Blog - Colin Campbell, Copywriter

Movies are a vast wasteland

December 20, 2025 No Comments

The New York Observer (observer.com) no longer has movie reviews except for movies that Rex Reed watches, which is down to one or two a month. They have categories for Art, Lifestyle, Culture, Business, Art Market, Art Reviews, Luxury Travel, Nightlife & Dining, Style, Theater, Opera, Dance, Tech, Finance, and Media. They are no longer observing movies.

Maybe movies are a dead corpse, alongside TV. In 1961, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minnow said,

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

Things have only gone downhill from there.

I don’t see movie reviews anywhere else, either, so it’s not just the Observer. Movie reviews vanished during the COVID lockdown because nobody could go to the movies so there weren’t any new films for a couple years. And after the movie theaters opened, the movies were no longer good. Comic book heroes and remakes and sequels outdoing each other in wokeness. 007 is now a black woman.

I’m talking about movie reviews online. Text about movies. I’m sure there are hundreds of YouTube sites dedicated to movie reviews, but I’m a reader, not a viewer.

I grew up reading sci-fi

November 26, 2025 No Comments

I grew up reading science fiction but it didn’t prepare me for the reality of the future, when it arrived. SciFi predicted space travel but it turns out that space travel is for robots, not humans. The people on the Space Station are not accomplishing anything. The Chinese space station was struck by orbital debris last week and now their three taikonauts are stranded: their return capsule was damaged. Mainstream media declines to give any coverage to the Chinese space program except when it fucks up–that’s why we’re hearing about the orbital debris damage.

SciFi predicted computers would remain giant, in compliance with the quote by IBM’s president in 1943: “I think there’s a world market for maybe five computers.” Instead every person in the world has a computer in their pocket.

I don’t know what scifi predicts today. I haven’t looked at any new scifi in many years. “SciFi” now means movies and TV shows about magic. I think the last science fiction book I read was RAINBOW’S END by Vernor Vinge. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2007. Amazon tells me I bought it on June 6, 2011. It’s about an Alzheimers’ patient who wakes up in hospital and has been cured. He doesn’t know what happened in the 20 years since his memory failed.

The story is about his re-adjusting to the world after he’s cured. He goes back to high school. The ending is unsatisfactory–he gets embroiled in some faction-versus-faction battle and one side wins, the end.

It’s now an alternate-worlds novel because it takes place in 2025.

The Hugo Awards are now a woke-fest of Mary Sue girlbosses. The market is dominated by sword-and-sorcery pastiches.

1020am

Meanwhile, I don’t know what to do and neither does anybody else. Nobody knows what the economy is going to do. The stock market is a giant bubble supported by the churn between Nvidia and the AI purveyors signing big contracts with each other and using the contracts as collateral for further indebtedness. Everybody is building multi-billion-dollar server farms to run their AI companies.

One upcoming problem will be the rapid obsolescence of the server technology. Moore’s Law is still in effect: before the loan is paid off, the billion dollar’s worth of servers will have a resale value of ten cents. Lots of people are predicting the AI bubble is going to crash. Price/earnings ratios are catastrophically high, and not just in AI.

The server farms use enormous amounts of electricity and the liberal hatred of electricity is running into a crunch. Wind and solar power will never generate enough juice to keep the grid going. The mainstream media has not been making an issue out of the new nuclear power plants under construction. The first new nuke plant this century went into operation in 2023, and another in 2024 at Plant Vogtle, Georgia. Several more are under construction or in planning.

The best copywriting gets right to the point.

October 13, 2025 No Comments

Points are sharp and dangerous and committees prefer safer alternatives.

I’m looking for companies that are young and want to grow, companies with a good new product that would be successful if more people knew about it.

Most people have never heard of you. I’ve never heard of you. I learn about you, and then I present information designed to bring folks up to speed about you.

I’m not an engineer in your industry, but if you want to use your website to explain your breakthrough to the marketplace, tell me about it and let me write something enticing and informative that will give visitors an incentive to call you.

I asked ChatGPT 4o to “assess the copywriting skills of the author of the text at https://www.colin.org.”

ChatGPT replied,

The copywriting on Colin Campbell’s website (www.colin.org) emphasizes clarity, simplicity, and the ability to explain complex ideas in plain language. Campbell’s approach appears to be focused on delivering straightforward and accessible marketing content that highlights the unique aspects of his clients. Overall, the tone is professional yet approachable, aiming to make information digestible for a wide audience.

Sunday, 8-2-2025

August 5, 2025 No Comments

Lots of TV news coverage of the Richter 3.0 earthquake that struck New York City yesterday. In California we literally do not notice a Richter 3 earthquake even if we’re at ground zero.

“Coverage.” In the old days we were all looking at the same three TV networks from coast to coast. Everybody saw LAUGH-IN.

