Very nice video, but, really, this is the most useless product I've ever seen.
Anonymous
The acquisition of some degree of knowledge about this Trotify malarkey has been, as you can imagine, some "collateral damage" resulting from my assiduous stalking of Kimi and Steph.It's actually pretty instructive about such topics as hipsterism, what changes and what is likely to forever stay the same in the British social and economic system etc. The guy behind Trotify - who appears to be constantly giving a leg-up to our well-shod former moderator in matters far more significant and lucrative than this one - obviously set about the Trotify project partly as a lark, but partly also with the very canny intention of getting the title "Managing Director of a (Small but Viable) Start-Up" onto his CV (along with correspondent, albeit subordinate, titles onto the CVs of his friends). As the device will now,as of March, actually be going into production, this ploy has certainly worked. The question, though, of how "viable" Trotify actually was certainly doesn't bear much honest scrutiny. They set themselves a target of 1000 advance orders as the indication of whether it would be economically viable to actually start producing and shipping the product - i.e. they behaved and spoke as if this "start-up" were subject to the same hard economic realities as any other small company trying to get its undertaking off the ground. I remember, though, being struck by the fact that the guy in question was stating how much he was looking forward to going into actual production already about a month ago. At that point, about 70 of the 100 days they had set themselves to achieve their "1000 advance orders" target had already elapsed, and they were nowhere near having achieved 70% of that figure (I think they had "sold" about 500 by that time). This apparently misplaced confidence betrayed the real state of affairs - and real "rules of the game" - here. The guy behind Trotify is the son of a multi-millionaire, Westminster School and Cambridge-educated, and has, I am sure, enough money
Anonymous
at his disposal to buy up the specified 1000 units a dozen times over himself. I doubt if he had to buy ALL of them. The Trotify thing was also coordinated through the "calling in of favours" from contacts on social networks like Facebook, and a guy with that much money at his disposal has, it goes without saying, several hundfred Facebook "friends" and subscribers who will readily buy his junk if there is a chance of he and his friends buying theirs. I would venture, however, the guesstimate that Trotify "sales" divide up something like this: out of the target 1000, maybe 400 were bought by Facebook and other "friends", another 300 or so by people directly involved in the company producing them (certainly predomnantly by the rich "inventor" himself), leaving 300 genuine sales, at a VERY liberal estimate, at best. Under normal, traditional capitalist market conditions, this would be "robbing Peter to pay Paul", a pure and simple "vanity project" run entirely at a loss by someone who doesn't need to worry about money. In today's world where "symbolic capital", "image" and "appearance" count for far far more than anything that Marx and other 19th and 20th century theorists treated as "hard realities", however, this "vanity project" is also a very, very clever move in the game to get on in the "real world". As I say, the guy can now claim, at what is really (from his viewpoint) a relatively minor cost, to have "successfully got a small company off the ground". It's a "Potemkin village", of course, but very few people beyond himself and his friends know that. On the basis of such "Potemkin" projects, which ostensibly demonstrate know-how and organizational ability he can go on to,say, make a bid for 0.5 million pounds in funding to organize next year's Wikimedia conference.
Anonymous
Trotify, of course, is only the "tip of the iceberg", and one of the least egregioous scams and cases of huge cojones, in the "Shoreditch hipster capitalism" of the second decade of the third millenium. You may remember that a much more widely-covered business "success story" of recent months also related to a product being marketed from Shoreditch. I won't stop writing to look up names and details, but I'm talking about the app that was developed by a 17-year-old schoolboy and sold to, was it Apple? anyway many huge international companies all around the globe. I know no more about apps than I do about bicycle-coconut hybridizing, but I have no doubt that the app in question is a much more genuinely useful product than the Trotify. Nevertheless, the two projects do display clear similarities. Certain details almost never mentioned in the news stories about the "app-developing schoolboy wonder" were that his father was the vice-president of Morgan Stanley merchant bank, his mother an international corporate lawyer involved in his undertaking from the start, and a large percentage of the people who "discovered" and bought his product probably people his parents had long-standing contacts with already. On a much much larger scale, this app project mirrors the structure and principle of Trotify, and vice versa. Neither project ever actually had any chance of FAILING. The element of "risk" and "venture" that has traditionally been a major basis for the moral justification of capitalism - "the entrepreneur deserves his profits because he takes RISKS" - is simply not present in the least in either of these projects. Such "start-ups" are merely sociallization measures for the ushering along of the children of the upper and upper-middle classes on paths that they are firmly set to follow anyway.
