FROM THE EDITOR
A former boss used to love the word. Ideate. “Let’s ideate on that.” No, I would think, let’s not.
I love wordplay — creative shapeshifting with letters and meaning. But ideating? Get behind me, Satan. Ideate, as the kids say, is the NPC.
More egregious perhaps than the word itself, which is bad enough, was the presumption that this was just how we roll now.
As journalists, we are hard-wired to pour scorn on corporate speak because these words and phrases are usually smoke and mirrors. Because they are often ridiculous and should not be taken seriously. Because they are the opposite of creative or robust. These words are a warning shot that something else, probably quite important, is not being said. And we battle these things because words are important, in any context. Words end up, often violently, translating to action.
To quote Puff Daddy’s Do You Know: “See how these players love that, to the point where I can’t take it, I’m a playa hater, I can’t fake it.”
But something’s changed, because the hip-hop megastar Sean Combs, aka Puff, aka Diddy, now Love, says “ideate” (in this week’s cover story). He has, for many, represented youth and pop culture. The power of the hustle, hallucinogens and bling. He’s walked in the desert. And after all that, he drops the ‘i’ word?
Ideating his destiny has also clearly been on the mind of Pastor Brian Tamaki. In his “I have a dream” moment, outside Parliament this week, he said: “I want New Zealand again to rise up out of the ashes ... I have a vision of a New Zealand that can be great again.” Derivative sloganeering that says absolutely nothing. Which is not a bad segue to this:
As Kate Hannah, founder and director of The Disinformation Project, tells Joanna Wane this week, “There’s been some interesting neuropsychology research that suggests the higher you value or rate your own intelligence or rationality, the more susceptible you are. Because once you’ve decided to believe something, your selfidentity is tied into that being a rational, sensible, intelligent decision. So you can’t question it.”
The violence in the language used against former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, the notion of co-governance, the trans community, and Pasifika and Maori is abhorrent and divisive. Just check out NZ First’s Lee Donoghue (who I just bet is right on board with ideating) on the Re: News youth debate and putting the “K back in Iwi”.
Disinformation and political rhetoric are not mutually exclusive. With just two weeks to go before the election, we dive into the war on disinformation and how to tell fact from fiction. Disinformation (and its genesis) is a little like a corporate cliche — it always bears closer examination.
Noho ora mai