I walk to the front of the iGallery and ask the receptionist how many degrees of living I’m experiencing right now, here at the iGallery — 360? Perhaps 240? If I live in Long Beach, am I likely to experience more degrees than if I live in Yorba Linda?

The receptionist smiles and gives me the once-over twice. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’s sizing me up as a Modern Cynic. She certainly works for a place that has the credentials. Housing Zone, an online magazine for the real estate community, says, “Nobody is better at creating and executing detailed marketing programs directed to distinct like-minded groups than Rancho Mission Viejo Company.”

Pinpointing like-minded groups is standard operating procedure for marketing people. In the past, straight-up demographics were the rule — age, income, education, occupation and geographic location determined the sales pitch. But by the late 1970s — with the rise of personal computers — marketing departments found they could increase sales by tossing personal values, attitudes, behaviors and tastes into the mix. As with all things in marketing, they came up with a cool new name for this strategy: psychographics.

An advertisement built on psychographic data doesn’t describe the product so much as it describes the personality and character of the prospective consumer — a campaign that almost ignores the product so that it can flatter you for having the good taste to want it. In Terramor’s world, you’re the kind of amazing person who “dreamed” of a “home in harmony with nature” in a “village in touch with its soul.” And because you dreamed it, the Mission Viejo Company can have only one response: “we will build it.”

Personal cultural values are identified with specific psychographic segments of the population. You may be “Bohemian Mix” or “Pools & Patios,” or “Shotguns & Pickups” or “Rural Industrial” or “Winner’s Circle.” You Shop at Banana Republic, watch Wall Street Week, live a granola-and-grits lifestyle. You’re urbane or rustic; hunt with a gun or buy jazz.

I wonder how this all fits into the Cultural Creative/ Modern/ Traditional grid. So I call Brooke Warrick, president of American LIVES, a value- and lifestyle-based market research firm. Warrick founded American LIVES 17 years ago with Paul Ray — the man who coined “Cultural Creative.” Warrick also did the market research for Terramor and helped with its development and marketing plan.

“Ladera Ranch was an evolution,” Warrick says. “There were five phases and we marched our way through each, pushing the envelope. We were going after different kinds of people at each phase. We decided in the last phase, Terramor, that there was one part of the market that wasn’t being served: a segment that wanted some sort of green development phenomena. We knew what their values were. We knew what was important to them.

“We said to ourselves, ‘Why don’t we design a part of the community that appeals to Cultural Creatives?’ If we did the Green Thing — internally we called it ‘the Green Thing’ — if we did the Green Thing, couldn’t we capture another part of the market?”

I ask him what other markets he targeted. Warrick tells me about Covenant Hill, another Ladera Ranch development. “I talked to a builder about that development the other day. I said to him, “Remember everything we said about the target for Terramor? Forget about that. The target for Covenant Hills is exactly the opposite. It’s for Moderns and status-oriented people.”

And how do you market homes to Moderns?

“They want a lot of baubles and bangles on the front of their homes,” he says. “We came up with the term ‘statement-oriented architecture’ to describe the embellishments for Moderns.”

What about Traditionals?

“There are parts of the development [at Ladera Ranch] that went after Traditionals, too,” he says. “For Traditionals, the fewer things on the home the better.”

As far as marketing to the 28 percent who think the earth is worth preserving, Warrick says, “We want all that 28 percent.”

Statement-oriented architecture? The Green Thing? My head is spinning. I hear the squeal of feedback, statistical white noise emanating from the movement of marketing information between consumers and researchers and market and back again. It sounds like this: poll-data-marketing-poll-data-marketing-poll-data-marketing. And this: You want/I want/You want/I want/You want.

How does that create culture?

Outside the marketing bubble of like-minded groups — the Moderns, Winners With Heart and Traditionals — shouldn’t there be a segment called “Leadership Seekers” — a huge untapped portion of the population looking for someone with fresh ideas that haven’t been diluted by polling data?

