Emptyage

But turning your profile picture green, adding a black banner over your face, or tacking your surname onto another online petition is the adult equivalent of slapping a peace sign onto your teenage backpack. Fauxtivism is worse than nothing—it trivializes the issue, mistakes gesture for action—and makes you feel good when you haven’t accomplished a thing.

CES, like many industry conventions, will be thick with “booth babes”—women paid to stand around in revealing clothing in order to draw men to the booths and see terrible products. That’s regrettable. Not only because it is sexist, but also because it just makes your company look like a bunch of undersexed nimrods. If the only way you can get people interested in your product is to have a scantily clad woman appear next to it for no apparent reason, your products are probably awful. And besides, it’s boring. It’s just boring. It’s been done so many times, for so many years, that my only reaction to seeing a booth bunny is to think, “Here is a company that is completely out of ideas.” Look, technology industry CEOs, if you want to stick a butt in my face, I’d be way more impressed if you made it your own fat ass. Butter up that big white rump of yours and squeeze it into a little red thong. Strap those mantits into a cheetah bra that lets your pale hairy cleavage see the light of day. Do that, and I promise you that I’ll listen to your pitch. (Even if it’s a little awkward for both of us!) Better yet, get the whole pasty, overpaid, C-level crew into some sexy swimwear. People will talk. You’ll be the buzz.

The big knock on Twitter, in its early days, was that it was simply a place for people to post what they were eating for lunch. And who cares about that? Who cares? How asinine. How banal.

Well, sometimes I care. It depends entirely on who is eating, and not at all what they are having. Yes, that may be banal, but what moments in life that truly matter are not? Over the last two weeks on Path I saw, again and again, the triumph of banality.

But as Romney begins to set his sights on the general election, shifting his attacks from his Republican opponents to President Obama, a disturbing pattern is emerging. Romney is moving from making false promises to bearing false witness, suggesting that the person at Romney’s core isn’t a moderate. It’s a liar. Twice in recent days Romney and his campaign have repeated President Obama’s words in a false context. Romney didn’t shade their meaning, or twist the words in a hey-it’s-politics way. He lied about what the president said.

But political journalism—unlike war reporting—long ago stopped being about what is true or important. Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, reporters began covering politics like sports and entertainment. How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers? On the other hand, there’s an endless appetite for stories about Santorum’s effort to reach out beyond his evangelical base, or Gingrich playing the expectations game in Iowa. This stuff is political candy.