Don’t hate the player — hate the game. How some Vice industries have worked their way back into public favour

Originally written for Marketing Week

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” Aldous Huxley

As I sit with my daughter at 5am on a morose Covid Monday, time moves ever so slowly.

Switch to the start of the working day. A short commute up the stairs, second coffee in hand and open the calendar. Suddenly it’s half one, time to cobble together a toastie before BOOM! Six PM. There’s simply no consistency, measure nor reason. Time is slipping by like an eel in a lubricant factory.

Lockdown in midwinter is a cruel mistress. It plays with your ability to track time. It meddles with your mood and it fiddles with your perception. Maybe this is why so many people are eschewing rational thought and backing loony conspiracy theories around Covid vaccinations, the environment and American politics.

Take Trump voters as a case in point — nearly 50% of the American (active) voting public. These aren’t imbeciles, in the medieval sense. They’re bright enough to accrue the Dollars required to fly to MAGA rallies, coordinate a tactical barnstorm of the Capitol, purchase extravagant weaponry, drive gas guzzling monster trucks and pay for weddings to their cousins. For some, their beliefs are true whilst for everyone else, they project some of the most absurd lunacies of the modern age. It…