Author: Aaron Weber

Mmmm, apocalicious.

So, there’s this incredibly wonderful fancy industrial-grade coffee maker, The Clover. It costs like ten grand, but that’s not too much more than your standard coffeeshop mega-brewing machine. The difference is that with this one you can program in, cup by cup, exactly the temperature and amount of water and how long it stays in the grounds. It’s become the hot thing among coffee-obsessives, and all the really cool shops were all over them. It got profiles in The New Yorker and Slate and The Atlantic as well as the beverage industry press.

And then Starbucks went and bought the company. And now, as Murketing points out, the cool shops hate them.

It’s not that they suddenly make worse coffee. It’s just that now that Starbucks has it, the excellence isn’t cool anymore: “The saga of its rise, embrace, acquisition and ensuing outcry is a precise, accelerated example of how a well-designed product can become a vessel into which people pour their beliefs, expectations and senses of betrayal; the parallels with Apple run more than just skin deep.”

Now, I understand that independent shops don’t want to be buying machines and supplies and support from their biggest competitor. It’s like Barnes&Noble buying up the book distributors and then using that power to screw the independent bookstores (something which should have been, but was not, blocked by antitrust authorities).

Still: Come on, people. It’s a coffee-maker. It’s not an ethos. It’s not a scene. I can see why cafe-owners would be disappointed, but I don’t see why anyone has any reason to feel betrayed.

I’m beginning to think there are a lot of Massholes on the internet. Why?

Background: Melonie Griffiths-Evans buys a house with a terrible loan: $470,000, no money down, an ARM her broker insists can be refinanced rapidly to something she can afford. She should know better, though, because she’s a realtor. Sure enough, the broker disappears and the company he worked for has since been shut down by the state. And sure enough, Melonie got behind on payments and ended up in foreclosure. Now, the bank owns the house and wants her out of it, but city council and CityLife/VidaUrbana help her stay in the house.

It’s pretty much a field day for internet commentators. Theme one: “You liberal jackasses want to use my money to help idiots,” with a thinly veiled “those idiots are lazy black welfare queens” subtext. Theme two: “You heartless conservatives want helpless poor people to be out on the street,” with a thinly veiled “republicans are all racists” subtext. Theme three: “I rent, and everyone who bought a home they couldn’t afford is an asshole, and I hate them personally.” Theme four: “I blame the Jews.”

The first three at least seem somehow related to the topic at hand, but I’m just not sure where the fourth one comes in. Bizarre.

We’d be interested in knowing more about the 1.8 percent of historians who regard this presidency as a success.

A stork delivers a baby, struggling through waves and storms and deserts, pausing only to fight wolves to make it safely to suburbia, and then is really let down that the baby grows up to be a functionary in a gloomy office. Message: Are you living up to your potential? If not, use our website to find a new job. Oh, crap. Are you crying at an advertisement again? Yeah, that’s always embarrassing.

The ad leaves me with more questions than answers. I mean, is it a good idea to make your potential customers feel really horrible about themselves? Why would the stork stop to fight wolves, when it could just fly around them? Can birds really experience disappointment, and if so, would they communicate that emotion with facial expressions while looking at you through rain-streaked glass? How long do storks live, anyway? Has anyone actually found a job on Monster? (Seriously, as far as I can tell, that website is useful if you are a company that has a candidate to fill a job opening, but needs to pretend to advertise the job to avoid legal troubles.) Ads Of The Weird isn’t convinced it’s a great ad either, especially given the quality of a lot of the jobs on the site.

Oh dear. 3D Printers have learned to self-replicate and NKOTB has reunited. Surely the second coming is at hand! Market self-regulation will make planes fall from the sky and sinners will have to use poorly-designed web pages to figure out what happened. Ol’ John McCain seems to think so, anyway.

On the other hand, given man’s inhumanity to man, maybe a good scourge and tribulation might not be an entirely bad thing.

NewTeeVee says my work-blog at TV With MeeVee is a “corporate blog worth reading.”

Rob Walker’s “Buying In: The Secret Dialog Between What We Buy And Who We Are” might not seem, at first, to have much in common with a book about Celine Dion. But when that book is “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste,” by Carl Wilson, it really does.

