“The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.”
-Al Reis, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
Ask around. Pretty sure the general consensus, among those not profiting directly or indirectly, is that the military industrial complex is a bad idea.
Names like Ford, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, or Halliburton, to name a few, have all been heard before. These defense contractors make money off war, or the takeover of new territory, and have a vested interest in its continuation. They use those earnings to influence law and to promote what is profitable to them, and pay politicians and media on all sides (of the aisle and the conflict) to dream up reasons to convince the people to let them buy and use their uber pricey products with the money stolen from peoples’ paychecks. Reasons we later come to find out were almost always not entirely truthful, or all out lies. Suffice to say there is enough word on the street to conclude that manipulating public opinion in an effort to profiteer wealth or power off ‘war’ and ‘defense’ is something most people are not down with. Until it is marketed right, that is.
Because the harsh reality is these companies only get away with it when enough people buy the sales pitch. And when enough of us finally catch on? Well, it’s time for a brand new marketing strategy and a brand new sales pitch. From fighting an evil enemy, to promoting freedom, providing defense, offering aid, spreading democracy, stopping terror, safeguarding health, and ensuring safety, there is always an award winning positioning campaign behind every war. Then some time later another award winning positioning campaign will come around and convince everyone that the old campaign was wrong, and that they are wrong for believing it. It’s marketing. It’s positioning.
At Tinfoil Hat Time we understand that an unfavorable public opinion of tinfoil hat wearers is one of our biggest hurdles. We believe it is the unfortunate result of decades of negative stereotypes, mostly due to the imagination of Hollywood fiction. Our marketing strategy should include education dispelling the myths about tinfoil hat wearers. All marketing materials should assuage pre-existing fears with relatable messages that promote the idea of tinfoil hats as normal, relying heavily on the pre-existing humorous, fun, and satirical aspects of tinfoil hats.
It’s not about selling a product, it’s about changing perceptions. Perception is the name of the game, a fact taught openly in marketing classes, and the job of the marketer is to alter it. In the case of ‘Positioning’ as Al Reis, who is co-credited with being the first to use the idea in marketing, so eloquently puts on the cover of his book, it is the battle for your mind.
All this being said, it is reasonable to assume that a brand new U.S. based military industrial complex, involving foreign investment, aimed at U.S. citizens, would require a brand new marketing strategy, right? An effort to alter perception in order to create a need, some reason for it to seem like a good idea to the people. Oh, but who in the heck would want to do that, you ask?
“As Knightscope looks over a multi-decade planning horizon, we believe there is an opportunity to build a $30 billion company analogous to a defense contractor, but instead focused inward on operations on our own soil.”
Yes, Knightscope. A U.S. based company who cites, get this, Sandy Hook as the reason for it’s “master plan to make the U.S. the safest country in the world”. However, it’s main investors include the number one telecommunications company in Japan DOCOMO (nttdocomo.co.jp/english/corporate/about/outline/index.html), a Chinese communist but U.S. sanctioned tech firm called NetPosa whose goal is to create AI surveillance cities (en.netposa.com/), the Japanese based global corporation Konica Minolta that boasts of just under one trillion in annual sales (konicaminolta.com/global-en/corporate/glance.html), an investment firm called Proud Ventures whose website is headed with a picture of Knightscope robots in front of the now heavily guarded and off-limits U.S. Capital (proud.ventures/), and, well, just about anyone who wants:
A recently appearing flood of online ads depicting 328 million Americans as being woefully under policed by only 2 million law enforcement officers asks the common laborer to “Join Us and Be a Force for Good!” by crowd funding a company with a valuation of $447 million. In return for a speculative, illiquid, high risk investment that they may lose in its entirety, the people can help Knightscope alleviate that problem.
That’s right, the problem of too few cops in America. Perfectly following a summer of defunded police departments and cops being stereotyped, intimidated, and bullied into retirement over isolated incidents before they even went to trial, at the encouragement of media companies who make their money off advertising dollars. A summer where a masterful positioning campaign depicted human police officers as uniformly racist and in need of replacement, as a problem to be solved as a whole. A problem that Knightscope just happens to have the perfect product for. A product that an enitity which sees its future self as “a $30 billion company analogous to a defense contractor” has been “multi-decade horizon planning” since 2015. A product, by the way, that functions. Their first units shipped in 2015, and by 2018 Knightscope had 36 contracts. Boasting over one million hours of actual real life robot security and surveillance, their Autonomous Security Robots (ASR) guard areas like parking lots, corporate campuses, shopping malls, and yes, even work for the police.
microphone and camera with night vision having, face recognizing, thermal anomaly detecting, automatic license plate reading, 24/7/365 operating, “force multiplying physical deterrence” robot works for the Huntington Park Police in California. The K5 “achieves measurable results” such as a 46% reduction in reported crime, a 68% reduction in citations, and a 27% increase in arrests. That’s right, an INCREASE in arrests of twenty seven percent. Interested in a demo? Visit: https://www.knightscope.com/k5/
Science fiction? Nope, just a brand new military industrial complex for a brand new world. A world in which war is a thing of the past and your homeland is the most dangerous place on Earth. Where fellow countrymen are the scapegoats by which defense contractors sell fear and gain lucrative profits. How long until they incorporate weed detectors and merge them with quadcopters in order to protect people from ‘black market’ growers? As Knightscope states on their startengine.com page, “Humans can only see so much - but robots can see much more.”
Certainly, if the history of war tells us anything, when the time comes the people will fall prey to the positioning campaign. They will latch on to the narrative, sieze the moral highground, perpetuate the stereotypes, and shout down anyone who sees things otherwise.
Until enough of us finally catch on.
