HOW DO WE KILL CHILDREN

In Strategy Room #2 we had whiteboards going, big rolls of paper, Zoom calls to assistants out in the pool going nuts creating moodboards and decks and a bunch of kids coming up with prompts for AI pictures to see if any of it got the juices flowing and unblocked the dam creativity wise so we could ideally step outside our preconceived ideas of "good", etc. On the largest and most central whiteboard were big, glossy letters that spelled out "HOW DO WE KILL CHILDREN?" which, while abrupt and perhaps slightly untoward in its immediate implication, was easily contextualised. Easily. Firstly, they were big and glossy because we had had them printed, because we had originally written the question in pen which felt almost glib in an inappropriate way. "The optics," one of us, doesn't matter who, had sighed, considering the possibility of a leaked photo which painted us as flippant or dilettante or naive. So we replaced them with better letters. It was that simple. Secondly, the message deserved to be considered in the full context of history. Let's leave it at that. Plenty to work with there: just Google it! You'll be reading a while. Thirdly: once history's factored into the equation, the only remaining question is how you kill kids and get away with it. At the start of the session 8 months ago we'd been different-looking cats, believe me. Neat, kempt, sane. Now messy, unkempt - still sane! Still sane and looking the real world right in the eye. Now we were drinking coffee and ordering takeout poke bowls for, if not every meal, then most meals. Did we enjoy it no. Not at all. "Bombs", we'd underlined first. Run a cost benefit analysis and bombs are essentially free after adjustments. And boy do they kill a bunch of kids. We looked at the numbers on that and nearly took the afternoon off. But then someone - not naming names - pointed out that bombs are a little stinky, branding-wise. Bad optics on bombs, we all agreed, even if they were so cheap after adjustments - and so effective! And then we put "bombs" out to the focus groups and they came back "criminals", "murderers", "wrong", "evil". We wanted to shake these focus groupers by their collars and say what the HELL is wrong with you, do you know how harmful it is what you're putting down on these forms, have you ever seen the clean pure fire that is unleashed by a bomb at the moment of ignition? Do you know how ignorant it is - to say that LIGHT ITSELF is somehow EVIL? Crazy - so we said, hey, put bombs down anyway. So cheap when adjusted. And after that someone underlined "Guns", and again that had got us all going - "an unimpeachable good," someone had said, "just look at cops, quite literally the good guys - quite literally paid to be the good guys." And that had been a breakthrough. And someone else - and they said this in confidence, so don't ask - had said - "and the kids we're looking at killing - these are standard fit out kids? Like little, short, small muscles - kids?" And we went yep. One and the same. And then someone was like "Isn't it crazy that we're trying to kill as many of them as possible?", which was a real pinch-me moment. Like, yeah. Sort of crazy, but then they obviously needed to die, and that's why we were here - to focus on ideating and iterating and not getting our hearts and our heads mixed up. And then it was like the floodgates were open, and we were talking about airdropping poison toys, about thin wires stretched across alleyways at child neck height, about radioactive pellets to give them leukaemia. Couldn't have been more proud of the team. Shivers. We ran it all up the chain and the bigwigs told us "love the creativity, keep it coming, we're at bombs budget-wise" - so we sent bombs down to fulfilment. And the boys from fulfilment shipped 'em off and we stood around the warehouse with a glass of whatever and watched the sunset and someone said "The kids will die, right?" And we said sure. The kids are gonna die. Don't sweat it.