Anonymous
>>98 I think you're quite right about the orders. There was no way, even on the most liberal models that they could have made up the rest of the orders since I last checked on them (this was after they'd been all over reddit and a few small tech blogs). I'm sure for them this was 'fun' too, as well as the purely strategic CV embellishment. It makes me sick, but then I never really do anything new, and I'm not convinced I would if I had access to a thousand pound CNC machine and no obligation to do what is basically self-immolation to keep me in warm food and techno music. I suppose it's do with the nature of what I consider a 'risk' (everything) as you suggest, 'ventures' are just vague dreams of stuff I would do if I had the 'motivation' or the 'capital'.
Anonymous
>>98 I don't really get why rich people bother with all that.
>>261 Yeah. The post might be something good to refer back to next time some bayng pack forms in the Tinychat around a statement of Kimi's to the effect that I denounced RavRav to her college, tried to blackmail their "landlord" etc etc etc. The "landlord" is the millionaire pseudo-"start-up"-CEO referred to in the post, a young man who lives in lies, wakes to lies, eats lies, gooes to bed to lies....as do Kimi and RavRav and all the other darling little citizens of our "post-modern" paradise who share a house with them. I suppose one has to be fair to them - and to the rest of you - and concede that the category "lie" doesn't really have the validity and significance it had in the "modern" age that ended, what?, thirty, forty, fifty years ago. The people who jeer and snigger at me and poke at me with your petty cowardly little denials that what did happen happened and insistences that what didn't happen did ARE still "liars" in the old sense, of course. But that sense is so obscured and confused for your generation by all the Foucauldian and Baudrllardian mockery of the very idea of a distinction between "true" and "false" - Nietzsche, God bless him, has a lot to answer for - that I can't deny, much as I feel inclined to, the possibility that you sneer at the idea of someoe calling someone else a "liar" because you genuinely DON'T KNOW WHAT TRUTH IS. I had ten or so years of scrabbling together what culture I could on the streets of London, though, before I immersed myself for a year or so in all the Frenchifying "reality is a discursively constructed product of shared imaginary projections" bullshit, and, in my dealings with individuals like Kimi, RavRav and their Trotify-touting accomplices, I still have one or two rock-firm "modernist" points of orientation to fall back on, like this one, from my 19th year on earth
The Sex Pistols fell apart around the "modernist" / "post-modernist" split - with the older party, ironically, Malcolm
Anonymous
>>262 MacLaren, insisting on the "younger" ideology - that "nothing is real" - against the younger party: the fearsome and beautiful John Lydon. I held with Lydon then and hold with him now. Anger is an energy. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Anonymous
>>263 A thread - now that the idea has occurred to me - about the place of the Sex Pistols and all that followed from them in the culture of the past fifty years might introduce some much-needed intelligence into this silly dung-heap of a board. There is a certain very important common issue linking all that Lydon and MacLaren got up to in the period 1975-80 and the more than slightly despicable "Trotify" project that Kimi and her friends are trying to surf to a little prosperity on the back of. It is this very issue I was talking about: "image and reality". Lydon, God bless his heart, has been fighting a hopeless rearguard action against the tide of "everything is just image; you can say what you want and do what you want because there is no 'reality' anyway" that has been gradually drowning occidental and indeed global culture for about four decades now. His choosing of the name "Public Image" for his band was a sneering mockery - and "guise", if you want to learn how to sneer, learn from Johnny Rotten - of the idea that "image" was of any importance at all beside what a person REALLY is. And a sideswipe at his old manager, MacLaren - who, a hipster long long long "avant la lettre", had tried to use Lydon, Matlock and the others to create his post-modern dream of a band completely without will or substance, a game with media-images intended to generate money from nowhere (the Pistols' actual income came mostly from pay-offs from record companies who, after MacLaren's engineering of public scandals, paid to dissolve contracts that had not yet resulted in any product). A smug, deceitful, "you-kid-me-and-I'll-kid-you-back" monstrosity like "Trotify" . and of course - morning, whoever you are - a thousand other Shoreditch pseudo-start-ups are MacLaren's sadly definitive victory over Lydon. But Lydon goes on, all the same. I leave you with this link to that indomitable rebel and DECENT HUMAN BEING, whose "anarchism" nowadays, it seems, goes under the name of the
>>266 Kimi still looks cute as fuck in that publicity photo, though. Sweet little bowl-cut tomboy with her ironic lop-sided grin and her wounded arm from srabbling about like God knows what sort of mischievous little proto-dyke under God knows what sort of sheet of corrugated iron on God knows what sort of abandoned post-industrial empty lot. I love her. Pity's she's such a cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunt......
