Right Catchphrase, Wrong Conglomerate
Short one because I'm fixing to head off to Breakfast...

So this weekend, Steph and I were walking around New York City, and we saw an entertaining new ad campaign: sheets of quarter-postcard-sized stickers, with pictures of zombies shambling around wearing white headphones, with a caption saying "iDead". Or pictures of sheep with white headphones - "iSheep". Dogs with white headphones - "iFollow". And so forth.

This struck a chord with me; the mp3 player wave has always vaguely reminded me of that episode of Sliders where they go into an alternate world where everybody has a personal VR headset that allows them to believe they're doing whatever they really want to be doing when they're actually cleaning windows, sweeping floors, etc. And there is something eerily zombie-like to a legion of yuppies walking around doing nothing but listening to their own music. If nothing else, it permits us to further engage in our culture of selfishness: "Of course I'm the main character of my own little movie. I've got a soundtrack to match!"

A certain kind of structured individualism, I'm okay with. But when individuals start isolating themselves behind walls of stimulus, I feel we've gone past individualism (a realm where the exchange of ideas between individuals leads to beneficial conditions for the whole) and into isolationist collectivism (where we are all cogs in the machine, but we think we're realized individuals, because look we have all this cool music).

Granted, I don't feel this way all the time. On airplane flights, for example, it's amazing to be able to sit back and listen to Beethoven's Seventh, or to Sweeney Todd or the Beatles for that matter, while the guy next to me blathers on about his alcohol habit or the kid across the hall plays on his DS. And while doing mindless Thog-Lift-Weights-Run-On-Track kind of exercise, there's nothing better than to have Seven Nation Army telling me I'm going to Witchata in the background.

Seriously, that song is one of maybe two in the universe that is specifically built to have the listener supply his or her own percussion in the form of heavy iron plates smacking into one another, interspersed with groans and grunts and explosions of decidedly non-yogic breath.

But I digress. My point is that an ad that says 'iDead' resonates with me, and touches on themes I've wanted to explore in a story for a little while. (I've stayed away from it 'till now out of a desire not to immure myself in Vonnegut-esque satire before I graduated from college, but hey, what do you know.)

So when I follow the link (www.idont.com) and realize that the entire project is a media shill for the Sansa e200, a new (admittedly relatively impressive) flash mp3 player, I'm understandably pissed off. Don't be an iPod zombie - but being a Sansa zombie is okay? Especially when one of the selling points of the Sansa is an obscenely long battery life, so you can stay zombified for even longer? If you click around their website it becomes sickeningly obvious that they're trying to harness subversive sentiment to make a buck or two.

To steal a phrase from MC Lars, ditching the iPod sidewalk zombie look is punk rock. Opening people's eyes and ears is punk rock. Making a contrived appeal the anti-authoritarian identity of youth subcultures in order to sell your product is not punk rock.

Not that, you know, I myself am particularly punk rock. But I have a goatee, so maybe that counts for something.