Evil(TM)

At this very moment I am looking at an empty bottle of a beer known as Ruination IPA. Its label is a winged demon kneeling on some sort of pedestal. The back of the bottle boasts in flame-seared language of the destruction that will befall my taste buds and annihilate my ability to enjoy a lesser brew. This beer implies that it is evil. Ruination IPA is by no means alone in associating itself with mischief and malevolence. The Spirit Shoppe once sold a brand of wine calling itself “666”. There is also a “Devil’s Pale Ale 666”, and a “Lucifer” pinot noir. Evil, it seems, is in style in the alcohol business.

The use of characters and symbols associated with evil as marketing tools is by no means limited to alcohol. Witness the number of pastries and other indulgent foods that brand themselves as “Devil’s Delight” and other such things. There is a “Little Devil” brand of clothing marketed towards the BMX scene. In department stores there is a perfume, whose name I do not recall, that comes in a curvy red bottle with little glass horns. The imagery of sin often used in the sex product industry needs little description.

What are these labels trying to suggest to us? Certainly not that we take up a lifestyle of satanic rituals, or start committing acts of unspeakable evil. Marketing evil is all about two things, temptation and disobedience. The aspect of temptation is the more visible in the glossy world of advertising. For centuries, religious dogma dictated that overindulgence, gluttony, sensuality, and material pleasures were sins that destined you to the fires of hell. One of the best-known Christian prayers implores that God “lead us not to temptation.” While the influence of the Church has waned, and especially in the United States there is a lack of centralized dogma, much of the Puritan ethic remains embedded in society. The moral values once expounded by the Church, and now a more diffuse, socialized memory of these morals, speak against hedonistic acts of consumption. The more brazenly a product shows that it is purely for inciting the sensation of pleasure, the more these old values condemn it. What the marketing of sin suggests is that we should abandon ourselves to these pleasures and forget the traditional inhibitions that keep us from consuming. Of course, the marketers never sell true evil. Most people have moral codes and believe at least in some sense of upholding the good. Where’s the money in opposing this? Selling temptation is selling little transgressions, minor acts of sensual pleasure. We are asked to cheat against the remnants of the old moral code, not to destroy it.

Then there is the type of “evil”-marketing I have called ‘disobedience’, although this is not a great term. This is the marketing that gets in your face with the old symbols of evil, devils and demons and hellfire. Hardcore religionists would point and say that we consuming these goods are unwittingly in the thrall of Satan. But this marketing is not suggestive of who we serve, it is who we become. Consuming a product marketing with evil is a statement about ourselves. It says that we reject the reverence of a fixed morality, that we make our own choices and heed no dogma. It says that we are deliberately transgressive; we hint that we are dangerous. The brand of evil is consumed with irony. We know we don’t aim to be evil, but we smile knowingly at what we believe we subvert, the order that we offend. But perhaps the ultimate irony is that we do heed a dogma, that we may have replaced the voice of a God with the voice of society telling us to consume.

What is the Lucifer of the consumerist creed? Perhaps one day the great sacrilege will be burning piles of money. Perhaps that day is here already.

Consumerism and Industry in the Global Order

One of the classic refrains of the contemporary anti-war movement is the slogan “No Blood For Oil”. Critics allege that American interventionism in the Middle East is motivated by a desire to secure the petroleum resources of the region. They point to corporate greed, the incredible power and wealth of the oil industry and see this influence being used to dictate world affairs for profit. While much of this criticism hits the mark, especially with the widely reported instances of war profiteering and this summer’s drilling debate, the critique overlooks the fact that it is the American consumer that ultimately empowers this structure. We of course not only purchase gasoline, but our entire lifestyles are dependent upon the purchase of goods that are made available to us only through mass production and mass transportation. Recycled paper is driven from mill to wholesaler to retailer in a fleet of a thousand diesel-powered trucks. Barbie and Ken are made of extremely complex carbohydrate chains derived via elaborate chemical processes from petroleum.

