"Give a fuck about your lifestyle." KID CUDI, Mojo So Dope
Kid Cudi rejects mimetic desire. He says he doesn't care about your lifestyle, he's just busy living his own. This is cool -- it makes us want to be like him. We care about his lifestyle all the more. Surely he is closer to some source of truth than we are. Cool and mimetic desire are wrapped up in one, from Kid Cudi to James Dean.
In contrast, Facebook is about manufacturing exactly the kind of desire that Kid Cudi rejects. We see what our peer group is doing -- the people who are like us. They go to our same schools. We grow up together. We work at the same places. But some do better than others, and we see it in their trips, their new purchases, their latest hobbies. All the things about what they do with their time.
But this is specifically what traditional media (music, movies, TV, magazines, newspapers) have been doing since the beginning. Celebrity news manufactures desire for clothing, food, travel -- all manner of lifestyle choices. Did you hear Larry Ellison bought an island? I'd like to buy an island someday too. Lil Wayne is giving up rapping for skateboarding. I want to skateboard. But it costs money to manufacture desire. PR, display ads. That's why every business in the world spends money on marketing. It's a cost center, a means to an end. Ads are a means to manufacturing desire.
What's better than manufacturing desire? Satisfying desire. That's what Google is about. When we want something, we look for it there. AdWords means that when someone wants something, you can probabilistically buy a piece of their brain by showing them an ad that they might click on at the moment they want it. You don't have to spend any time manufacturing desire, they've already got it. The entire world's media is already busy generating desire, from Facebook to CNN to the magazines of Conde Nast, to the party I went to last week. In some sense, that is why Google's insistence on gearing their entire strategy around Google+ is inexplicable. What they have is already superior. Satisfying desire is orders of magnitude more valuable than manufacturing it.