Narrative Warfare: Welcome To #Brand Zero

Today's post is about something you can do here and now. You can do it, and you can easily explain how to do it to your friends and family. Welcome to #Brand Zero.

#Brand Zero came about as a strategy to deal with converged corporations wearing IPs as skinsuits so that the Thralls of Empire within can use nostaglia as a spoonful of sugar to make the poison go down. What you see above is the core of it; it is a strategy not of love, or of hate, but of deliberate and cold-blooded indifference. This is a strategy of turning one's heart harder than stone towards those corporate skinsuits.

This is because the corporate cult centers figured out that outrage works just as well--if not better--than lovefests for remaining in the public eye, and coupling this outrage with maintaining a sense of power over the audience induces a learned helplessness in that population. This manifests as "I hate you (Company), but I'll buy your next product anyway."

The drama channels on YouTube, therefore, are suckers playing into this trap.

The answer, therefore, is to cut the converged out of the IP altogether. These skinsuits, in entertainment media of all sorts, are disposable, expendable, and fungible; they can be ignored, and the solution is to do just that- and thus cut them out of the loop, and thus the scene, entirely.

They need you. Specifically, they need your time and attention more than they need your money, love, or hate. They cannot exist without it. Don't talk about the converged skinsuits at all. Certainly not in public, and try your best to refrain in private.

For every game, every hobby, every pursuit you can work around the skinsuits and deny them time, attention, money, and energy. Replace them--never leave a void--with something else, preferably something you can do by yourself for yourself that fills that same niche. If you play that epic gothic space opera wargame, buy or print models from another source, use paints from another company, and get the rules you need for free from online sources. Ignore the company entirely and enjoy the game as the hobby it is meant to be.

You'd be surprised how far this is being applied, coupled with home manufacturing breakthroughs, to pursuits far beyond hobbyist entertainment of all sorts.

We don't need Empire's thralls. Empire falls.