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by jameshart 1778 days ago
I love the tone of this, it’s like the musings of an explorer who discovered a jungle city abandoned by a mysterious civilization.

“there were old wall slogans inside that must have been added to motivate and inspire the employees” … “ the tall building had several brick structures on the lower main level. He suspected that those structures probably had plants and ferns in them so that important business clients and employees would be met with a pleasing sight upon entering.” … “Martin Gonzalez also noticed pictures of people using Motorola products that had been left on the walls of the building.”

Indeed, the ways of the people of the Motorola civilization of around 2011CE are mysterious and strange to us. Perhaps the central atrium served some kind of ritual purpose? Were prisoners perhaps thrown off the upper balconies as a sacrifice to their gods? We will never really know.

7 comments

Archaeologists have found inscriptions referring to the cult of "Six Sigma", which is hypothesized to be a primitive form of ritual statistical magic.
@pfdietz the battered remnants of the cult of "Six Sigma" looks strangely like post Soviet abandoned building triumphalist wall writings, albeit with western typography
Back in the U6σR
I used to work for a Motorola-owned company. Digital Six Sigma brings back a lot of “belt training” memories
A wonderful example of the cargo cult phenomenon!
Skimming your comment I read “ritual sadistic magic”. Funny how the mind wanders
“Ritual statistical magic” is even more genius: Future civilizations will look down on us for believing that statistics were part of science, not not seeing the hand of the cleric in making them up, just like we look down on middle ages for believing anything monks pretended to translate from the Bible, which in fact they made up.
All praise the holly p-value! May the null hypothesis be with you!
Perhaps they will regard our current obsession with machine learning as a sort of Tower of Babel built out of made-up statistics. Or a castle in the sky.
Or as their ancestors?
Many years ago I picked up a book on six sigma. First page was all about how you attack anyone that disagrees with six sigma.

Okay so this is a cult.

Put the book down and spent remaining career avoiding anyplace that mentioned it.

Well there were lots of whips involved: White Belt, Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt and Master Black Belt.
At first I did read satanical magic and I chuckled.
Or perhaps stochastical magic
Several black and green "belt" like accessories were found, which we hypothesize were used for sacrificial strangulation to the statistical deity.
David Macauley's _Motel of the Mysteries_ is the model for all funny/profound archaeology of the present, I'd say.

https://wearethemutants.com/2017/12/06/david-macauleys-motel...

This book looks great. I just ordered it, thank you for mentioning it.
Hotel of Mysteries is totally worth it whether you are 35 or 8.
HR wall slogans are cringey when still drying on the wall. They are even cringier in a ruin.
Gives you another perspective on the hieroglyphs on walls in ancient Egypt though if you imagine them being put there by enthusiastic religious branding consultants, and inducing just as much eye rolling from the citizens of the day…
Lololol. I've never thought about it that way.

But it's true. Citizens of those ancient Egyptian cities probably did roll their eyes at some of the wall hieroglyphs.

Especially because the pharaohs exaggerated their victories.

And the priests probably made up ridiculous stories of what their gods "did" and "accomplished"

Some citizens were probably just as incredulous as we are today.

> Especially because the pharaohs exaggerated their victories.

Ramses II exaggerated even his defeats, that is, he claimed that as his victories. For example the famous wall relief of Ramses II slaying the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh. https://www.memphis.edu/hypostyle/tour_hall/ramesses_ii_scen...

In reality it was a terrible defeat and it allowed the Hittites to limit Egypt sphere of influence to no further West than Canaan.

Of course they were. They state the human leaders were gods and immortals, yet why are they writing these things on their burial chambers?
"The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?"

Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, 1978

https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/1979/...

it's plausible but I have a feeling that cultures in those days had a lot more meaning, I may be wrong though
The most cringey one to me is the Philips one "Let's make things better". Funny enough their slide down into relative obscurity started right after introducing that slogan. Up to that point they were one of the powerhouses of technology.

Today they are still active in Medical, TVs and light, a faint shadow of what they used to be.

After 2004, they ditched that slogan and started using "Sense and Simplicity" as their new slogan.

