X-Message-Number: 18266
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2002 00:11:46 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: the old packaging problem

Steve Harris has written:

"Timeship or no Timeship, I suggest only that we spend time finding out
what people expect to see in a cryonics organization, and (so far as money
permits) give people something of what they expect to see."

Cryonics is still so unformed, such a piece of slow-breaking news, we have
no idea what people expect to see, and I think they have no idea either.

This gives as an enviable marketing advantage.  We are not stuck with a
pre-existing image. We can create a new one.

Since people are more likely to buy something that seems at least slightly
familiar rather than something that is totally new and alien, our "cryo
package" should create some associative resonances that are reassuring.

My question, articulated more frivolously in a previous message, is, "To
what familiar iconography should we attach this thing?" Timeship attaches
cryonics to a mishmash of prehistory archetypes and hokey images from
Hollywood movies. (This does not mean that Timeship cannot be good
architecture. I think it is quite beautiful. It simply acknowledges a
mixed pedigree of influences. Likewise, New York's Chrysler building is
something out of a 1930s comic book; but is, to me, exquisite--especially
the winged hubcaps fashioned from stainless steel. But I digress.)

As a cryoseller myself, I have always tried instinctively to avoid all the
resonances that Timeship evokes, because prehistory/Hollywood is
antiscience in my view of the world, and I want cryonics to BE
scientifically valid, and to SEEM scientifically valid.

But I'm not sure this is a rational attitude on my part. The "look and
feel" of cryonics can be totally disconnected from the way in which it
actually works. For instance, I just saw an ad for a "vintage style"
phonograph, made of oak, with an LP turntable on top, a music CD slot in
the front, and an audio cassette slot in the side. I'm sure that the
system plays CDs just like any modern-styled unit. The interior mechanism
is the same. The styling has just been added to please a particular
audience. Timeship can work in much the same way.

Also we can vary the appeal of cryonics for different niche markets. For
geeks, we talk about Eric Drexler. For the mass audience, we go for the
Timeship look. For Mormons, we portray cryonics as a kind of modern
extension to their most modern religion. And so on.

But wait; let's suppose we only have enough money to pursue ONE of these
strategies. Now which do we choose?

This is the question I find interesting, and have contemplated from time
to time, since discovering cryonics. Acknowledge the pulp-magazine
science-fiction heritage, or focus on the dry statements of cryobiology?
Tell human interest stories of little girls who recover after falling into
snow drifts, or show electron micrographs of brain slices?

There are many options.

--Charles Platt

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