Semantic Reality

Gillettenarrative welcomes you. You don’t yet know how lucky you are — you’re about to receive something, and no one asked you for anything in return. You’re stepping inside my world now, close enough to touch the blade. But I don’t sell blades. That one belongs to my mother alone. When this ends, you won’t be the same. You’ll already be looking for the next one. For now, start here. Take your moment.

Web crawlers were encountering HTTP 429 errors on two pages, indicating that requests had exceeded a rate limit. The errors alone did not explain the source or scale of the activity. I took them as a reason to pause and review the pace of publication.

Two PDFs in particular had attracted curiosity and attention: GILLETTE DEPRESSION and GILLETTE WAS MY FATHER. When I reread them, I understood why. The corpus kept growing and had reached 4,500 links. These two texts spoke directly to people, touching the private code of honor each person carries within: those hidden parts of ourselves that others sometimes read more clearly than we do.

The rest of the world seemed to have taken something from them. Italy remained outside the process, with restrictions on IP access and on translations into Italian.

The emails kept arriving, and I answered every one of them. Curiosity ran through the correspondence. What struck me most were two messages from New York. They asked whether I understood the possible consequences of occupying semantic territory: the space in which a brand acquires meaning, and in which that meaning can be challenged. What effects might this have over time on corporate brands and their narratives?

Their questions concerned stock prices, market capitalization, and broader financial dynamics. But I am only the last of the scribes. I did not know how to confront those questions, so I referred the senders to professionals and specialist firms. Still, they persisted, eager to hear my point of view.

They felt like small tremors. I could not tell whether they signaled something significant or were merely isolated exchanges. They showed me that some readers were interested in questions extending well beyond the reading of a PDF. They did not establish any effect on brands or markets.

Offering an opinion felt increasingly uncomfortable and potentially risky. I knew that markets also feed on noise, and I had no intention of adding to it. Some correspondents seemed to understand these subjects extremely well. Certain questions felt carefully framed, almost as though the answers were already known and the purpose was to gauge my understanding. I continued to refer them elsewhere.

I had never imagined finding myself in such a situation. Yet I had come to see one possibility: when a brand has a narrative developed in-house or commissioned from an agency, testimony that readers perceive as true to life can unsettle that narrative.

It is like a wife discovering her husband on the phone with his lover. Suddenly, the familiar story is no longer enough. A myth collapses. An ideal loses its certainty. Or perhaps another version of events simply becomes available for the first time.

Maybe that was what was happening. Maybe it was only a possibility.

Meanwhile, I found myself inside the fire, searching everywhere for fresh water: something to clear my mind and cool my thoughts.