I remember after that their consumer electronics got really, really bad. Basically all their products were just... not finished. The firmware on most of their devices was just terribly buggy, and features advertised on the box where sometimes not even available. I remember having an MP3 player where selecting the FM radio mode would just crash the device. Never did they release a firmware version that would enable FM radio mode. I had to carry a small metal pin in my wallet, just to be able to use the reset button behind a tiny hole in the side of the MP3 player. I usually had to reset it once or twice a day.

I also had a media streamer that did not work at all out of the box, it just didn't support any of the advertised codecs. And I had a Phlips TV that would reliably crash when switching from TV mode to Teletext mode.

Living in the Netherlands, I felt kind of obligated to choose Philips over brands such as Samsung. However, many times I found myself returning a Philips appliance, and buying a Korean/Japanese made alternative instead.

Never, ever again will I trust them for consumer electronics.

Philips in the Netherlands and Thomson in France went the same way (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_(marque)) - after being major manufacturers of consumer products, they are now licensing their consumer brand to third party manufacturers.

Basically they are banking on their previous glories and advertising.

Sometimes you can spot the exact same product from a noname manufacturer, it's just missing the right sticker.

Telefunken, too.
Same here, every Philips device bought after the mid 90's was junk. At some point they even couldn't make vacuum cleaners that worked or fridges that didn't fail completely within the warranty. Which is also why plenty of the bigbox outlets stopped offering their stuff, the quality was just incredibly bad.

And given how much goodwill that brand had it is very impressive how fast it was run into the ground. I still see their TVs for sale here, and medical devices and some stuff for infants.

Interesting, the vacuum cleaner of my parents is a Philips and itworks well. No smell in the air while running, the first time i don't hate using one.
I still have a Phillips vacuum cleaner. It's 10 years or more. Impressive build quality.
That was about the time, IIRC, that they went on a mission to make everything as simple to use as a Senseo coffee machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senseo

You mean its corporate ghost (aka brand name) is still active in these things. Afaik they've divested everything apart from medical.
Light is definitely theirs as well, and even though the TVs and white goods are made abroad they are still just as much Philips's creations as Intel is making CPUs.

Edit: this comment is false. Please ignore.

no it’s not. Philips Lighting is split of into a new brand: Signify. They pay to use the Philips name (e.g. for Philips Hue).
Totally missed that, my bad!

(Given that this is in my country and in my field of interest that's a pretty good indication of how big of a miss this is, so thank you for the correction.)

They're not remotely obscure in the medical field. By the numbers, Philips has been a medical devices company for a long time.

They have been slowly getting out of the consumer business for a long time. They just recently spun off their remaining consumer appliances business after having spun off lighting some years ago.

Sounds a bit like MAGA, only the latter is more ambitious (and dumb) by using superlatives.
On my startup’s wall, I have the top cringy slogans of my customers. In the middle sits:

“We advance humanity.”

I guess the message is, don’t take yourself too seriously, most of where companies succeed is happenstance. It still takes a moment to all visitors to understand that it can’t be serious.

I think I saw that in Doom: Enternal. And yeah it wasn’t the good guys saying that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_Eternal

In case anyone is wondering, the "propaganda slogans" on the walls are the Motorola "common values":

We are innovative. We constantly create ingenious solutions to the real challenges of today, tomorrow and beyond.

We are passionate. We meet every challenge with energy and determination, always pursuing ever-higher standards.

We are driven. We keep it simple by focusing on what matters most so we can seize opportunities with speed and confidence.

We are accountable. We stand behind the work we do, the contributions we make and the high business standards we maintain.

We are partners. We succeed together because we respect all individuals and value contributions from colleagues and customers alike.

"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair"
The greatest of poems
Always ask yourself: Is this good for the company? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA5rB63Mzc8
I'm pretty sure that Motorola had a very high Dilbert Index.
This strip was a direct reference to some things in Motorola:

https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-03-02

> structures

Multiple sacrificial altars surrounded by balconies from which the faithful could watch.

If you haven’t read it already, you might enjoy Motel of the Mysteries[0] where an archeologist from the future stumbles upon the ruins of a present days motel and speculates over its use and the artifacts found within.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831

I love this sort of blend of urban exploration and archeology. I actually made a video game about it, inspired by the "sublime" of uninhabitable (yet comfortable) exurbs of midwestern USA: https://q-andrew.itch.io/anemoiapolis