X-Message-Number: 18255
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2001 23:12:32 -0500
Subject: Raspberries Over Vanilla
From:
In Message #18249, Charles Platt <> wrote:
>> Anything which enhances our understanding of cryonics staff as people
is very useful to me. If David wants to tell us what he ate for lunch
yesterday, or whether he prefers cats to dogs, I would be interested.<<
I prefer Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders to either. And I had a Big Mac, Diet
Coke, and fries. Supersized. Cellular toxicity don't scare me!
(...*Urp*...)
But-seriously-folks: since I made such a case yesterday for at least
trying to post something substantive, as long as I'm already here I'd
like to say something about one of Charles' earlier posts which I
neglected to address.
Regarding Charles' message #18227 about the film Vanilla Sky
("Narcissism, Hollywood, and cryonics"), Damien Broderick (one hell of a
writer himself! Check out http://www.thespike.addr.com and
www.amazon.com, gang) wrote:
>> Technical discussions aside, this is the single most insightful and
thought-provoking post I've ever seen on Cryonet. Thanks, Charles.<<
The seductions of prose. Beautiful writing is like a beautiful woman's
face: the form alone inclines you to assent, quite apart from what it
may be saying. And certainly Charles' post was one of the most
beautifully written pieces I've seen on Cryonet in a long long while.
Check *this* out:
>>When I saw Steven Valentine's superb presentation for his Timeship
project, I realized that he had taken all the stuff I found most hokey
and embarrassing about immortalism--the 1950s B movies, the religious
iconography, pyramid power, mysterious powerful rays, people in white
robes and Lucite sandals--and instead of sweeping this stuff under the
rug, he had recognized it and enshrined it as the true essence of
cryonics. And from a mass-marketing perspective, he was right! We're
crazy to try to get away from these wacky overtones. They are in fact the
core of the matter to most potential consumers. We *need* a building
shaped like a mandala, with a promenade where mirrors trap the sun and
reflect it through swirling clouds of LN vapor, while Scientists walk
priest-like through the mist, pondering some 1930s Vision of Tomorrow.<<
Isn't that beautiful? 'Religious iconography, pyramid power, mysterious
powerful rays, white robes': it has all the awful attractiveness of a
bad Wagner overture. Hey, it worked for Leni Reifenstahl, Charles seems
to be saying. Why not us? An honorable man at heart, Charles tells us
why: because it's hokey unscientific rubbish, from which every true
member of the intellectual elite should turn away, lip curled in scorn.
Regrettably the doltish proles with whom we're forced to rub shoulders do
not share our exquisite sensibilities, and rush to this sort of thing
like flies to -- well, you-know-what. What can we men of mind do about
it? Beat our breast and weep. Witness the lamentable cri de coeur that
is Charles' conclusion:
>>And here is the take-home message: There is nothing we can do about
it.<<
No? The problem with all this beautiful imagery and posturing is that it
doesn't quite connect with reality. Lucite sandals are the 'true essence
of cryonics'? Then why aren't any of us wearing them? Maybe because
even the public realizes such stuff is too absurd for words. Imagine a
New York Times poll: "Would you sign up for cryonics if the building
were shaped like a mandala with swirling clouds of LN vapor?" Public:
20%: "No." 20%: "What's 'LN'?" 60%: "What's 'cryonics'?"
Writers write beautifully, but marketers cleave to the bottom line.
Charles is a writer, and he does his job superbly, but I work in
marketing, and let me assure you, Charles' antithesis of successful crass
irrationalism versus unpopular ethical nobility is -- well, just not the
case.
Personally, from a purely business perspective, I am not a fan of the
Timeship project. I can't think of anything more wasteful or
counter-productive than to spend tens upon tens upon tens of millions of
dollars on a projected cryo-hotel for ten thousand cryonics patients when
there are barely a hundred such patients in the world right now, and
barely a dozen more coming in annually -- particularly when expenditures
in the mere thousands can get such spectacular results as the HCSP
initiative. The 'Timeship' has the sort of overweening Albert Speer
grandiosity that definitely catches the eye, but seems to (rightly) be
causing Charles Platt intellectual indigestion. The strange thing is
that he seems to consider it savvy marketing despite his revulsion. It
ain't. In marketing, supply follows demand, or withers on the vine and
dies. And it is exactly that part of the equation -- demand -- that we
are ignoring and that we ought to address.
Why don't more people sign up for cryonics? The answer is simple:
because most people have absolutely nothing in their mental or media
environment that inclines them to entertain cryonics as a real, concrete,
desirable, available possibility. The casual viewer of Vanilla Sky, for
instance, will not watch it and realize that CI or Alcor are really
factually there, ready and waiting to provide services that he can
actually afford. He will think it a sci-fi prop used to explain Tom
Cruise's two-hour preceding wet dream. If, by some chance, the viewer
does hit on some link to the truth that cryonics is actually available
today, he will almost certainly run into the distorted urban legends
about the subject first -- that signing up costs zillions; that the
father of cryonics is not Robert Ettinger, running a solid active
organization in Michigan, but Walt Disney, tended to by the seven
robo-dwarfs in Disneyland's subterranean bowels; that the people and the
providers in it are the sort of mysterious Lucite-sandaled loons Charles
proposes as a marketing ideal. And if the person penetrates past that?
Then he runs into the real crunch: the fact that cryonics organizations
for the most part make the process of joining difficult as hell.
