By Christian Gustafson01/12/97

Those new ads for Lotus Domino with the actor Dennis Leary (right?) are pretty entertaining. I especially like the one that shows him walking around a sort of Internet cafe, noting that most of the 'surfers' are just wasting their time on 'net trivium. Contrast this to a weenie-corporation like MCI, the MS-friendly jerk that tried to pull the plug overnight on IBM's systems when the latter announced that it was switching to AT&T (Nevermind that IBM basically carried MCI all throughout the 80's).
MCI advertises its Internet services with a sickening, patronizing P.C. commercial that tells us that the Internet has "no race," "no genders," "no age," and so forth. With each pander, some sort of victim looks out at you from the screen, whimpering a note of thanks to MCI for empowering him through the Internet. A young woman, a black businessman, a young deaf girl, a hunchback, two leper lesbians, etc etc. Puke.
AT&T, on the other hand, shows young fearless digital entrepreneurs surfing on a wave of street asphalt. We're reminded of the "creative destruction" inherent in a free-market economic order. We're reminded that it's surf or swim in a zero-cost transaction age. We're reminded that the woman surfing in the skirt has terrific legs ... yow! Can Microsoft run a commercial that doesn't pander to us like MCI does? Always some little kid clicking on a Martin Luther King, Jr. AVI file, or some other touchy-feely scene. Always. Without enlightenment through MS, the little tyke would probably be out injecting HIV into minority babies, or spray-painting swastikas on the side of the local 7-11. Or coding Java apps. "Solarized pictures of dead fat rock stars," Dennis Leary sneers. "You wanna surf, move to Maui."
Besides pushing Produkt, commercials say a good deal about the company, of course, and I much prefer the no-nonsense, practical attutudes of IBM and AT&T in these examples. MS and MCI are trying to appeal to a much wider audience, to make all of us feel good about them, for *some* foggy reason, with a P.C. cultural statement. And no! I don't accept the idea that those subtitled foreign IBM commercials were in any sense 'multicultural', even though they are filmed in dirty, undeveloped places like Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, Ireland, and Italy. All of these people in these ads are saying that they want to be like we good Americans, to make money, carry ThinkPads, have access to clean water and modern electronic banking, and so on. Through IBM, these things are possible; let's hope so for their sake.