Chips and Salsa

Feeling wiped out today, and my angel of a new boss is letting me out of my shackles a little early so I can go home and germinate by my lonesome. "I'm not sick," I keep telling them. "It's just the aftermath of my allergies." But it's hard to sound convincing when you have the tone of Leonard Cohen after a bender.

Driving home last night, I caught a snippet of "Democracy Now," with host Amy Goodman talking about RFID chips, and how they'll be used to track where we go, what we buy, and just about everything about us. While the government use of such devices is certainly terrifying, I couldn't help being fascinated by the consumer aspect. Products can now be tagged at "birth" and followed from shipment to purchase to disposal. Even if we pick up a product and put it down again on the store shelf, that could be tracked. Every micromovement plotted on some database. Time used, time thrown away, shelf life duration. Everything metered and charted to garner even more fragments on who we are and how or why we buy things. More market research gathered, more analysis done. I can't help but think why all the obsession. It's as if marketers are some off-world sentience who are amazed by human behavior and need to chart it all down, all the way to the tiniest quirk, so they can safely put a tube of toothpaste the shelf.

Such devotion to studying humanity covertly reminds me of the underappreciated Alex Proyas film, "Dark City," where a bunch of menacing Nosferatu-like aliens have kidnapped thousands of humans, the latter of which are toyed with by the former, given memories, given new lives, in order to see what the humans would do. Such actions would reveal what made us us, and would give a dying alien race a chance to survive, through observational osmosis leading to injecting our memories (made up of a viscous fluid) straight into their brains. The aliens, of course, fail because one human figures out he's a lab rat, and begins to use the aliens' power against them (with some help from a pre-Bauerian Kiefer Sutherland, who channels Peter Lorre something fierce).

I'm not a marketer. I don't understand the pressure of having the public buy your razor or your shampoo or your car, but I'm shocked by the way companies lurk in the shadows to gather so much about what's in the end just disposable crap. Really, it is because we aren't filling out consumer surveys that you are spying on us? Just like products that say "fair trade" or "recyclable" or "dolphin safe," I'm guessing there's going to be a techno-organic market in the future where products will sold saying "Chip Free" or "RFIDon't!" Next to the farmer's market salsa. Yum.