Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland
I picked up this book not long after I saw students from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass working on a “marketing exercise” last fall on the lawn in front of the Student Union. They had split up into teams and were competing to see who could most successfully promote the new Honda Element (a squared-off minivan with a configurable, industrially tricked-out interior — sort of an SUV for slobs who have expensive pastimes involving significant amounts of equipment) to their fellow students on campus. Several of these cars (trucks?) were parked on the lawn, surrounded by small, frenetic groups of SOM students who were shoving promotional material at passersby, giving out pens and T-shirts, and recruiting people to sign up for “games” and raffles — in exchange for their personal demographic information, of course. Continued…
Prayer at church Sunday: Oh, Lord, please restore my sense of humor. Too much concentration upon politics recently, like a steady diet of Romaine lettuce, has left me bitter and cynical. Time to switch gears.
So I’m sitting here working and UPS comes up the driveway to make a delivery, and I notice from my second-floor window that the roof of the UPS truck has a large white rectangle painted on it.