What I seek to illustrate is not that the American consumer is to blame for our present military misadventure, as there are numerous more causally linked factors to criticize first. The fact is, however, that the consumerism of the West has a huge role in determining the fates of the rest of the world. Naomi Klein writes of the labor dumps of the free-trade zones around the world catering to brand-name companies looking to cut out costs from their manufacturing process. The use of cheap foreign labor in dubious conditions is familiar to all of us. However, not so many people in the world are employed in manufacturing. A Vietnamese woman with a sweatshop job may feel very glad that she is not a plantation worker in the Congo or a miner in Bolivia. The oppressing economics of consumerism extend far beyond the manufacture of the goods themselves to the extraction of resources and other forms of capitalist exploitation. Even while we lambast Disney for having Chinese women toil away on Mickey Mouse pyjamas, we hurl a different criticism at industrialists who pay workers cents a day to harvest rubber or dig for manganese. It is corporate fat cats we say, who subject the world’s poor to such misery. I most certainly do not buy bulk quantities of rubber or semi-obscure metals. But I do put tires on my car, I do buy sensitive electronics full of conductors and semiconductors and so on. All industry, all infrastructure is ultimately destined for the use of human beings. Perhaps not all of this constitutes consumerism, but consumerism could not occur without it.

Libraries have been written about how the drive for resources causes wars, how fragile export economies based on monocultures and other single commodities leads to cyclical poverty. The phrase “banana republic”, before it meant a line of young adult clothing, stood for the domination of the West, of corporate power over the Third World, with the likes of United Fruit having whole governments in their pocket. However, next time, before we blame a corporation for anything, especially for utilizing power and wealth, we must ask where this wealth derives from. It is not from corrupt politics or a reckless disregard for the welfare of laborers, although these certainly help the profit margin. What empowers the corporate world is us. Their revenue is the banana in your lunch bag. If we seek to end the heinous practices that lead our governments to conduct foreign relations we consider unacceptable, we have to first address our own consumption and realize that we are dependent upon that which we deplore. To end our own complicity we must reevaluate how much we truly need to consume. We should not simply ask ourselves what we truly ‘need’, or follow some utilitarian program of global good and expect this to be feasible, but we should ask the more pertinent question of how we can live and find value in our lifestyles while compromising excess and luxury in favor of a sustainable justice.

Transcendence or Consumerism?:The Social Meaning of Drug Use

Ladies and gentlemen, the great question of our times: is doing mind-altering drugs a consumerist act?

Many people within and without drug-consuming subcultures identify the experiences of taking various drugs with mystical or religious significances. Critics deride these claims, saying that these experiences are merely chemical-incited delusions or that the iconography and rhetoric of the drug-using counterculture are merely other expressions of acceptance-seeking, self-branding conformity. Interestingly, we have the term “drug users” but not the term “drug consumers”. Perhaps this is reflective of a true difference between drugging oneself and other forms of consumption, or perhaps it is a linguistic dinosaur waiting for society to replace it.

Let’s look first at some of the popular legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco. There is little doubt that using these is an act of consumption. Cigarettes were once most obvious example of the increasing ubiquity of advertising and marketing, while alcoholic beverages are today one of the most brand-dependent industries. The consumption of fine wines and champagne and expensive spirits is one of the best-known delineators of refinement and social standing, while the consumption of cheap liquors and mass-produced beers is quite the opposite.

Perhaps it from the stigma of criminality that an illegal drug is “used”, or worse “abused”, but not “consumed”. Consumption is at the heart of our society, and we cannot allow actions we condemn to be legitimated by lexical proximity to our heart!

Illegal drugs are inherently different from legal drugs in that they cannot be branded. While a merchant of such drugs may seek to raise the reputation of his product, excessive indentifying features and widespread renown would be severe liabilities. As one bag of marijuana, cocaine, or whatever is generally indistinguishable from like bags of similar product, there is no social cachet in the display of its pedigree other than endless and dubious claims about the pharmaceutical efficacy, or “quality” of the product. We could speculate against Baudrillard and say that drugs are special because they have use-value and exchange-value but no sign-value!

