05.19.13
Culture of Lickspittle item of the week
The tech nerd pest’s commonplace notion that an “app” is the answer to every problem in the world is a natural for our culture of lickspittles.
This week the perfect item for the progressive gadget nerd is Buycott, an app made in the child’s belief that the Koch Brothers can be undermined if we could just all check what products their multi-billion dollar business empire puts in supermarkets.
Fight back! Wave your Buycott equipped iJunk over the bar codes and don’t buy AngelSoft toilet paper people! That will fucking show them!
With the Koch Brothers vanquished and the Citizens United decision only an unpleasant fading memory, the world will be at your swiping fingertip.
App developers will turn their attention to vanquishing all bad things through automated on-line petitioning and smartphone waving.
As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg solved the problem of global organ donation over a bottle of posh wine with his wife, so will apps available on iTunes do away with malaria, the need for 48 million Americans to be on foodstamps and the regime of Bashar Hafez Assad. (I even have a name for the last one: RUSyriass.)
With national deployment of Buycott the grip of corporate America will loosen and worker’s rights will undergo a new renaissance.
After Buycott is through with them the fourteen American multi-nationals that refuse to sign the Bangladesh Factory Safety Accord will rue the day they decided to keep making garments through cruel slave labor cutouts in foreign territories.
“Buycott is still working on adding new data to its back end and fine-tuning its information on corporate ownership structures,” reads one helpful piece at Forbes. “Most companies in the current database actually own more brands than Buycott has on record. The developers are asking shoppers to help improve their technology by inputting names of products they scan that the app doesn’t already recognize.”
Crowd-sourcing will triumph. Once the word is out, millions of users will see to it that Buycott’s database is complete, comprehensive and error free! Just like everything that’s done by flash mobs united by social technology.
“This thing is awesome,” reads one testimonial at the Apple shop. “It teaches you patience while you try to register 17 times.”
Floormaster Squeeze said,
May 20, 2013 at 6:10 am
What is really silly is they all have Wikipedia apps in which they could educate themselves thusly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
George Smith said,
May 20, 2013 at 7:38 am
Very clever. That whole time you are staring at it waiting, you are likely not buying stuff from companies that have practices you might find unacceptable.
Perfect score from Culture of Lickspittle press, though.