So Yesterday Read Free Page A

board.
But more importantly, other people watch them. Unlike the Innovators, they are cool, so when they pick up an innovation, it becomes cool.
A Trendsetter's most important job is gatekeeper, the filter that separates out
real Innovators from those cra2y people wearing garbage bags. (Although I've
heard that in the 1980s, there were some Trendsetters who actually started
wearing garbage bags. No comment.)

Below them are the Early
Adopters.
    Adopters always have the
latest phone, the latest music player plugged into their ear, and they're the
guys who download the trailer a year before the movie comes out. (As they grow
older, Early Adopters' closets fill up with dinosaur media: Betamax videos,
laser discs, eight-track tapes.) They test and tweak the trend, softening the
edges. And one vital difference from Trendsetters: Early Adopters saw their
stuff in a magazine first, not on the street.
    Further down we have the
Consumers. The people who have to see a product on TV, placed in two movies,
fifteen magazine ads, and on a giant rack in the mall before saying, "Hey,
that's pretty cool."
    At which point it's not.
    Last are the Laggards. I
kind of like them. Proud in their mullets and feathered-back hair, they resist
all change, or at least all change since they got out of high school. And once
every ten years they suffer the uncomfortable realization that their brown
leather jackets with big lapels have become, briefly, cool.
    But they bravely tuck in
their Kiss T-shirts and soldier on.
    ************************************
    The unspoken rule was
that Mandy's meetings were for Trendsetters. Or at least people who had been
Trendsetters before Mandy hired them. Once you get paid for being trendy, who
knows what you are?
    A cool hunter? Market
researcher? Scam artist?
    A big joke?
    But Jen was no joke,
whether she got fifty bucks for her opinion or not. She was an Innovator. And,
as I should have expected, she had committed the original sin of having
uttered an original thought.
    "Did I get you in
trouble?" she asked on the street.
    "Nah," I said. (Nah is Hunter-speak for yes.)

"Come on. Mandy was
about to spit her pacifier."
    I smiled at the image.
"Okay, sure. You got me in trouble."
    Jen sighed, eyes
dropping to the gum-spotted street. "That always happens."
    "What always
happens?"
    "I say the wrong
thing." Sadness had settled into Jen's voice, which I couldn't allow.
    I took a rant-sized
breath. "You mean, whenever you wind up hanging out with some new crowd
and they're all agreeing with each other— about the new movie they all think is
great, or the band they all love, or whatever is most recently super-cool—you
find yourself uncontrollably saying that it's actually crap? 0ust because it
is.) And suddenly they're all staring at you?"
    Jen stopped right in
front of the NBA store, openmouthed, framed by the merciless windowscape of
team logos. I squinted in the glare.
    "I guess so,
yeah," she said. "I mean, exactly."
    I smiled. I'd known a
few Innovators in my day. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to be.
"And so your friends don't know what to do with you. So you shut up about
it, right?"
    "Well, that's the
thing." She turned, and we kept walking downtown through the post-work
crowd. "I never really got the shut-up-about-it part."
    "Good for
you."
    "Which is how I got
you in trouble, Hunter."
    "So what? It's not
like they can fix the ad with a re-edit. And it's too late to reshoot the whole
thing. It would be worse if you'd said the white guy's tie was too wide. Then
they'd actually have to do something."
    "Oh, that makes me
feel better."
    "Jen, you shouldn't
feel bad about this. You were the only one up there saying anything
interesting. We've all done a hundred of those tastings. Maybe we've gone
soft."
    "Yeah, and maybe
there was an MBWF thing going on in that conference room, too."
    "There was?" I
looked up at the skyscraper still hanging over us, and my memory flashed
through all the faces, all the