Of course, once one begins to discuss the particularities of various drugs, it becomes clear that a sign-value does exist, not in the way that a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt displays the appearance of wealth with a little logo, but in the way that playing polo itself demonstrates economic and cultural capital. Wall Street bankers don’t smoke crack, but are stereotyped as the likely users of pure cocaine. There is a classist hierarchy of drugs, with some such as cocaine associated with wealth and extravagance, while others such as crack and crystal meth are representative of poverty and ignorance. The poor fall into a greater cycle of addiction, poverty, prison, and death while the rich may consume incredible quantities of drugs and boast of it due to there expense. Eventually, the rich may go to rehab and begin to consume the “drug-free life” of health foods and spiritual centers.

It is now clear that using drugs can be a consumerist act. But can they ever not be? Maybe. We could certainly tell a person just off of an acid trip that the experience they just spent hours narrating was in no way a transcendental experience but merely a consumption of a physiological state of being and its associated culture and lifestyle. But, if we deny the nonconsumerism of such acts, if even biochemistry becomes subject to this social critique, what remains that is not a consumptive act?

Death, Undeath, and the Pursuit of Material Happiness

In the late 1960’s George A. Romero released the first of his series of dead-coming-to-life social criticism films “Night of the Living Dead”. This iconic film jump-started and remains emblematic of the still-existing genre of zombie movies. A few years later Romero released his landmark “Dawn of the Dead” which remains one of the entertaining indictments of consumerism ever caught on film. The premise of the movie is that zombie attacks have suddenly overwhelmed the major cities of the United States. A small group of survivors evacuates via helicopter, and while flying over an unknown suburb sight the edifice that will be their fortress against the living dead: a shopping mall.

Although the mall contains a number of undead, their choice at least initially proves to be astute: they have a limitless amount of supplies to survive on if only if only they can clear the building of existing zombies and then barricade the rest of the witless undead hordes outside. After many gruesome encounters they finally secure a safe existence within their castle of consumerism. They then go about the slow business of surviving and waiting for the world to sort itself out. However, they do much more than survive. They live the good life. Life in the mall offers them not only the food and safety they need to live, but sleek furniture, fine drink, and fashionable clothes. They have lost contact with the outside world, which is presumably falling to pieces around them, but they don’t even care. They take the self-absorbed goods-based lifestyle to its extreme: caring about luxuries and status symbols while there is nobody to demonstrate their status to and while the fate of the human race lies in a most precarious state.

For one character, though, these comforts ring hollow. With the bulk of human existence stripped to its most basic states, life and death (and the horrifying prospect of undeath, without a functioning society, the language of symbols and possession become next to meaningless. Yet to others, these goods offer them solace in a world that otherwise doesn’t make sense any more. Ultimately however, their obsession with the material becomes their undoing. At the end of the film, a human biker gang invades the mall in search of supplies, allowing zombies to penetrate into the protagonists’ consumer paradise. The bikers begin a bout of wanton looting. Had the protagonists allowed this to continue, it would most likely have been a simple matter to rid the mall of remaining zombies and resecure their perimeter. But this isn’t good enough, as they rush to defend their things, not from the zombies but from the people taking away their commodities. Chaos ensues, people die, and the mall is lost to the shuffling hordes.

The movie is pretty clear in showing how consumerist attitudes affect the lives of the people living within the mall, but what does it say about how consumerism affects or lives? I would agree with Romero that it makes us selfish, indifferent to the greater world around us, and exclusivist. The ultimate zombie movie cliché is that “the zombies represent society, man!”. This film is no exception. Except, when I see these zombies I see not a generalized mindless social organism, but the downtrodden, the poor and the hungry (hungry for brains?). Consumerism ultimately makes us think what matters is what we have, and drives us to protect our wealth as if we were protecting our selves, at the expense of all those others who see into world of prosperity and just want to have a little of it for themselves.

Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg, and the Bourgeois Kitchen

Recently, Martha Stewart had a very special guest on her cooking show. That guest was none other than gangster hip-hop legend Snoop Dogg. The footage can be seen here:

Part 1
Part 2

Aside from its seeming absurdity and entertainment value, these clips actually touch on a lot of aspects of modern consumer society. First off all, before Snoop Dogg actually appears onstage, there is Martha Stewart herself. While I am by no means a frequent viewer of her shows, you can see even in just this episode a very clear and conscious message designed to encourage a particular style of consumption. For starters, the kitchen is massive and while all the instruments and ingredients necessary for any particular segment are conveniently provided by her assistants, the expansive wall of cupboards and shelves suggests the broad array of further cooking utensils and foodstuffs that the modern woman is told she needs to have on hand if she is to be a socially adequate cook. That it is important for a woman to be a good cook is the even more basic message illustrated by the prevalence of housekeeping shows similar to hers. There are no shows on any of the networks providing useful tips for avoiding housework (although many now have entire shows dedicated to making things quicker and more convenient for working mothers and so forth). That Martha is seen as an incredibly successful and carreer-oriented businessperson makes her status as the pinnacle of domesticity all the more powerful to many viewers. The true sign of success in the Martha Stewart universe, however, is the dozens of warmly colored wooden drawers , the island stove, the upscale seasonings, and all those other markers of bourgeois home décor and culinary sophistication.

Into this wonderfully bourgeois setting steps Snoop Dogg, the ultimate hybrid of the impoverished working-class and the flashy nouveau-riche. Perhaps it is significant that his rise to incredible wealth was as a creative artist, that ever hard to place group in the social hierarchy. In any case, the contrast between Snoop and Martha could not be more glaring. Class and race consciousness hit full throttle right off the bat as Martha struggles embarrassingly with Snoop’s dialect, confusing common street language with Snoop’s own tongue-in-cheek additions to the language and subjecting both to ridicule. What follows becomes a painful belittlement of the speech of the urban poor. What could be more inadvertently condescending than asking in seriousness whether or not one of the most successful people in the country whether or not he can spell?

Snoop Dogg, far from being visibly offended, takes matters in stride. It is likely he on a large amount of drugs on set, but his subsequent behavior shows the true gulf between their worlds. Snoop makes this contrast as obvious as possible, at times deliberate by jokingly explaining “street” terms and his own vocabulary to the presumably uninformed audience, to playing ironically with Martha’s own expectations of him (“That’s a potato…”), to rejecting the ‘fancy’ foods he is unfamiliar with (“White pepper?!? I want black pepper”). He skips such bourgeois treats as gourmet pepper, but has no trouble whatsoever blatantly shilling for a brand of high-end cognac, a symbol of what an incredibly rich man such as himself is supposed to savor.

The chuckles from the audience come to an awkward halt when Snoop teaches them a phrase “Ball Till You Fall”, outlining his own outlook on wealth: “Make as much money as you can before you die.” The crowd is stunned. Surely, there must be some greater goal in life, the upper-middle class housewives in attendance wonder? What vulgar ostentation is this? And he can’t even cook mashed potatoes! When he pours cognac into his bowl of potatoes, it probably became a gastronomic catastrophe. Truly, this footage reveals Snoop Dogg is an atrocious cook. But perhaps the biggest difference between himself and viewers on the Martha Stewart is that he doesn’t care.

Digital Music, Piracy, and the Flood of Files

That’s right, music piracy. Truly, I dance upon the cutting edge of blogging.

I think we can all agree that in modern society music has become a commodity. To a large degree the music business has become one of the strongest promoters of consumerism. The music video in particular has played an obvious role in shaping the connection between the creation of music and the marketing of other commodities. To be sure, a music video promotes buying a CD or a track on an online music store. In most circumstances however, you can only sell one copy of the song to any given person. What’s more, if several music videos are made for songs on the same album, the videos may be redundant in terms of direct marketing. The real commercial value of a music video is in promoting an image or a lifestyle, reinforcing the sign-values associated with our commodities. The Beyonce “Upgrade You” video is one obvious example.