“Buying In” is about the ways that people assign meaning to consumer objects and use them to define themselves – and whether the phenomenon of consumerist identity is a good thing. “Let’s Talk About Love” is about Celine Dion, yes, but it’s about the ways that people assign meaning to Celine Dion, and what those meanings are, and whether any one of them is universally correct.

Celine Dion is widely disliked but also widely loved. Schmaltzy, kitschy, commercial and soulless? Beautiful, pure, and filled with love? Both? It wouldn’t hurt to have a chapter about her in “Buying In,” right next to the discussion of skateboard culture and the rise of Timberland work boots among hip-hop fans.

At different points and en route to different destinations, both books make the same point: People want to be regarded as individuals and also they want to feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves. Various kinds of consumer behavior sate those apparently contradictory needs, often at the same time. I tend to think of it as sort of a tribal behavior: I’m a skateboarder, not a preppie. I listen to Neko Case, not Celine Dion. You get the idea.

One of Wilson’s point major points is that regardless of her actual merits, Celine Dion comes in for a lot more criticism than she would otherwise, because people want to distinguish themselves from people they see as being Celine fans. He covers a lot of ground getting there: The philosophy of aesthetics and taste the evolution of contemporary pop music from 19th century music halls, the origins of pop-music criticism, the Quebecoise culture that formed the background for Celine’s rise to popularity, and more. But ultimately, he’s just trying to step back and give Celine a listen and see what it is that other people love about her. He doesn’t quite manage to like the material himself, but he at least gains some understanding for the tribe of Celine.

Meanwhile, Walker’s interest is the way marketers try to get people to buy things, and whether they have any idea why people actually are buying what they do. He, too, covers a lot of ground: BzzAgent and the Word Of Mouth Marketing association, case studies of Scion and Red Bull and skateboarder culture, the history of advertising and the belief that “kids today are immune to advertising,” which seems to have been in effect since at least the 1900s. The ongoing focus, though, is the way that buyers determine the meaning of what they buy at least as much as sellers do. He talks about how brands like Timberland and Pabst have been the beneficiaries of consumer-driven rebranding that’s turned them into consumable meaning, and how they’ve played along with it rather than resist it. And he talks about how Red Bull and Scion have latched on to existing communities to try and build themselves credibility with different groups.

There are plenty of great anecdotes and at least a couple lessons anyone in sales, marketing, or product development should learn, but he’s got one big point at the end. He says that products may symbolize individuation and community, but they don’t create them. The goal of marketing (or murketing, as Walker calls the latest devious and confusing marketing techniques) is to convince people that a product will provide those emotional needs. But it can’t.

Walker doesn’t think it’s possible or necessary for people to stop imbuing consumer objects with meaning, but he wants people to be aware of how and why they do it, and to understand that a symbolic purchase isn’t a substitute for actually having your own identity or being part of a community.

In both cases, we’ve got an examination of our unexamined consumer preferences turning out to be moral choices – and often not very good moral choices. Both books remind us to look carefully at what we consume, and whether we consume it at all, and how we position that consumption as a signal to other people.

Barry Crimmins sure is doing some great work:

“I’d much rather lose a campaign than lose a war.” — John McCain
“How about both?” — Barry Crimmins

McCain’s emergency appeal to boys who are more afraid of losing than anything else in the world speaks to every clown who ever got in a fist fight at a slow-pitch softball game. The United States has already lost a lot more than a war it never should have started in the first place. Thanks to America’s growing police state, we have lost our civil liberties. Thanks to America’s practices of torture, illegal detention and extraordinary rendition, America has lost whatever good name it had in the world. Thanks to America’s two-term fascist moron president, America has become an international punch-line. Thanks to the low, low prices of politicians, the American government has become a subsidiary of heartless, bloodless corporate scum. And thanks to that, the American military has become Hessians in service of that scum. Under the phony cover of “globalization” America’s economic backbone has been filleted and shipped in sharp shards for use in impaling peasant populi around the world. This country is broke, it’s infrastructure is busted and its health in the exact same condition as the ethics of the insurance and pharmaceutical racketeers who value profiteering more than life. Why exactly should I give a shit WHEN we officially lose a war that was a lost cause the second it became a viable option?