“These busted boomers,” writes Constance Lavendar, “are clinging to an argument based on authority, hierarchy, and privilege; they despise digital democracy because it threatens their existence, challenges their authority, and breaks down their well-preserved hierarchy.”

She was commenting on a post in the Chronicle, about The Cult of the Amateur, a book by Andrew Keen about how “experts” are more valuable than the chattering masses, and the internet is killing culture. You could tell she is incensed. I felt I had heard this kind of ‘busted boomer’ argument before.

It emerged from Maurice Saatchi in his column in The Financial Timesin May. (Maurice Saatchi, as you may recall was the legendary co-founder of Saatchi and Saatchi, the ad agency that launched Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party in Britain in the late seventies.) The core of (Lord) Maurice’s argument in “Google Data Vs Human Nature” is in these two sentences:

“It is an inconvenient and stubborn fact that outside Newton’s universe, where physical laws govern reality, the world is conditioned by perception.”

He goes on to say:
“People do not know what they want until a brilliant person shows them.”

In his line of reasoning, perception works because people are stupid, and need to be told all the time! That’s very inspiring, isn’t it, in this day and age?

The so-called ‘brilliant people in agencies didn’t come up with the stunning creative work such as Diet Coke/Mentos uncommercial, or the user-generated content that people are riveted to on niche sites. The old guard still wishes that the work of these ’stupid’ people and ‘amateurs’ –on Wikipedia, on blogs, on YouTube– did not exist.

In a later column, Mr. Saatchi wrote: “Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising.” You know he is troubled by this algorithm thing. It must be tough watching the digital natives over-run the place.