From the prevalence of music marketing, we might be led to believe that the music industry is doing well, when in fact the opposite is true. What is the cause of the industry’s ill fortunes? Well, if you ask them the answer is music piracy. The music companies may be decrepit dinosaurs struggling to deal with new circumstances, and I see no reason to be sympathetic for their failed business models, but it can hardly be denied that music piracy has had a profound impact on the way we consume music.

In the “old days” we bought music in a package. This package was physical: a plastic box covered in plastic wrap, and some incredibly annoying stickers. The box contained a round plastic disc and a small booklet containing such things as copyright information, lyrics, and artwork. The music itself though was also packaged immaterially in the format of the Album. When you bought music you bought a medium containing x songs in a particular grouping and order. Older generations of music media such as the vinyl record and the cassette tape made listening to a particular song in isolation even harder. Now we buy files, an abstract series of 1’s and 0’s that we can replicate, alter, and transmit with the greatest of ease. Transferring music recordings, with or without the legal right to do so, is so easy that quite literally a child could do it.

Strangely, the ease of acquiring music makes us both more and less connected to the music we listen to. We are more connected because we have more freedom of choice in selecting what songs we choose to hear. We don’t need to get 12 songs in a package if we just want 2. We are freed from the arbitrary bundling of the album (although with this freedom we may sacrifice a cohesive artistic vision in some cases). Through online discussion and distribution of music we are more easily exposed to interesting artists without major mainstream backing, and we are able to acquire hard-to-find music from anywhere that’s connected to the internet. We become more active consumers of music than previous listeners who were more beholden to the tastemakers and corporate interests that control the airwaves. On the other hand, the ridiculous ease of accumulating music can also make us uninvolved in our music selection. It is not uncommon for people to have downloaded tens of thousands of songs, often hundreds at a time in bulk downloads, with little to no familiarity with what they’ve acquired. This may be a daring or radical way to sample lots of music, but a personal music library is at risk of becoming a massive spreadsheet of extremely thorough but rarely heard music sitting as idle data on an infinite number of hard drives.

Technology has advanced to the point where we are capable of engaging with the wide world of music in ways never before seen. Yet, we find ourselves still downloading the hit single, the Soulja Boy’s of the world, just as the marketers tell us to. But even while we conform to these wishes, we ironically follow the market-driven urge to consume by denying the market our capital. Unrestrained by economics, but compelled forwards by our consumption-based perception of culture, we consume music more and more ravenously, with no barrier to prevent us from ripping one more track, one more album, one more Torrent of an entire discography. The internet has blown the door of the selective process off its hinges, and we take the opportunity by renouncing selection and consuming all that we can.

Warning: Hypperreality, Virtual Reality, and Other Crazy Stuff Ahead

Whenever I think about how the rise of consumerism has reshaped society I think about how we could potentially reshape it again to achieve a pre- or post-consumerist society, and whether or not this is in fact desirable. I'm aware of several active non-consumerist movements, such as religious asceticism. I've always been skeptical however, of philosophies that require eschewing all the goods we've accumulated for the simple fact that attachment to material possessions is too far ingrained in the social psyche to reverse course. So I wonder, could a revolutionary new good somehow break our entrapment in the spiral of endless consumption?

Years ago I stumbled across some madness on the internet that I took quite a liking to due to its sheer audacity and apparent insanity. It is an online version of a book entitled The Hedonistic Imperative (Table Of Contents) The book posits that the use of nanotechnology, psychoactive drugs, genetic engineering, and virtual reality software could produce a post-consumerist utopian world. While at first reading this tract is like wandering through the head of a madman, if the bizarre rhetoric is stripped it reveals a cohesive (but rather implausible) vision for a post-consumerist world. The basic premise is that through use of drugs, we can permanently feel physically ecstatic, while virtual reality software would permit the complete democratization of experience.

