The more things change,
the more they remain the same.
After decades, your company has changed the taste of your product from X to Y. This change has consequences for the daily routine of tens, or even hundreds of thousands of your product’s users, including mine. It does not sit well. Let me explain why.
Dear costumer service,
Natural selection, first described by Charles Darwin in the 1800s, is an important driver for biological evolution, a complex process that explains the diversity of life on our planet. Natural selection focuses on the role of individual traits in the evolution of a population.
Here, we encounter one of the most persistent misinterpretations of natural selection, summarized in the popular use of the term ‘survival of the fittest’. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is widely adapted to mean how ‘the strongest survive’ – ensuring the genetic continuation of a species. Darwin himself did not coin the phrase, and throughout time its meaning evolved and became part of schools of thought such as ‘social Darwinism’. Social Darwinism applies the idea that ‘fittest’ individuals dominate not only biologically, but also in other fields: sociology, economics, politics. As a pseudoscience, it appropriates complex evolutionary dynamics for setting ‘rules’ that would ensure social-economical success. In reality, the approach’s infatuation with an ideal ‘uber-mensch’ is entrenched in racism, misogyny, and for some, in self-loathing.
Evolutionary, ‘fittest’ does not specifically mean ‘physically fit’, domination, or a simple survival success-rate, but rather adaptation: the possibility for a species to adapt to evolving circumstances and ‘fitting’ its environment, so to speak.
Dear customer service,
Evolution is a very slow process. Even abrupt environmental changes take many generations for a species to adapt to. While an asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, landslide or flood can sometimes trigger adaptation, these shifts are rarely global, and the adaptations lag far behind the event and well beyond a human lifetime.
We, people, are simply not equipped to handle large amounts of change in short periods of time, and still, we are forced not only to adapt to increasingly substantial shifts in major issues such as the climate and biodiversity crises, but also to an endless range of seemingly insignificant changes, such as product rebranding, digital operating system updates, fashionable political ideologies, and demolished street views. All of this is happening against a backdrop of progressing insights on human equality and emancipation.
Meanwhile, staple businesses such as banks, public transport companies, phone companies, power companies, and healthcare organisations habitually change their logos and appearance whenever a new board of directors is appointed.
This certainly does not compare to the level of adaptation people that in war zones have to deal with. What I describe are first world problems. However, the continuous bombardment of “change” for change’s sake has its effects. It tests of the elasticity of any population. It is exhausting.
Recently, we have had to adapt to the circumstances of a pandemic. Many of us are still adapting. There is a continuous sense of existential anchors being lifted out of solid ground. We are adrift in ever deeper waters. Some people throw their hooks towards anything that remotely resembles land: traditionalism, isolationism, populism, or even conspiracy theories. Previously reasonable people begin to defend racist traditions, or try to set – metal – telecommunication masts on fire, fearing another new technology that is being forced upon them without proper preparation or public consultation. Agency is a keyword here, or rather, the loss of it.
But these ideologies are nothing more than floating plastic garbage islands, aimlessly drifting in the ocean. How desperate a population must be to mistake those for a future paradise?
Dear customer service,
The list of products that have changed from X to Y in my lifetime is endless. My favourite perfume disappeared ten years ago; my partner is still looking for a discontinued shampoo; hair clips that used to last years now break within months; and political alliances invent new acronyms with each election cycle, which now rarely lasts a full term.
Did any of us agree to these terms and conditions in flux? I don’t think so.
Dear customer service,
Your company’s website states that it may take up to 14 days to get used to the new taste of your toothpaste. I tried it, and this is simply not the case. You have replaced the unique experience of your product with a generic and interchangeable one, which will please a wider audience which is already drowning in similar options. Your loyal customers bought your product precisely because of its unique properties. With those gone, there is no incentive to stay loyal to your product, or your brand. What remains is the loss of its particular taste.
Dear customer service,
I mourn the loss of something that has been a part of my life since childhood. Toothpaste, as mundane as it may seem, is one of the continuities that spans a lifetime. Several times a day, it becomes part of our bodies, a staple of our routines, and provides a small but ever-present anchor. Compared to having to leave a home because it is being devoured by forest fires or because of machismo-driven power games that deem it necessary to bomb it, the change from X to Y seems meaningless: a problem of privilege. But many things can be true at the same time, and I consider your company’s decision to change the taste of your product to be a symptom of a society that is mindlessly damaging the foundations of weary populations, both large and small, leaving them burnt out and overstimulated.
Dear customer service,
I would argue that avoiding these minor changes would help to drive forward the substantial changes that are so urgently needed.
It is painfully ironic that the populations with the greatest capacity for meaningful change, are the ones most overwhelmed by trivial disruptions. Worn-thin people reach for the familiar. When the familiar is constantly lost in daily life, people may look to ideologies that project the familiar; or rather, mythologised versions of it.
Instead of adapting to new global realities, people adapt to an endless scroll of weekly device updates, traffic reroutings, altered views, changing app layouts, new logos, new products, new everything.
In order to change, some things need to remain the same. So, please, dear customer service, don’t change the taste of your product from X to Y.
Alexandra Crouwers, Dec 4, 02020 Anno covidii. Published as part of the article The Plot, The Compositor, and Mourning/Mistakes.
Below: John Barry, The More Things Change, 1970.