Technologies To The People® Promotional Video, 1994

The basic logic of marketing is that market success has less to do
with what product you are selling and more to do with how you are
selling it. That means competition is ultimately as much a question
of discourse as of the quality of the product itself. TTTP has engaged
with this competition from day one through its tactical use of words
and images in the material distributed in support of its projects and
the company in general. In this promotional video, which is one
of several the company has produced, international tech-economic
experts are shown praising the values and ethics of TTTP against
a background of emphatic imagery. These aesthetics were common
fashion at the time, when information technology was seen as a new
evolutionary step in the process of creation and civilization. TTTP
connected with this narrative. However, the experts in the video
were hired and paid not by TTTP but by its market rivals—global
corporations such as Dell, Microsoft, and so forth. The promotional
video strings together sequences hijacked from corporate public relations
videos and appropriates, to much different ends, the abstract
concepts they use to deliver ultra-positive descriptions of the role
their companies play in the world of advanced technology. Instead
of promoting a business-centered worldview, TTTP’s video uses these
concepts to express a human-centered worldview. The video thereby
confronts the viewer with the question of which of the two worldviews—
or sociopolitical economies—he or she wants to use to define
“freedom,” “the future,” “flexibility,” and, not least, “access to technology.”
The video ends with the quotation “Because You’re Worth It,”
which in the context of TTTP suggests that the public is worth more
than the money it pays for consumer technology.