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S A L E S
F│⊙│RCED
POST: 0003
CRITIQUE
10-26-02022
It’s almost Halloween.
I’m wondering what’s gonna be aired on the 6 floor LED wraparound screen at the top of the 2nd tallest building in California. I don’t want to be wondering, but I’m wondering. For Halloween 2019, it was Tolkien’s all-seeing Eye of Sauron. In 2020, an undulating river of blood. Salesforce Tower, what’s the plan year?
I didn’t know about Salesforce before it had a tower. I still don’t know what it does. I did try to figure it out. ‘Tis the season for a fright, after all. Their website is a tedium of corpro-jargon. It promises ⊙ customer-centric automation ⊙. Their COVID-19 Response Playbook outlined how a customer can ⊙ return to work, reopen their business, and accelerate change in the new normal ⊙. I find it difficult to continue reading or watching anything once the phrase “new normal” is uttered.
I quit.
I think I’m not supposed to care what it does. Salesforce dwells in the growing category of corporations, organizations, and financial institutions that affect my life in ways that they seem to make deliberately obscure. Salesforce might, one day, manage my health insurance or rent me a scooter. Someone might deliver a book I ordered in a Salesforce van, wearing a sky-blue Salesforce mask. None of it would surprise me. For now, I begrudgingly resign myself to Salesforce’s existence; that is what the tower seems to desire.
Salesforce seems incapable of being interesting, so it comes as no shock that their tower is so boring. The local joke is that it looks quite like a dildo. A dildo, but not an interesting one. The type you might buy at the Apple store. Sleek, shiny minimalism that attempts to homogenize what is perceived as $Quality$ to as large a percentage of the population as possible. Vapid stimulation. This vibrator comes in silver, black, and now, rose gold. Consequently, for all its phallic associations, the tower lacks any libidinal passion.
To me, the tower looks like a bullet. I see no pleasure there. I see a banal, inert object that contains the potential for ruin.
Were it not the tallest building on the San Franciso skyline, it would go unnoticed. The same sort of steel and glass megaliths that self-replicate across any late-capitalist cityscape. Salesforce designed a headquarters that is ignorable, yet impossible to ignore. It is a boring company with a boring product but it asserts its dominion by simply being the most prominent bore.
A solid metaphor for high capitalism and its machinations that operate so far above my understanding, Salesforce takes this to a literal level. The tower-as-capital asserts itself as the tallest phenomena of my landscape, and yet is so much less interesting to me than a colorful bit of graffiti, or a murder of crows, or the menagerie of creepy crawlers underneath a dead log. The $Biggest$ games of humans seem to be the least impressive. Still, there is that big LED screen to look at.
In 2020, the Eye of Sauron was not on Salesforce Tower’s 6-floor wraparound screen. Perhaps they thought, given the timing, it was in poor taste. Considering they opted for a river of blood, I don’t think that was the case. I think someone of some meaningful managerial authority felt that the Eye of Sauron looming over the city from a panopticonic center, was just a bit too ⊙ on the nose ⊙. I know Salesforce and its kin monitor my online life for marketable data. I know that this is to my detriment. I know this, but it might not be wise to for them tell me so directly. These types of industries rely on collective disregard from us. The Eye of Sauron came off as taunting us with reality, which is bad for biz.
“When the illusion that the big Other did not know can no longer be maintained, the incorporeal fabric holding the social system together disintegrates – impossible to believe anymore that the big Other was ignorant of them.” – Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, PG. 45
I hope they put the Eye back in 2021. It’s nice to be told the truth for a change. I like it when tech companies fly their colors. It makes it harder to pretend that . . .