In marketing there is a classic distinction between what are called
high-involvement purchasing decisions and low-involvement purchasing
decisions. Coke or Pepsi? Big Mac or Whopper? These are
low-involvement purchasing decisions. They don't involve a lot of money,
or time, or social or intellectual conflict, or brooding existential
self-examination. Cryonics, on the other hand, is a very
high-involvement decision. The perception is that you have to pay or
arrange to eventually pay a large amount of money; that you have to deal
with your doctor and lawyer and insurance agent, who may be
unsympathetic; that you may face possible ridicule or opposition from
your family, your spouse, your friends, the people you hang around with
or work with; not least, that you have to face the real possibility of
your own death, and the chance that even cryonics may not pull you
through, if circumstances beyond all control dictate it. It is portrayed
as, and sometimes is, a difficult and time-consuming and not particularly
pleasant process. Whereas ignoring it and putting it off is pleasant --
gee, there's so much more other fun stuff to do. It's like cigarettes:
a smoke feels good now, and dying from it feels bad thirty years later.
Who doesn't want to feel good now? Light up, buddy.
It's this basic fact that reveals the crack in Charles' Lucite model.
Would you really feel good now walking up the steps of some Egyptaic
cryo-crypt, checkbook in hand, while hooded musclemen thud massive
Oriental gongs and unseen speakers thunder out Orff's "O Fortuna!"? I'd
feel like a complete jerk. Everyone would, which is why this idiot
scenario has never caught on with either the cryonics community or the
public.
Every problem, properly understood, contains the seeds of its own
solution. The solution to the problem of marketing cryonics is simple:
we have to change the ratio of immediate displeasure to pleasure.
Signing up ought to be simple, easy, affordable, reasonable, pleasant,
sensible. *Far* from emphasizing the irrational, we ought to be
emphasizing the rationality of cryonics. Not the indecipherably
technical rationality of K/Na ratios, vitrification solute percentages,
and bio-nanomechanics, but the common sense rationality of affordability,
openness, protection for one's family, experienced service, reasonable
investment, support for humanely directed scientific research. You reach
the public by talking their language, and their language is not the
language of cryobiology journals or Grand Guignol architectural sketches,
but the language of the pocketbook, of the charitable contribution, of
the desire to give the people you love and care about every last chance.
Point out advantages simply and clearly and people will see them. Make
joining a pleasure, and people will join. The best marketing approach is
neither elephantine Ringling Brothers bravura nor marginal elitist
technobabble. The best approach is listening to the public and trying to
give them what they say they want.
If I had said to people at the Cryonics Institute three years ago, "Three
years from now, membership will have more than doubled, we'll have a
full-fledged research laboratory with a Ph.D, cryobiologist with twenty
years experience running it, and we'll be pulling in more than ten times
as many members annually as we did on average throughout the twenty-three
years before," the reaction I'd have gotten would not have been a set of
enthusiastic nods. (Charles' reaction goes without saying.) And?
Membership has more than doubled, we have a full-fledged research
laboratory with a Ph.D. cryobiologist with twenty years experience
running it, and we're pulling in more than ten times as many members
annually as we did on average throughout the twenty-three years before.
Why? Simply because we've tried to give people not frills or hype or
Lucite sandals but affordable care, rapid care, and increasingly
improving care. Will Alcor double in size and be pulling ten times as
many members three years from now? Maybe. I hope so! The more thriving
organizations, the merrier. But it just won't happen if the only options
it entertains are B-movie pyramids, or "There is nothing we can do about
it".I did not think much of Vanilla Sky, frankly. Charles' raspberries
(Yank slang for a rude noise directed at an object of contempt, for you
Euro readers) at this film are fairly understandable. It's not really an
enjoyable film, nor an especially well-done one. If you see it (and you
probably should) you'd do well to skip the first hour and a half and come
in at the end, which is where all the snappy cryonics material comes in.
But I was glad to see it up on the big screen, and I consider the net
effect of that film, and the net effect that *is* that film, to be a good
thing. The fact is, in Vanilla Sky, cryonics is presented with at least
some degree of accuracy. The cryonics organization there is shown to be
professional, available, helpful, and lasting long enough to achieve
exactly what it promises: taking a damaged human being from death to
fully healed revival. The cryonics people are shown to be competent,
concerned, and actively and successfully working to help the member
through the process. This is how we want to be perceived. That we
should be so presented in the number one box office hit in the country is
terrific. That this should come on the heels of an equally positive and
accurate presentation of CI by the number one news program in the
country, ABC News with Peter Jennings, and on the more distant heels of a
similarly positive and accurate bestseller about cryonics, "The First
Immortal" by James Halperin, is more than terrific: it argues for an
increasing acceptance and permeation by society of a positive and
desirable and accurate image of cryonics. It isn't everything we might
wish -- yet. But we're getting there.
And should we toss it away by slipping into sets of white robes, or to
confining ourselves to obscure cryobiology journals read by less than one
percent of one percent of one percent of the public? Of course not.
Antonio Gramsci wrote: "We must have a pessimism of the intellect, but
an optimism of the will." Charles' efforts certain exemplify an optimism
of the will: he writes newsletters, propagandizes, goes to meetings,
he's aided in actual suspensions, served on Boards, has helped found an
entire organization. You couldn't ask for a better activist. But,
strangely, his writing issues almost exclusively from a pessimism of the
intellect, and such pessimism is a distortion -- a distortion that
paralyzes.
What's the reality? That it really does seem that people are beginning
to react positively to what we've been trying to say all along --
responding on the grand scale in the movies, in book sales, in television
news, and (as far as CI goes) even in actual people signing up at record
rates. So why all the gorgeously written lamentation? Maybe we should
treat ourselves to a good healthy dose of optimism for a change, and
reach out to those 'potential consumers' with some respect and some
positive expectations instead. More and more, that's how they seem to be
reacting to us, and I don't see any cause for complaint at that at all.
David Pascal
http://www.cryonics.org
P.S. -- Happy New Year, everybody!
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