The following is an excerpt from a "Hedonistic" critique of Brave New World (link. scroll to the "Consumerist" heading)

At present, society is based on the assumption that goods and services - and the good experiences they can generate - are a finite scarce resource. But ubiquitous VR [Virtual Reality] can generate (in effect) infinite abundance. An IT [Information Technology] society supersedes the old zero-sum paradigm and Fordist mass-manufacture. It rewrites the orthodox laws of market economics. The ability of immersive multi-modal VR to make one - depending on the software title one opts for - Lord Of Creation, Casanova The Insatiable etc puts an entire universe at one's disposal. This can involve owning "trillions of dollars", heaps of "status-goods", and unlimited wealth and resources - in today's archaic terminology. In fact one will be able to have all the material goods one wants, and any virtual world one wants - and it can all seem as "unvirtual" as one desires. A few centuries hence, we may rapidly take [im]material opulence for granted. And this virtual cornucopia won't be the prerogative of a tiny elite. Information isn't like that. Nor will it depend on masses of toiling workers. Information isn't like that either. If we want it, nanotechnology promises old-fashioned abundance all round, both inside and outside synthetic VR.

That right there, that is bold. The author provides numerous defenses for the inevitable criticisms, but they are far too tiresome to bother reading in full. Instead I will provide some quick defenses of my own and then add my own critique. Now, clearly, this technocentric vision exposes itself to many obstacles in implementation and feasibility. Suffice to say, the provision of minimal material goods at a sustainable level is to be accomplished through more super-awesome future sciencey-stuff like population regulation, robotics, and a wild-eyed vision of modifying the genetic urge to procreation.

Of course, the problem here is that this vision is in fact blatant consumerism with the added twist of using false realities to create utopian abundance. Would we not be merely transferring the postmodernist hyperreality and sign-values from the physical world into a virtual reality? Some would argue that this is the logical conclusion of consumerist hyperreality's subversion of physical reality. I however, argue that this is faulty, as the redistribution (or rather, infinite distribution) or experiential wealth would fundamentally alter the meaning of sign-value. How can we relate to the world and each other through sign-values if our worlds become our own creations? Through infinite consumption of sign-values we may eliminate the relative enjoyment of commodities and the concept of luxury. Commodities then would offer us nothing besides a use-value, and even a use-value becomes meaningless when immersed in a virtual world!

Far be it from me to imagine what human desires would then encompass if commodities no longer held meaning. I suppose there would be the pre-consumerist 'basic needs' of humans, but if we are to follow the full program of these weird futuro-hedonists even these will be eliminated by genetic engineering and a worldwide distributive mechanism.

Perhaps this is why their vision hinges upon mankind consuming massive amounts of psychoactive drugs.

The Best Summary Of Marx, Ever

Let's take a break from posting incessantly about consumer electronics to talk some philosophy and political economy. Marx is actually not so bad to read once you try to write it yourself in English like a sensible person, so here goes...

Marx’s theories of political economy revolve largely around commodities, which are any objects that satisfy some human desire. Commodities have a dual nature as use-values and exchange-values. Use-value is the commodity’s direct ability to satisfy such desires via its application or consumption. Exchange-value is the commodity’s relative worth as compared to commodities of other kinds. This exchange-value is manifested in its monetary price. The exchange-value, being dependent on markets rather than pure usefulness, is unrelated to its worth as a use-value. A commodity exists in either of these forms and can be transformed from one to the other by the act of buying and selling. So long as it circulates among sellers, it remains an exchange-value, but when it is put to fulfill its natural function, it is then a use-value.

The main problem with capitalism according to Marx is that it estranges the worker from his labor. This is done in a number of ways. First of all, as the worker does not own the goods he produces, he is contributing more and more objects to a world that does not belong to him. Each object he creates which is not his expands the relative strength of the unattainable world in comparison to the world that is his.

The second kind of alienation relates to the motivation behind his labors. Under capitalism, the only motive for a worker to produce is his own survival, the challenges to which are forced upon him by external forces. Since he has no choice but to produce, his labor is essentially coerced and therefore does not belong to him but to the coercing forces. Rather than gaining things from his efforts, he gives his efforts to another and they are lost to him.