The more I learn about Terramor’s pitch to Cultural Creatives, the less “authentic,” “nurturing” and “altruistic” it feels. I tip my imaginary hat to the iGallery receptionist, get in my car and cruise through the tract.

Here, on grand opening day, the streets are lined with green and white 360-degree balloons. Surrounded by paradoxically bulldozed hillsides, prospective Cultural Creative buyers in their antithetical SUVs cruise down O’Neill Drive past Gaia Lane, Aura Lane, Thoreau and Ethereal Streets.

It’s possible to attack the Mission Viejo Company as cynical — as inauthentically green. And you’d have so much evidence, including the fact that the developer might have chosen to throw green upgrades (photovoltaic cells, solar panels, wastewater wash/rinse and the like) into each and every home as standard, and could have simply insisted, because it was the right thing to do, that this is how everybody should live on a planet whose resources are tumbling around on the sides of freeways, festering in landfills, falling from the sky like hard rain, running through our fingers. Or you could praise the company, and say, well, hell: capitalism has something for everybody with money, even people the capitalists wouldn’t really like very much hanging around their swimming pools.

“Great homes, wrong place,” I think and flip Hicks back to life on the CD.

“If anybody here is in marketing or advertising,” Hicks yells though my speakers, “kill yourself. No joke here. Really. Seriously. There is no rationalization for what you do. Kill yourself now.

“You know what bugs me?” he continues. “Everyone here who is in marketing is thinking the same thing: ‘Oh, cool! Bill’s going for the anti-marketing dollar. That’s a huge market!’

“Quit it! Oh, quit it!” Hicks cries. “Don’t turn everything into a dollar sign!”

The marketers in Hicks’ head speak again. “‘Oooooo — the plea for sanity dollar. Huge. Huge market. Look at our research.’”

Looking at the research and the results, it appears that the Cultural Creative market wants creativity as long as it’s institutionalized and standardized in museums and universities. It wants self-expression as long as it doesn’t violate the Talmudic CC&Rs of the homeowners association. It wants altruism and idealism as long as they don’t get negative numbers. It wants polls instead of considerations, population trends instead of truth.

Terramor is to the social-justice, environmental-protection and self-actualization movements of the 1960s and ’70s what Vanilla Ice is to rap, what Cat in the Hat the movie is to Cat in the Hat the book, what The OC is to Orange County.

Isolated in the hills of Ladera Ranch, Terramor is a marketing analyst’s answer to a global community — a preprogrammed Cultural Creative world with hiking trails and solar panels. But the real creators of culture won’t be living here. They’ll be directing the future from between the slices on the Anderson/Ray pie chart.

I head north on the 405. Through a demographer’s eyes, I’m passing miles and miles of flat suburban piescapes populated by marketing segments.

Thirty minutes later, I’m surveying 19th Street in Costa Mesa’s Westside — the breeding ground for Rock Harbor Church, Diedrich Roasters, Wahoo’s and Chronic Industries. Throwing back a beer at Taco Mesa, I take in the wild open environment of humanity living outside the marketing bubble — approximately 180 degrees from 360-Degree Living.

Warrick might ask, “What does the pie chart look like here? What are the psychographics? What’s the marketing campaign?”

Here’s the breakdown:

They are Mexican Altruists, Guatemalan Idealists, Indian Subcontinent Optimists, Gay Thai Episcopalians, Bug-eyed Hopped-up Propellerhead Poets, Catholic Narcotraficantes — all subgroups of what Nathan Callahan calls Society’s Mavericks, expressing their core values of bebop, hip-hop, trance, ranchera, No Wave, narcocorridos, rockabilly-acid-jazz-funk and biting the hand that feeds them. The Real Shit — the Unknown Rebels, creating a culture without an adjoining dollar sign, monkey-wrenching the engine of homogenization, stopping the line of Red Army tanks, bending yardsticks into burning men, engaging in life outside the marketing survey.

— Nathan Callahan, December 11, 2003

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“Great homes, wrong place,” I think and flip Hicks back to life on the CD.