Just before Christmas, an engineer put out a Youtube video of his brilliant payback on people who stole Amazon packages from his doorstep.
It’s funny, evil-genius and a celebration of the creativity in engineering.
Anyway, I woke up about 7 hours after he had put it out and said how this was now a creative goal for me at R/GA.
Unsurprisingly I got a lot of positive comments on the film, but there were more than a few that talked about how they loved it when they had seen it earlier.
While it might seen an innocuous comment, saying ‘they’d seen it earlier’ feels like an attempt to suggest they are ‘better’ than me … more in tune than me … more connected than me.
Now the reality is they probably are better than me on all those things, but given the video came out only a few hours after I woke up, it’s not like I am years out-the-loop, despite what this blog may suggest.
I find it interesting because whereas once status was measured in terms of how much money someone had … now it seems to be about how fast we know or have seen things. It’s probably always been that way given I remember how we used to talk about bands in terms of how long we had liked them before they had got popular, but watching people try to elevate their status [in a way that lowers someone else’s] based on seeing a Youtube video 2 hours before someone else feels like social currency is now more valuable to people than actual currency.
Mind you, given the impending disaster that is BREXIT, that is probably the only way we will be able to pay for our groceries soon.