(A RE-POST, SLIGHTLY EDITED, FROM A YEAR AGO ON THE DATE OF THE FIRST-EVER ‘CYBER MONDAY’)

I only had to glance at the feed headlines this morning to see that ‘Cyber Monday’ is getting pushed as the big online holiday shopping day by the mainstream media like some kind of suspicious-smelling Santa whose lap our parents are insisting we sit on.

Well, peeps, here’s what The Ol’ GameChanger has to say about that…

First of all, Monday will unfold as it gets performed for the first time ever, not according to a script written by someone we’ve never met, into which we have had zero input. It is going to be a day you and I create together, collaboratively.  We do not have to shop today to make today a success.  And if we do shop today, will that be the measure of our success?  Today there are a lot of people trying to convince the marketplace that the metric of our success is one particular number or set of parameters they expect to be generated over a designated 24-hour period.  Maybe this is true for you, maybe it’s not.  Chances are, it’s not.  So the idea of marking to market on a so-called Cyber-Monday is, in fact, pure fabrication.  It’s a one-way ticket on the train to Crazy Town.  Whether the headlines tomorrow about Cyber Monday are good or bad, they will most assuredly be bullshit.

Second, asking the cyberculture to shop on Monday is ludicrous, because a netizen has the ability to shop anytime, anywhere.  We can shop (or work or communicate or whatever) when we’re in line for coffee, we can shop on Cape Cod while we’re sunning ourselves in Capri, we can shop for Lakers-Celtics tickets while we’re at a Spurs-Mavericks game, we can even shop while we’re taking a piss, an experience for which there is no brick-and-mortar equivalent, except maybe for the super-rich.  You can probably get a cappucino  in the restrooms at Goldman Sachs.  I wouldn’t know.  What I do know is that asking a netizen to transact on Monday is kind of like asking a fish to swim.  We transact every day.  When the fish swims, it’s news because..?

My friend Tricky Kid, one of the most on-the-pulse people I know, tweeted me Thanksgiving evening from his car after driving past a store where people were camping out overnight so they could get in there the instant it opened on Friday morning. “Pathetic,” wrote Tricky.   The reason Tricky Kid found the overnight line pathetic is that the whole concept of the line — and the linear in general — is an Industrial Age design, and we are living in a non-linear world.  Always have been, really.

The architects of Cyber Monday might as well push headlines that say ‘Online Merchants Promote Cyber Whatever’ or ‘Fish Expected to Swim on Monday’.

A GameChanger names the day after the fact, by what has been created on that day, not ahead of time, as advertising for whatever he or she is expected to consume.