There’s this whole free iPod website that people are hooting and hollering about online. I guess the idea is that you create some profile or something, and then like sign up for a bunch of shit through their affiliate companies, and as “thanks” they send you a free iPod.
Anyway, all these random blogs I’ve been seeing through blogexplosion have been going crazy about it. It’s like at the mere mention of the words “free” & “iPod” combined everyone just pulls their pants down and runs around screaming like a fucking monkey at a banana convention.
Don’t get me wrong. iPods are sleek, cool & well-designed. I’m a huge fan of stealing music online and fucking over the bloated irrelevant record industry, with its overly restrictive unreasonable copyright laws. I’m just so tired of people always trying to bait one another with things like: free offers, freebies, rewards, points, prizes, free gifts, free hand jobs in the bathroom….
We are trained to the point of reflex to immediately drop all our critical powers when we hear the battle cry of “FREE STUFF!” We suddenly believe in magic. We suddenly believe that Jesus and Buddha have gotten married and they love us and want us to be happy. We suddenly believe we can fly through outer space riding a fish. We suddenly believe that fairies came down at the orders of the King of the Elf-Unicorn Freedom Federation and have granted us with all the magical means to satisfy every consumerist fantasy we’ve ever dreamed of.
We must be true of heart and noble of intent in order to have it, of course. We cannot question manna from Heaven. Not even pause to ask “Whom does the Grail serve?” Instead we must GRAB IT immediately and uncritically. Before the whole thing vanishes back into the ether, and the carriage turns back into a pumpkin.
Maybe what the “FREE STUFF!” panic-button really does, though, is remind us for a split-second somewhere in the back of our brains that the green slips of paper we spend our entire lives chasing are actually worthless and meaningless. And to be liberated from the quest for currency for even a moment is to taste the ambrosia of the gods.
But we don’t get the time to give these ideas conscious consideration of course - lives of advertising indoctrination have ensured that. Instead, we just blindly grab at whatever stupid little sparkly trinket is getting dangled in front of our spit-dribbling faces, because we know that if our little monkey hands don’t snatch furiously at it, it will forthwith disappear back behind the mystical monetary walls of exclusion forever.
What people really need, I think, is a good old-fasioned free punch in the face to shake them out of their stupor.
UPDATE!
I’ve posted a follow-up to this, based around an interaction I had with one of the people peddling these Free iPods.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- iPods to become illegal
- The Comic Book of Mormon
- Free iTunes iPod Alternative?
- Apple Unveils New iPod Tampon
- iPod Dance Line
