AInt going to be eaten!

In the bigger scheme of things I could argue that we have been on the path to where we are now for way longer than you, or I, think.

How far do we want to look back? Let's start with advertising. We could go back to the beginning but that would take forever. Advertising started as giving notice, in a polite and reserved way, that something was for sale. I remember a Monty Python skit where one of the protagonists asks " Are you selling something? " In those days selling anything was not an admirable occupation. Of course, the entire world economy runs on selling everything but advertising the fact was not the done thing, except possibly in America. In America, everything has always been bigger and better and more in your face. So perhaps things really got going in America. The message came over loud and clear you needed stuff, stuff that you needed to have that you didn't have. I did say that I wouldn't go back to the beginning but in the beginning this was one monkey looking at another monkey; " monkey see , monkey do ".

The message was that other people were getting stuff that made them better, or look better, and if you wanted to be happier, or look good, it was kind of important to get some of that stuff too.

With what they call progress the platform where all this happened went from newspapers and billboards, to television, to smart phones on the Internet.

It is now happening on Facebook, Instagram, Tick Tok and even into the Metaverse.

All along the way the people who were doing the advertising were competing with each other for the attention of all the other people, the consumers, to make more profit through more sales. Money was the driving force while the evolution was actually conformity. People followed other people doing what was seen to be fashionable, cool, clever, trending, advanced, the next best thing.

Trends and ideas came and went while advertising, or marketing, continued and became cooler, cleverer - an industry in itself. Marketing followed the money.

The thinking was being done by people who had ideas of how to market stuff that was better, faster, cooler and necessary in a brave new world, that was getting braver and newer all the time.

You might ask what has this got to do with a clothing brand called Zimbabalooba?

When I started Zimbabalooba back in 1989, I had done some thinking and I wanted to make a statement.

The iconic symbol of Zimbabalooba is on every pair of Zimbabalooba Verts.

It is a strange bird-like creature and a frog 🐸. Frogs have played a role in fairy tales since forever and so we know a frog is symbolic in the sense that a frog may, or may not, be the frog it appears to be.

I designed the Zimbabalooba logo with a message, a reminder if you like. I will now share it with you.

The bird is the system, the government, institutions, advertising, even possibly peer pressure. Now with AI we have something that isn't even human.

The frog 🐸 is you.

The reminder is you have a choice to fight, to hold onto a chance of freedom; escape from them and hold onto your independence, your freedom of thought.

Or, allow the bird to eat you!

What makes this scenario a lot scarier in these current times is the fact that the bird has always been up until now, human.

We are stepping or, we have stepped into a world where AI is being rolled out, and then rolling itself out, to do a lot of things. One of them is communication with humans. Machines are telling us what we want to know. They are also being deployed to listen in on us and find out how we think and what our behaviour patterns are so that it will be easier and faster to sell us stuff.

The subtle shift is that in the present future the devices we use are no longer choices of convenience. We need them and through them our minds are being analysed and ultimately our thoughts will be controlled. So subtly that we may not even know it has happened.