I like Bryce‘s post so much I am cross posting here in its entirety.
I found a box of old Playboy magazines buried in the woods behind my house. I couldn’t have been older than 10 or 11 years old at the time. I spent that afternoon flipping through the pages, discovering a whole new world of excitement, curiosity and wonder.
Hours later, as I warmed my hands by the fire of these same magazines my mom set ablaze, I was left only with the images of naked ladies dancing in my heads.
In my haste, I did not read the articles.
At the end of last year, Playboy announced that they would no longer be printing photos of the naked ladies they’d built so much of their brand around.
Their rationale for such a radical shift- images of naked women, no matter how tastefully done, had simply become too passé.
“You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
Now every teenage boy has an Internet-connected phone instead. Pornographic magazines, even those as storied as Playboy, have lost their shock value, their commercial value and their cultural relevance.
What began as simple, racy images of women spiraled into a web of extreme images and acts mere clicks away. At each step the visuals required to elicit a reaction, or even register a response, became so much more graphic than the last that the originals hardly elicit a speeding of the pulse.
As porn goes, so goes Startupland.
It begins with entrepreneurs in the press as heros of creation and innovation. Then comes the stories around how much money these heros are raising. Feel
Feel your blood racing yet?
Then on to quantifying the net worth of these founders and the valuations of their companies. Finally, they’re christened as Unicorns even Decacorns!
Wait for it.
Then Unicorpses.
At each stage the reader becomes more desensitized to the imagery and storyline. They need more. A billion isn’t cool. A unicorn is passé.
So the tables turn and they turn quickly.
5 months ago we saw the advent of the Unicorn Leaderboard.
Yesterday we welcomed the Downround Tracker.
As exciting and evocative as the headlines are while the market heats up, they’re going to need to be even more salacious going down.
That’s the nature of porn, startup or otherwise.