Another kind of alienation is loss of the worker’s human identity, or ‘species-being’. Marx says that man’s identity is completely tied to using the immaterial (labor) to convert ‘nature’ into objects. He makes the (somewhat dubious) claim that this transformation is man’s sole purpose in life. Since a man is alienated from his labor, he is subsequently alienated from his human identity.

The fourth kind of alienation Marx describes is the alienation between human beings. Because the worker loses his labors and his identity to an external master, who is necessarily another human being, he is naturally alienated from this master that takes so much from him.

Ultimately, the problem with alienation is not that it deprives men of goods and economic well-being (although this is important), but that it deprives a man of his humanity. A working man is essentially rendered a machine, devoid of the few things that can be said to truly belong to a person. The capitalist system forces a man to surrender his free will and his life activities, effectively enslaving him, with the important difference that at least slaves can claim to have a purpose and identity that belongs to them. Because of these deprivations, he argues, capitalism is the greatest form of exploitation.


This exploitation should be evident, he says, but it is obscured by a capitalist preoccupation he refers to as fetishism. Marx’s fetishism is the obsessive behavior by which members of a capitalist society measure everything in terms of money. Under capitalism, the cycles of life are understood by market forces that motivate the flow of capital and commodities, the most notable property of any object being its price on the market. Marx says that this outlook on economics and society is a fetish because it distracts from the true nature of the goods society depends on, namely the goods’ nature being the product of labor which is exploitative and alienating to the worker. This fetish allows the structure of the capitalist system to dictate the course of people’s lives.


Word.

The Semiotics of Blenders

You may be familiar with the popular internet video series “Will It Blend?” This series, an advertising campaign for Blendtec blenders, serves as a demonstration of the remarkable shredding power of these blenders. Dozens of these videos have been produced. Some of the items destroyed for the viewing pleasure of the internet public have included broomsticks, marbles, and even hockey pucks. There is no doubt that this company produces formidable blenders, and evidence of their prowess is available here.

Of course, their website is much more than a mere product demonstration. If that were the case, the destruction of a few sturdy objects would be quite enough to convince the audience of the blender’s technical merits. The real purpose for the prolific destructive acts of Blendtec founder Tom Dickson is to enhance their brand’s notoriety and increase sales. According to the unimpeachable information on the series’ Wikipedia page, the campaign was a resounding success resulting in a dramatic upturn in sales and even spawning a line of themed merchandise.

But I am not here to discuss blenders, I am here to talk about what gets blended. I was struck by Mr. Dickson’s choice of…victims? Tom Dickson is a man with his finger on the pulse of modern consumer society, as demonstrated not only by his success with viral video marketing , but also by the products which he destroys for maximum memorable effect. The footage from an episode in which he reduces a set of credit cards to dust could be seen as a biting comment on consumerism if it were put to other ends. In one episode he destroys a Guitar Hero controller, ostensibly because there were no Beach Boys songs in the game, but almost certainly because of the Guitar Hero series’ explosion to becoming a national entertainment phenomenon. He also destroys a copy of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, rather pointless in terms of demonstrating a blender, because as we know all too well, disc-based media are ridiculously easy to break. Once again, the whole point was the destruction not of an object, but of a hyped object.

We could go on at length about Mr. Dickson’s expanding portfolio of differently colored powders, but instead I let’s look at one example and what it tells us about consumerism in the contemporary world. In one the most popular of all the episodes, our buddy Tom reduces the vaunted iPhone into a smoking cup of dust. The iPhone represents not merely an advance in telephony, but is also arguably the pinnacle of popular gadgetry (I risk here contradicting my previous blog post saying the same thing about the iPod.). At the time, a retail iPhone cost about $500. The blackened ashes of the iPhone that emerged from that blender sold for $901 on Ebay. A foul, essentially worthless mess of raw materials sold for more than the product of an extremely fine-tuned device crafted from a considerable investment of research and labor. Dickson may as well have just blended a copy of Karl Marx’s Capital and been done with it.

