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.
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