I visited Portugal as a teenager, and Italy too. I have fond memories of those trips with family and manye memories stand out, but between all of those memories I have strange recollections about ice cream. We went to plenty of touristy places and we went in the summer; there were a lot of ice cream trucks and trailers floating around by the beaches and in the city streets we walked down. And on each of those little cards or cars was packaging that felt somehow outside of time. William Gibson might have called it from a “Mirror World.” That’s how he describes the product design ideology from the UK, a place formerly obsessed with self-sufficient manufacturing. There’s a whole universe of consumer electronics and utilities over there that feels very familiar, yet totally alien. 

More pervasive than the vestigial English product design multi-verse is, to my mind, the world of advertising and design. 

Those ice cream packages felt as though they were from a past I never experienced, unfolding today. Europe is a place that feels altogether much older than America, becuase as far as architecture and the culture of the people I’m familiar with are concerned, it is. But buildings are old, old, paintings are old, old, old, ice cream packaging over there feels old while it’s still new. 

This is a feeling I observed while visiting my grandparents in Montreal and watching Canadian television. Their advertisements feel like ancient reruns from an alternative universe. 

It’s as though the marketing vocabulary outside of the US is a decade behind and autistic. 

I was discussing this feeling with some friends and I took it a step further. If US is the present, and Europe and Canada are some fringe of the past...where’s the future? Japan’s too weird for that, I decided. But Russia? 

Russian marketing might not be pleasurable to observe but their psycho-sphere manipulation is top notch. Where do you think Donald Trump and the brexiteers learned how to manipulate people?

The pipe line of out and out propaganda used to empower governments to and from marketing to sell soda and corn-based snack foods is likely something that’s been studied.