Today there are hundreds of cable TV channels and millions of online podcasts. Newspapers are a fading memory. The Santa Barbara City Council is deliberating on a law banning newspaper vending boxes on the sidewalks. Some magazine and newspaper names survive online but most have failed to monetize their properties. The more subscribers they attract, the more money Google makes.

I looked at a Substack page of gripes from writers who gain a flock of subscribers after publishing a particularly good piece, and then most of the subscribers fail to renew. Why can’t there be a one-time payment method so a visitor could pay one dollar to read this particular article. Too expensive for Substack to administer.

The web is still hobbled by the lack of a micropayment system.

Yeah, the web is really still in its infancy. I launched colin.org thirty years ago, Xmas 1995. I thought I had about 3,500 pages but Pro-Sitemap’s indexing shows I have more than 10,000 items indexed now. It’s counting the photos as well as the html files.

Why use a copywriter for a website.

The societal changes caused by the internet were presaged by similar upheavals caused by telegraph and railroad connections across the continent 150 years ago. Mark Twain could no longer make a living by writing for magazines and newspapers–as soon as one article was published, it was pirated, telegraphed around the world to be printed and not a penny coming back to him. That’s why he devoted his energies to the Chautauqua circuit where audiences would pay to hear him speak.

Copywriters came into being in this era by accurately describing a product in Chicago that could be shipped by rail to a farmer in Nebraska. Gaudy false promises might bring a few sales and no repeat business. The Sears catalog was scrupulously accurate and its 500 pages of cheap pulp paper were useful in the outhouse.

So all I’m aspiring to is to create the best text you can wipe your ass with.

In the beginning was the word

June 26, 2025 No Comments

In the beginning was the word. My father was a typographer in the ad game and he was always at his drawing board creating words from the time I was born.

My theory is that I copied his enthusiasm for his task from my earliest days. I was reading everything by the time I was four. My Christmas present when I was 6 was a miniature printing press with a font of all-cap rubber letters.

What is a copywriter. Inside the ad game, it was an exalted title. The apex creator of the ad. Today it means the guy who writes the captions. The copywriter is no longer a part of the design process. The Design Committee will let you know when the design is finalized, and then we’ll be ready for text.

I was a writer for print, mostly, in my early career, but then the Macintosh computer came along and I dived into it head first and within a few years I was in Silicon Valley making more money as a Mac graphics guy than as a copywriter. I did so many courtroom presentations, for instance. I thought it would be my new career.

Then I told my placement agency I wanted copywriting work, and started contracting for the Internet Shopping Network in 1999. Then I wrote thousands and thousands of product descriptions for Walmart.com in the 2000s.

I wrote a lot of stuff in Santa Barbara. In Silicon Valley they were more interested in my graphics and web skills. Now that I’m semi-retired, I’m offering my copywriting services in Santa Barbara again.

What I like to do is to absorb myself into my new client’s information, where I discover that everything I knew about the client’s niche is outmoded.

The AI Invasion

June 3, 2025 No Comments

Everywhere I look I see AI invading. The Turing Test has long since been sent to the old folks’ home–AI can write stuff well enough to persuade you a human did it. Fool me once, fool me forever. There’s no going back.

I look at VentureBeat.com several times a week–it’s been around for twenty years or so covering the latest events in tech industries and there are no longer articles about chip fabs and other aspects of tech. Every single article is about AI. New AI apps are touted every day. The foundations are being ripped out of niche industries and this doesn’t make it into the TV news channels.

But, who cares about the news? CBS News is on this first Sunday of June is devoted to nostalgia–an interview with an elderly novelist whose books were made into movies thirty and forty years ago. ABC News: THIS WEEK With George Stephanopoulos, the network’s Sunday news-panel show, with a list of charges against Trump, what a terrible mess he’s making, plus ethics violations up the wazoo. The sidebar mentions Ukraine destroying 40 warplanes on the ground at Russian military bases but that stays visible for five seconds and then we’re shown a much longer description of the availability of a new and even better Covid-19 vaccine, while the main screen continues with more revulsion about Trump. Sky News has an old black guy sitting at a table with an old white guy tsking about Israel continuing to fight instead of surrendering and allowing Hamas to slit their throats. I’m sure AI bots could disparage the Jews just as easily and persuasively.

Anyway. AI is here to stay. Next week the Apple Developer’s Conference will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the iPhone, a landmark event in human history. Last year Apple announced that macOS Sequoia would introduce Apple AI which would have massive effects on computer usage, but the introduction has been perpetually delayed. The industry consensus is that Apple is ten years behind in the integration of AI into Siri, compared to other virtual assistants such as Alexa.

We’re still in the early dawn of AI development. I’ve seen several articles saying AI has run its course, we’ll be forever hobbled by the inherent inadequacies of Artificial Intelligence.

What they mean is the limitations of the transformer algorithms. I expect that some newer AI technology will be a supernova event–maybe hardware, maybe software. Who knows whether human culture will survive the blast.

People will survive but civilization might not.