We couldn't help but snap this photo of a Midtown Houston business that looks like it's closing its doors. That's right, it looked like Cyborg Tax is powering down its systems and heading toward the biomechanical business junkyard.
So, where did their clients go? I don't know, but in rummaging through their dumpster I found a partial list of their clients. Here it is in order of revenue:
1. Darth Vader (worth a percentage of the $4.2 billion revenue from Star Wars)
Probably the biggest client was Darth Vader. We know from his MySpace page he's still living large off all his movie dough. Does the Death Star count as a home office? Is the Sith religion eligible for non-profit status? That could save him a bundle.
2. The Terminator/CSM-101 (worth a percentage of about a billion and a half dollars)
He's ruthless, relentless, and unstoppable. He's more industrial than a thousand Soviet tank factories. He's "a hyperalloy combat chassis, micro processor-controlled, fully armored. Very tough." But you wouldn't know it on the outside because he's covered in "living human tissue—-flesh, skin, hair, blood...grown for the cyborgs."
And, because his advanced AI allows him to learn, he's picked up some new tricks. He can pick up new language skills and "not sound so much like a dork." He can learn not to kill, which is impressive since he's a Terminator. And he learned to take advantage of some really cutting-edge tax breaks thanks to Cyborg Tax—-like how to depreciate new parts, "own" himself through an offshore shell corporation, and avoid "technology transfer" issues when touring Asia.
All in all, he can expect a very respectable return on his investments. So he can afford a nice lifestyle until his power cells run down in the 2090's
3. Master Chief (with part of a billion dollars in revenue)
Master Chief Petty Officer John-117--known simply to all as 'Master Chief'--is the last hope for the survival of the human species. Mankind faces extinction at the hands of technologically advanced aliens known as the Covenant, whose religious leaders pronounced humanity as 'infedels' and declared a 'jihad' to purge the galaxy of homo sapiens.
Beat back from planet to planet, the Marines of the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) and Master Chief--the only surviving cyberneticaly enhanced SPARTAN super-soldier—-are the only thing standing between the Covenant and their final assault on Earth.
Sound as epic as Star Wars? It is, but it's an interactive, internet-enabled game you can play as a campaign or against other players around the world. Master Chief doesn't just save humanity, he propelled Microsoft's XBOX game console to the forefront against industry leader Sony's PlayStation franchise. The original Halo became the "killer app" that ensured the success of XBOX.
Then came Halo 2. It's launch broke records for video game sales--with $125 million in sales in the first 24 hours. It rivaled the revenue and media coverage of a major motion picture and cemented the power Master Chief had over his fans. Like Star Wars fans who camped out in front of theaters, teens and adults, fathers and sons, queued up late Monday night for the 12:01 AM November 9, 2004 release.
With Halo 3, the launch wasn't just a video game release. It was a major story, fueled by huge promotions and viral marketing, covered by the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, as well as live coverage from G4TV and thousands of bloggers. Master Chief took a place of honor on the homepage of Microsoft.com.
And so many people called in to work sick to play Halo 3, researchers measured the productivity loss to the American economy, dubbing it Halo Sickness.
So what is Master Chief doing with his hard earned cash? Probably just collecting interest, he's not the kind of guy to get a huge TV or pimped out ride. Like the original Spartans he's named for, Master Chief is the consummate professional soldier who ignores the niceties of life and concentrates on defending the rest of us. Bungie concept artist Eddie Smith said of Master Chief: "He does his job, walks off, doesn't even get the girl, he's that cool he doesn't need her." Thank you, Master Chief.
4. Seven of Nine
"I knew exactly what I was in for when I had my first costume fitting," explains actress Jeri Ryan. "Clearly my character was added to the show for sex appeal, which remains the one way to get attention very quickly." Say hello to the sexiest cyborg on our list: Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01. Also known as Seven of Nine, or just Seven.
Seven's story in a nutshell: Born a human named Annika Hansen, her parents were exobiologists who took her along for a deep space mission to study the Borg when she was just six years old. Not a great idea as it turns out. After nearly two years of shadowing the Borg, making over 9,000 log entries, and collecting 10 million teraquads of data, the Hansens are discovered and assimilated. About twenty years go by and Annika, now known by her Borg designation Seven of Nine, is a mature Borg drone serving on a Borg vessel in the Delta Quadrant.
This where we meet Seven, during the Star Trek: Voyager two-part episode Scorpion. The Voyager crew and the Borg face a common enemy called Species 8472, and are forced to work together. Seven is the designated representative from the Borg assigned to the U.S.S. Voyager. After she tries to assimilate the crew, they disable her ability to communicate with the Borg collective consciousness--and she begins a long journey toward reclaiming the individuality lost when she was only six years old.
It is this struggle to understand individuality and humanity—a role filled in other Star Trek series' by Spock and Data characters—that provided a needed element to the series. Although Ryan acknowledges her sexy attire as a way to boost ratings, it was Seven's outsider perspective, honest probing of human behavior, and even pointed questioning of the Captains decisions that she says "brought conflict to the show, which was sadly lacking."
Smart, sexy, and cybernetic. When it comes to Seven of Nine's charms, resistance is indeed futile for most male sci-fi fans. But why was she at Cyborg Tax? Unknown. It's common knowledge that money is irrelevant in the 24th century.
New, young faces are a good start at refreshing a classic 40-year old sci-fi series. But this film is being “reimagined” be director J.J. Abrams. Think Tim Burton’s Batman, which transformed the campy “shark repellent”-wielding Adam West incarnation and took inspiration from the darker beginnings of the caped crusader.
