Jun 24 24
I felt like the last entry was already boring and disjointed enough, and I didn’t want to add more so I started another entry to cover the actual events of today. I’m very tired. I was feeling depressed earlier today on my way to work, and I feel even more defeated by the elegiac atmosphere of this corporate cell phone company event. Maybe I’m projecting, as I can’t imagine enjoying a life spent in the employ of a cell phone company, nor as a journalist in charge of reporting on the same, but these people all seem deadened and corpselike. Its also the same presentation done over and over again. The presentation itself is already a sort of dirge of new features rendered in annoying corporate jargon. Its all useless AI digital trinkets and color-customizable garbage. Depressing pablum. The final group seemed to be full on influencers, and unsurprisingly this was the most depressing of all. They oohed and ahhed at the presentation video, which was just generic aftereffects adslop. Someone said it was a really impressive package during the Q&A, and then an italian woman asked what they were doing to reach out more to the female market segment. I think this is what people mean when they joke about ‘brain worms.’ What kind of normal sentient self agentive subject could possibly be curious what one of the major smartphone retailers was doing to infiltrate women’s spending habits?
Probably the only interesting revealed detail was related to the fact that the new flagship phones were coming in a variety of p*nt*ne colors which were selected in close ‘co-curation’ with the cellular brand. In describing why this was important the presenter noted that p*nt*ne had provided the colorways for the product 12 months ago, in part so that production could acomodate the correct color for the phones, cases, crossbody straps1, etc. The additional benefit of this, for the company as well as the consumer, is that simultaneously to the release of this product, the colors will start appearing across the spectrum of consumer goods. The presenter held up his acid-lime green phone and said he’d already begun seeing the shade in fashion shows.
I know that the bulk of the economy is unproductive rent seeking, but its particularly funny to see whats happening here, which I have to surmise is rent seeking on manufactured color trends.
Theres not enough money in just selling paint, so I surmise that our friends at pant*ne are trying to make colors their intellectual property. I already knew this was more or less their current business plan, and they’ve done a pretty thorough job of having an effective monopoly on color coordination. While they cant literally copyright colors, they’ve become so ingrained in design and printer calibration and digital imagery that they effectively have. I feel like this stuff might be sort of common knowledge, but I remember it being particularly a topic of discussion when I worked at a print shop a year and a half ago and they started having their beef with Adobe2.
What I assume is happening now, based on the simultaneous rollout of phone case colors along with fashion colors, is that the p*ntone paint company is selling color trends as a service.
I imagine they simultaneously were speaking to this phone company and whatever fashion label this guy had seen his special phone case color at, and are coordinating new color trends to coincide with each other. They’re selling this coordination as useful market information. It makes sense- I feel like the types of people that were running this phone rollout would buy into a pitch that p*nt*ne could predict or control perceptions of colors, and so it was economically rational to partner with them (which I assume is basically paying them to lease their color labels and color information).
I guess I can’t prove that there is a concerted conspiracy by the color cabal to create a privileged set of color schemes, but they already position themselves as color tastemakers explicitly. I used to always jokingly make a big deal about the ‘color of the year,’ but now it doesn’t seem so funny to me- it feels both more sinister and more annoying than before.
Its not usually mentioning the phenomena of marketing creating desire where it didn’t belong, but its especially funny when you see it so raw and bare and cynical, especially with something as abstract and pure and physical as color.
Colors going in and out of fashion already seemed so constructed and out of touch with real people’s tastes and wants. It reminds me of when I was a child and people would ask me what my favorite color was. I would always say that I didn’t understand the question- how could I have a favorite color? They all served different purposes. What I can describe now that I didn’t have the vocabulary for then is also the fact that colors don’t make sense in isolation, and color is exciting in its contextual interaction, so how could I choose a favorite particular color? It felt like a sad choice I didn’t want to make. Eventually I grew tired of discussing color theory with an audience that wasn’t interested and I ended up stopping my rebuttal and just defaulted to blue, which was a safe choice that didn’t invite further discussion.
These in particular were stressed as being a part of the new portfolio push to the ‘tech as fashion/lifestyle’, though this was only explicated to the influencer group
It’s really infuriating that you have to click around and find a non-p*nt*ne color, and if anyone knows a free workaround that works on a cracked version of illustrator or photoshop, plz let me know. (I looked into it for 5 seconds and figured out how to do it. Not sure why I never did that before) This move also presaged their more recent controversy, so I can’t say I was surprised when I saw it in the news