If you’re wondering who’s inspired this little tidbit, it was Seth Godin, with this small text or blog post. Reason why I can’t settle on one single term for it is that there is no unequivocal sign to designate specifically what it is this fellow Seth Godin does.
Hell, I haven’t been able to call myself an “engineer” for a long, long time. If you ask me how I make money, that’s an easier question to satisfy, although the reply can be quite lengthy. Just like that, saying that Seth Godin is a marketer is completely missing the point.
Now, I’m positive Seth uses engineers here as a blanket term. I do the same when I talk of priests, psychoanalysts and family. They’re very impersonal words I was brought to hate by my particular conditions. Nothing personal, and I’m not being sarcastic on this one. They refer to some far, far away dudes that I can safely antagonize inside my head.
I’ve come to believe that words have to be fuzzy in order to work. Thus, a chair is an object people sit in. Very loose, vague description, and it must remain so otherwise the word itself would be rendered useless.
The point that Seth makes in his article is terribly valid: market is king. This goes for every corner of the world, since the beginning of human time, and even for teenagers complaining about “the system”. It has absolutely nothing to do with old bankers censoring pornography in the UK.
More specifically, the market has to be redefined, or – put more bluntly – we must forget what we think we know about the market. Whatever it is that Seth Godin meant when he took it upon himself to speak on our behalf, I can only guess, estimate and approximate his intentions. True communication is a fallacy, and practical folks would do good in just forgetting about all this geeky mumbo-jumbo. Calm down and I’ll tell you what Seth means.
The market is the capitalist format for the old possibility condition factor.
A possibility condition is some hoop you have to jump through in order to get in the game. If you’re an entrepreneur or a marketer, the market is the territory you have to live in. If you can stay there long enough and find sustenance and a breathable atmosphere, then you’re gold. That’s what Seth means by self-funding method.
As an aside, I still think of what Seth does as writing a column. Sure, he fits the profile of a blogger: put your website up, write small pieces with some regularity, publish books. Is he getting paid to do it? Is it cool? What is it exactly that he writes about? These are questions a corporation would ask of a would-be writer/journalist undergoing consideration for a position. Boring questions that try to explain what is happening, even though the explanations are more confusing than explanatory, even though the piece itself flows back and forth between many domains of human knowledge and activity.
This is where things get interesting, because definitions are finally revealed as what they really are: little prisons with frail bars that could never contain what’s inside them. Impossible as it is, the bars still stand.