In the original five year mission, Star Trek offered sixties viewers a Utopian future in stark contrast to the racial difficulties, social tension, and looming nuclear oblivion of the real world. Star Trek showed us a world where not just men and women, blacks and whites, and Americans and Russians worked in harmony together, but humanity overcame war and strife to form a Federation of Planets with other species.
It also inspired our techo-fetishes: communicators inspired a Motorola engineer to design the cell phone, Uhura sported a “Bluetooth” headset, computers talked to us, and the impulse engine is in use today on NASA space probes. Transporters and warp drive were more than a plot device—they gave us hope of a grand future peacefully exploring the final frontier.
And it was all new and fresh and inspiring. In later years, Star Trek became more and more formulaic. Visual artist Gabriel Köerner is working on the new movie, and offered insightful criticism of the last Star Trek TV series, Enterprise. “They did my dream show,” says Köerner, “and closed the book on doing a good take on that concept. It was essentially a surrogate Original Series.”
“It’s a prequel to The Next Generation. It shared TNG and Voyager’s look, feel, scoring, pacing, dialog, storytelling that centered around a white male Captain, a logical Vulcan to be his judgment, and a southern man of bold feelings to be his conscience. Nothing about it was daring or different. An awful vocal soft rock theme, taking ‘Star Trek’ out of the title, guys in button-down shirts and ties, little more rough language, and whipping up ‘prequel’ words for all the same luxurious technology does not make a ‘Proto-Trek’. Its producers blamed its premise for being ‘too different to accept’ for its demise. It was that it wasn’t different.”
The new movie is expected to bring Star Trek to the mainstream and bring back the excitement. Köerner goes on to discuss his inspiration for the upgraded movie version of the NCC-1701:
“I took inspiration from old Chryslers, women, Starship Troopers, women, art deco, and Jonathan Ive and mid century modern design. I wanted a flying Jayne Mansfield, Captain James Tiberius Muthafuckin’ Kirk’s Flying Sex Machine. His hot rod. The only lady he keeps around longer than a beamdown to the planet of the week.”
As a lifelong Trek fan, I hope the movie is as hot as the ship design—and pumps new life into the Star Trek brand.
What novel offers a literary hero for Art Directors and Brand Managers? It’s from sci-fi author William Gibson, an unexpected writer on the subject of global marketing. Gibson, who in 1984 gave us the groundbreaking “Neuromancer”, coined now commonplace terms like “cyberspace” and “the matrix” years before either the Internet or Agent Smith.
In his latest work, "Pattern Recognition", Gibson is no longer inventing future cultures fast-forwarded by technology. Set in our present, just after 9/11, "Pattern Recognition" portrays a world with much of Gibson’s future already existing in our present. “The world,” says Gibson of his latest book, “is weird enough without needing to invent anything.”
The hero of this story is Cacye Pollard. As heroes go, she doesn’t have adamantium claws or a nifty tool belt. Her power is a pathological sensitivity to branding. "Pattern Recognition" is about Cayce’s uncanny ability to sense the architecture, the patterns, of our global brand-obsessed culture.
Her brand sensitivity is so strong that she’s physically allergic to some brands and logos. A wrong turn in a London department store sends Cacye reeling away from a Tommy Hilfiger display. She pays a local handyman to grind the trademarks off buttons on her 501’s. Her black DKNY cardigan is “un-Dikini-ed” with a pair of nail scissors. Worst of all is the appearance of Bibendum, the proper name of Michelin’s chubby tire man, whose image can cause Cacye to vomit.
She uses her brand sensitivity as a freelance "coolhunter" with an almost supernatural ability to spot trends and products before they hit the commercial big time. Cayce also consults as a logo-evaluator for multinational mega-advertising agencies. She can just look at a logo and “know” whether it will succeed or if the illustrators need to go back to the drawing board. She does it intuitively, and with flawless accuracy.
In his previous stories, Gibson created worlds with AI’s acting as puppet masters pulling invisible strings and setting change in motion. In "Pattern Recognition", it’s advertising agencies that are pulling the strings. In particular, the ad firm Blue Ant.
Blue Ant is described as “relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational. The agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as some non-carbon-based life-form, entirely sprung from the smooth and ironic brow of its founder, Hubertus Bigend.”
Bigend is “a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates” who “seems to have no sense at all that his name might seem ridiculous to anyone, ever.”
The plot takes off when Cacye agrees to take an unusual assignment from Blue Ant. Bigend wants Cacye to use her sensitivity to track down the creator of mysterious, brief segments of beautifully rendered film uploaded anonymously to the Web by some undiscovered 'garage Kubrick'.
The footage created a global buzz. It’s spawned an authentic subculture with 'footageheads' who gather on virtual forums to argue about its meaning and origin. Bigend sees it as a completely new, and very lucrative, way for Blue Ant to establish itself as the preeminent marketing force of the 21st Century. "I saw attention focused daily on a product that may not even exist," Bigend says. "The most brilliant marketing plot of this very young century. And new. Something entirely new."
The point of all this is that stories of futuristic technology no longer shock us because the future, in many ways, has already arrived. Gibson’s trademark cyber-genre has become passé and the truth of our popular culture is now stranger than science fiction.
When Cacye’s quest for the footage takes her to Japan, she comments on the “remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home.”
Like the add-ons of the Tokyo skyline, brands themselves are Legos from which our marketing-centric world is built. Read “Pattern Recognition” and revel in the future world we’re constructing right now.
The Matrix is best known for its warped reality created inside a vast virtual
world. But, inside that world, there are still real world rules. Trinity, who’s
a top hacker, actually used a ‘real’ world hack to take down the
power grid.