Those iPhone ashes sold at $901 both because of what they are and what they were. What they were, as I have said before, once a unit of a prized achievement of consumer society. Were he alive hundreds of years ago (and with a blender), Mr. Dickson would have blended tulip bulbs and Chinese porcelain.

What the ashes are now is an item of memorabilia, gaining this status from being the remains of the iPhone destroyed in front of millions. You could blend your own iPhone at home, and I assure you it will not increase in value. There can be only one “Will It Blend?” iPhone. In a culture where we partake of massively shared cultural experiences, possessing the physical manifestation of these memories is akin to owning a modern-day relic.

Quick Note

Heads up, if anybody is reading this, let it be known that publishing these posts is an arcane and mysterious art and I hereby renounce attempting to get the formatting right.

iPod Uber Alles

Apple’s iPod line of portable mp3 players is one of the most successful branding efforts of the decade. To many people, the terms “iPod” and “mp3 player” are synonymous. About a year ago I walked into a retirement home carrying a small new digital alarm clock for my grandmother. Along the way, my mother introduced me to numerous of my grandmother’s elderly friends, all of whom invariably asked if the clock I was holding was some kind of iPod. The iPod has in many ways become the epitome of technological consumerism.

The iPod’s dominance of the portable music player lexicon is unsurprising, as it stands almost unchallenged as the player of choice for today’s tech-savvy trend-followers. Searching through both retail stores such as Best Buy and Circuit City, as well as online vendors such as Amazon.com, reveals that there is in fact almost no competition to Apple’s ubiquitous product. Other companies do manufacture portable music players but none of these stand directly in competition with the iPod. These players are typically low-budget models with limited storage capacity and features. The fact that I have heard of none of these brands probably means they have little to no effective marketing, and are instead focusing on undercutting Apple through sales to shoppers who cannot afford or do not see the point in paying for Apple’s high-end models. In Apple’s field of high-priced, high-capacity, trendy music players, the only real competition is Microsoft’s Zune, a failing effort surviving on the strength of its mother company. Some would argue that this is a natural result of capitalism, namely the triumph of a superior product in a particular sector of the market. Perhaps this is the case, but I find it more interesting as a result of consumer capitalism and the triumph of the superior brand.

What are the three most notable characteristics of the iPod? I asked a number of my friends this question, and was amazed to find that all gave the same answers. First of all, they all said, it is a music player. True enough. It is interesting to note though that at least part of the perceived quality of the product is in its explicit functionality. Secondly, they said it was white, a remarkable claim considering that the iPod is now available in a whole rainbow of colors including black, blue, and pink. One of these friends owns a non-white iPod. This show’s the effectiveness of Apple’s long association with the color white, starting with their breakthrough styling on the iMac computer. Maybe also my friends were calling to mind years of advertising in which the iPod was depicted as a white shape strking out against black human silhouettes, the dynamic but faceless bodies that implied the energy of the device could be anybody’s. Finally, they all said that the iPod is “simple”. The simplicity they refer to is of course the iPod’s iconic control wheel, a single plastic wheel that can be both turned and pressed. While I would argue that the lack of differentiated controls is in fact confusing, I cannot avoid acknowledging the sleekness of the interface and the degree to which operating the iPod is like second nature to those that own it, while watching them struggle with my old non-Apple brick is quite amusing. Perhaps branding has even penetrated deep into our muscle memories?


The iPod has become its own industry, with literally hundreds of accessories designed for it by dozens of companies, iPod-specific docks appearing on a wide range of home electronics, and even direct iPod-specific connections being built into some automobiles. These products aren't made merely to facilitate the integration of portable music players with other devices, they are dependent on the success of the iPod and only the iPod. That a company and a product can be successful as the result of branding is nothing new to us, but the power of a brand to create an entire industry based on itself while preventing competing products from gaining any meaningful share of the market is a truly astounding feat of marketing.