• by Jeff Einstein , May 25, 2004

Again, many thanks to those readers kind enough to pen email responses to my last column. As I replied to one kind soul: "Your feedback and that of others with sympathetic thoughts remind me that I'm not the only inmate in the asylum."

Several of the emails I received inquired about the nature of any appropriate response to our obsessions and addictions with media and technology. More specifically, they wanted to know when I would start offering solutions.

Not to worry: I will. But not right away...

To those looking for quick answers, I would suggest that there aren't any, and Einstein's Corner would likely not be the first place to look in any event. Indeed, for my money (what little there is of it), quick answers are part of the problem, not the solution. Our search for them is one of the reasons why we feel so compelled to sell our time for pennies on the dollar in exchange for time-saving technologies that ultimately consume all of our time. Quick solutions are typically lousy solutions.

And while I won't offer any solutions today, I will pose a question: What's the cost to business and society when enough workers go to sleep at night and wake up the next morning wondering what can I do to keep my job, or what happens if I lose my job-instead of how can I do a better job? How much inertia does that single question generate nowadays, both at work and at home?

I only ask because today I want to address another signature characteristic of addiction in the Age of Technoculture: paralyzing inertia.

Central to the maintenance and promotion of Technoculture is what the late Neil Postman, author of "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology," called a "culture of experts." Experts represent the high priests of Technoculture. Their essential function is to promote the interests of Technoculture and maintain the status quo through the generation of inertia, the primary defense mechanism of both addiction and Technoculture, and the reason why addictions are so very difficult to kick- at least without expert help.

As with addicts, you can't throw a brick and not hit an expert nowadays. Experts are quoted everywhere across all media nonstop. Experts constitute the ultimate form of cheap reality programming. Many of you are probably experts, or--if not--are likely well en route to becoming experts. The fact that I'm writing about experts now may even qualify me eventually as an expert on experts.

Our addictions are the internal experts we carry around with us at all times. Like their external counterparts in business and the media, our internal experts know everything. In business we are quick to promote addiction as the driving force behind our expertise at point of sale or in client encounters: "Everyone here eats, sleeps, and breathes media."

An important function of experts is to provide us with all the reasons why our lives and businesses don't work for us, and what we can and cannot do about it. According to our addictions, our internal experts, the reason why things don't work out for us is always the same: Someone else screwed up. Someone else is always to blame in the Age of Technoculture. If it's not the liberals, it's the conservatives. If it's not the religious fanatics, it's the godless infidels. If it's not your boss, it's your employees. If it's not creative, it's planning. Addicts are always quick to blame. Just ask any expert on addiction.

The remedy is always the same as well: more acting out. More faster smarter better. In short, more business as usual, despite any remedial nods to innovation and change. The flip side of inertia is expediency: addicts will take the quicker fix over the better fix nine times out of ten.

Recovering addicts often refer to their disease as "cunning and baffling." Inertia is the perfect example: It thrives best in escalating extremes, both good and bad, with corresponding feast or famine imagery and vernacular. During the best of times, increased spiritual, emotional, and financial investment generates blind arrogance and a commensurate resistance to change, regardless of potential and sometimes obvious character flaws. The most intractable players during the dot com economy were typically the young guns who promoted change the hardest, the young evangelists of innovation mired in the blinding inertia of their own success. By contrast, during the worst of times, increased sensitivity to the uncertainties of life generates the paralysis of fear and a ghetto mentality. The collapse of the dot com economy obliterated any tolerance whatsoever for risk, and resulted in our current obsession with ROI, a stripped-down version of the same dot com economy, repackaged with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

Largely invisible during the best of times and all too visible during the worst of times, inertia extracts a high price-spiritual, emotional, and financial-at both ends. I call it the "Inertia Tax," and it represents the single biggest cost of doing business and living life in the Age of Technoculture.

How does the Inertia Tax effect the cost of media? As I mentioned in last week's column, you might expect that the cost of media would decline as inventory expands due to increased access to increased bandwidth. But no such luck. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Media saturation over protracted periods of time decreases the overall efficiency of media, and increases the amount of related inertia generated by the medium itself. The increased media price tag back to advertisers reflects the amount of excess tonnage that must be put into play in order to defeat the increased inertia. Ask yourself how many extra impressions are required nowadays to get a customer up off his ass during half time and down to the 7/11 to buy your beer. This is a classic example of escalating addiction at work, an example of what happens when more and more consumption of the drug is required to generate the same buzz.

The greatest victims of the Inertia Tax on a day-to-day basis, however, are innovation and thought leadership. Addiction breeds expertise, and expertise stifles innovation and thought leadership as it mitigates risk.

Okay, so if innovation is the antidote for inertia, what's the formula for innovation? Well, contrary to my earlier admonitions about the hunt for quick solutions, I'll offer one here, a quick formula for innovation: Ignorance + Intent = Innovation.

Now before you dismiss the above as too idiotic to even consider, think for a moment about what ignorance brings to the table. Two basic attributes recommend ignorance as a business resource and tool:

1. A limitless and cheap supply.
Ignorance is the basic human condition. We have no idea what the next minute will bring, let alone the next financial quarter. Moreover, there is never any increased demand for more ignorance and therefore nothing to drive up the price.

2. No inertia.
Ignorance is inertia-free. As the antithesis of expertise, it comes with no body of knowledge to defend. True enough: Ignorance is why and how fools rush in. But ignorance is also the mother of faith.

The more secular counterpart of faith is intent, implicit in the question that inspires each journey we take. Intent is the only way to put ignorance or anything else to work on your behalf.

So I lied. So it's not such a quick solution after all. What do you expect from an addict mired in inertia?

Jeff Einstein is a strategic marketing consultant and an early pioneer of the digital marketing industry. He was a co-founder of EASI, one of the nation's first interactive advertising agencies. His column, "Einstein's Corner," will appear each Wednesday in MediaDailyNews.