UB2 Challenge 1: Perfect Pitch

The first challenge asks contestants to make a pitch, to "sell" the judges on a great idea. The language of the Pitch has, of course, become totally pervasive in our comercially-saturated society. Check out the challenge video and how ridiculously funny it is. Doubly impressive because it's increasingly difficult to effectively satirize the Pitch because (TANGENT WARNING) as Mark Crispin Miller notes, TV and advertising and business already mock their own conventions mercilessly. They protect themselves from mockery by doing all the mocking themselves, "thereby posing as an ally to the incredulous spectator". You can't turn on a TV without seeing an ad mocking the Pitch. I will go turn on the TV and make myself lunch and see if I notice an example...

I am back. I was right. I noticed two examples during the first commercial break. The first was a Jack-in-the-box commercial where the antenna-ball-head guy was pitching his new sandwich to a bunch of employees. The second had some guy giving a powerpoint presentation to a room full of chimpanzees. Commercials like this say "we know how you feel about the ridiculousness of the business world, and we agree with you." Pre-emptive ironic humor is a way of demonstrating "self-awareness", thus blessing the brand with an aura of "authenticity". As Thomas Frank writes, "The corporate takeover of life is coming; in fact, it's already happened. But what makes the culture of the businessman's republic so interesting is not that it demands order, conformity, gray clothes, and Muzak, but that it presents itself as an opponent to those very conceptions of corporate life." So advertising mocks "the pitch", winking at you, letting you "in on the joke." Here's the punchline: this is one way corporations maintain so much control over American life.

While I'm on this tangent, I might as well mention communication and information design expert Edward Tufte, a prominent critic of the logic of the pitch. He sees the predominance of the pitch mindset as evidence of a creeping commercialism infecting all aspects of communication, a barrier to critical thinking. Read a couple pages from his forthcoming book here. It is fascinating stuff. The cognitive style of Powerpoint, in particular, comes under fire for the way it turns everything into a sales pitch. Tufte even makes a very convincing case that the inadequacy of Powerpoint--that is, the way the pitch has supplanted other modes of communication (such as detailed technical reports), led to NASA's mistaken conclusion that that foam falling off of the Columbia's fuel tank posed no threat to the space shuttle's safe reentry , and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board approvingly cited his analysis in their final report.

Unsurprisingly, Tufte worries about the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. "Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials." Meanwhile, I worry about its use in churches; I have seen otherwise very talented preachers awkwardly try to integrate PowerPoint into their sermons.

Politics has been infiltrated by the logic of the Pitch as well. The administration formulates a policy behind closed doors, then parades around trying to sell it to the populace and the media. Rather than an authentically democratic process, we have a consumer choice between competing pitchmen trying to sell you on the features of their respective policies. Remember how everyone criticized Kerry in 2004 for not speaking in bullet points the way Bush does? The Pitch is no place for nuance and qualification. Oversimplification sells! And Tufte notes "the chronic problem of government intelligence agencies: once the collection and selection of evidence starts to become fixed around a pre-determned policy line, intelligence agencies may become permanently unintelligent, confused about the boundaries between detective work and marketing." (Remember Colin Powell's embarassing Powerpoint report to the UN about WMDs? Pitch logic infects the media too; where we once had journalism, now we literally have guys with talking points.

It is possible to "think outside the Pitch" but it requires media channels outside of the realm of big business, more democractic kinds of political processes, new avenues for public discourse, and constantly reminding ourselves that the culture and cognitive style of the market is not the only option--other kinds of communication, social organization, culture, entertainment, politics etc are possible. Blogs, at their best, are one place that can happen. (Thus I brilliantly bring this post back to the topic at hand!)

Anyway, I just got back from an overnight trip back to Walla Walla again, to see how the venue I used to help run is doing without me. So if I'd been in this contest, my perfect pitch would have argued for one possible plan of personal action that I found changed the way I think--in good ways, I hope. Of course it would need to be expressed completely ineffectively with a long, boring Powerpoint presentation: