dwenius | (no subject)

(no subject)

On the route from San Francisco airport to El Cerrito-- a path too often traveled-- there is a large sign that says: "Autonomy Dominates the Search Industry." Without getting into the question of the veracity of this claim, I will remark that I am convinced that this specific wording is intended to subliminally suggest to the aging Bay Area hippie population the name of a Pink Floyd song, thereby engendering spontaneous feelings of goodwill towards the company that their product's performance would not necessarily foster.

So: score one for the evil forces of marketing. Also, there has not been nearly enough exploitation of this and similar memes in SciFi, not even in P.K. Dick.

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that would explain this ad I found on craigslist:

several specialties offer some future creative growth to go-getters in a case when moving is unpredictable.

Well, they were the company who first came up with the idea of letting people buy their way to the top of search engine results pages...

I don't get it - what song is that a reference to?

Astronomy Domine

Right?

yeah, I got *your* reference (see my first reply). I was joshing mathew in response to *his* reply.

I R TEH DUM.

LAWL

The closest to a "future in which marketing is all" that i can think of are The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (written in the '50s, and probably showing it by now; i read it as a teenager), and the sequel written by Pohl on his own in the '80s (The Merchant Wars or something like that). Not fantastic literature, but they had their moments.

Actually, I rather like that billboard as a warning instead of as something touting an actual company.

Questions are a burden for others. Answers are a prison for oneself. And the information-industrial complex is ruled by self-determination.

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