Last Wednesday, a troop of scientist monkeys was circling in a helicopter above the Utah desert, when they spotted something that shouldn’t be there.
The scientists landed to take a closer look.
There, in the middle of Road Runner country, among red cliffs and tumbleweeds and a whole lot of nothing, stood a rectangular silver pillar. It was about 10 feet tall, and about 1 foot in width and depth.
The mysterious object had no apparent purpose or function. There was no clue who or what had created it.
So in an instinctive show of excitement, the scientists started hooting and throwing sticks and scratching their armpits.
But let me take a step back. I found out about this from a BBC article titled:
“Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert”
I clicked on this article among dozens of other tempting news headlines. So I asked myself why. The news aspect was one, the curiosity another. But that’s clearly not all.
It’s that word “monolith.” Maybe you see where this is going.
A monolith in the middle of the desert ties into Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001. You know the famous scene, with the orgasmic music and the sun rising as a monkey smashes some tapir bones.
I thought this monolith article was speaking directly to me. But sadly no. The BBC knew what it was doing.
Millions of other people made the same 2001 connection. One twitter intellectual writing under the account @MonolithUtah commented “We come in peace.” Another wrote “2020 isn’t done with us yet #utahmonolith.”
This has obvious applications if you’re writing sales copy. In fact, marketer Joe Sugarman exploited the underlying principle behind this monolith story to sell all kinds of devices, from smoke detectors to remote car starters.
That’s something I wrote about in more detail when I originally wrote this article and sent it out to my newsletter subscribers.
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