Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Sucker Showcase

Many years ago, the original cast of Saturday Night Live did a sketch about a game show called “Irwin Mainway’s Sucker Showcase” during which the host would tell various credulous idiots (the titular “suckers”) various obvious lies in order to get them to humiliate and/or injure themselves. It’s a variation on the old idea that people will do literally anything in order to get on television or win money; when you combine the two there’s almost nothing that is too obviously stupid to keep people from doing it. Dan Ackroyd was the MC (Irwin Mainway) and Steve Martin was the show’s “returning champion” – e.g., somebody so dim that he couldn’t figure out the show’s true nature even after enduring an episode of it. Steven Martin later included the sketch in his own T.V. special; you can find the clip here: https://youtu.be/4Hi8DIEhb_o

What seems most remarkable to me isn’t so much how prescient this sketch turns out to have been as how much more honest the format is, to the viewers if not to the contestants. Modern reality television has subjected contestants to activities at least this unpleasant, and potentially even more hazardous to life and limb, starting with shows like “Fear Factor” and “Survivor” and continuing to the current day. But where the fictional Irwin Mainway and whatever heartless production company was behind him were openly making fun of people, and inviting their audience to laugh at these suckers/contestants, the modern reality show hosts (and, one assumes, producers) go on endlessly about how exciting and competitive their contests are, and how well their contestants are dealing with the challenges involved…

Now, I would be the first to admit that this isn’t a new idea. A number of television series have based episodes around the concept over the years, and there are at least three full-length movies of which I’m aware that have been released on the same themes. I will also admit, however, that I have started worrying about the long-term effects of both encouraging people to be credulous idiots and encouraging other people to watch them and laugh. As the world becomes more complicated all around us it gets easier every year to make an innocent mistake that can screw up your entire life. Even ten years ago if you lost your cell phone, the worst that would happen is that you would report it as lost/stolen, have the carrier deactivate the account and give you a new one, and buy a new phone. If you’d bothered to sign up for the insurance, they’d just give you a new one. Today that same phone could allow someone to drain your bank account and max out all of your credit cards before you noticed it was gone…

I point this out for a number of reasons, not least of which is I’m worried about the corrosive effect this is having on our society; however, the effects on business, and particularly on business strategy, may be even worse. Business runs on information, even more so than money, and without complete and accurate information it isn’t possible to plan your activities or make competent decisions. If you base your calculations on bad data there is no way you can possibly get the right answers (the infamous programmer’s term GIGO – garbage in, garbage out – comes into play here), and with people deliberately introducing nonsensical information into reference sources just for the fun of watching more people behave like credulous idiots it’s getting harder every day just to tell what is real and what is supposed to be humor…

Earlier this week I noticed a clickbait item trumpeting that Don Knotts had just blurted out his “real” reasons for leaving the Andy Griffith Show. Which sounds like minor celebrity gossip, at best, until you realize that Mr. Knotts has been dead for eleven years as of today’s writing, and he revealed the complete rationale for leaving the show in the early 1970s. Heaven only knows what kinds of malware or online scams you might be subjecting yourself to if you clicked on that link, but the one thing I’m fairly sure of is that if you did click on it you would not have learned anything about the late Don Knotts that everybody else didn’t know forty years ago. If you make a practice of clicking on such links you probably won’t learn anything else, either, but you’ll definitely have qualified for an appearance on the next Irwin Mainway production when it comes out…

And that’s still not even the worst of it…

No comments: