeed it is as if this mangling process is put into place to satisfy the client. Because they keep asking for more.
You see this frequently in marketing copy. I have read marketing blurbs and felt as if my mind turned off. There is nothing there to understand. There is a sequence of words put together to achieve a general desired effect: to get the customer to buy. But put under scrutiny and one may feel pressed to derive meaning.
In the same way, a lot of SEO marketing copy has a coherent meaning that is more secondary and accidental. The material is primarily put together in order for the search engine to consume it, and decide whether it is worthwhile for ranking. Google has attempted to counteract this with natural language algorithms, but I still see a lot of strange things regardless. And when I am looking for something online now, I often have to sift through links and links of commercial material which has risen to the top, as that is where much of the energy is flowing, and it is expressing itself in the search.
This too illustrates the private nature of much of what we choose to fill our public spaces with, regardless of our efforts change it. The imprint of accumulation - economic accumulation is the primary animating principle - can be found everywhere.
There are huge distortions in our most cherished channels of communication and production. Work becomes meaningless: what exactly do I think I'm producing? And so does public communication itself. It appears as a form of madness, but it is only concentrated power bending all productive energy in its direction.
