I just finished reading The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman (published 1980). This activist, revolutionary, brilliant guy embodied the heart of the 60s, and indeed embodies the heart of all activists fighting against a corrupt, messed-up system.
Abbie Hoffman was a smart kid born in 1936 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family that was assimilating into a somewhat anti-semitic America right before World War II broke out. Kicked out of high-school, he was a trouble-maker and a hustler early on. His parents managed to get him into a fancy academy to finish high school, which brought him to college at Brandeis.
There he ran into some big name teachers, like Abraham Maslow for psychology, Herbert Marcuse for political philosophy, Leonard Bernstein for music, Eleanor Roosevelt for foreign affairs. He ended up getting his masters in psychology, coming out of Berkeley right at the birth of the 60’s. He saw Castro speak. The CIA had just been born and was already pulling dirty tricks abroad. Students were demonstrating. Allen Ginsberg was composing poems right across the bay (they later would become friends).
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or: You Didn’t Pay For What You Bought
When we buy an item at the store, there’s a price tag attached and we usually assume that price on the tag is made up of two things: the cost of making the item, and some amount added on for overhead, profit, etc. If we see a remarkably cheap item, like a complicated piece of electronics for mere pennies, we assume that efficient creation, cheap parts and mass selling make up for the small profit margin. And to some extent that is a valid picture.
However, more often than not, the price tag on the shelf does not actually reflect the real cost of the item we buy. The cost is, in fact, higher than what we pay. Sounds like a great deal, right?
It’s not. The reason companies get away with selling items at lower than the cost to produce them is because the companies externalize their costs. Now, externalization is a simple enough idea in general: let some third party do part of your business in a way cheaper than doing it yourself. For example, having the pros like FedEx do shipping for your business instead of doing it in-house can save lots of money. But that is only the surface of cost externalization, and what we are interested in is much more insidious.
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Someone in Maryland has been secretly replacing ipods inside their boxes with culture-jamming ransom-style notes.
Quote: “Reclaim your mind from the media’s shackles. Read a book and resurect[sic] yourself. To claim your capitalistic garbage go to your nearest Apple store.”
Personally, I think this little act of poetic terrorism is well-intentioned and pretty harmless, so I say more power to whoever is doing it, and may you continue your spree without getting caught. Yeah, it may have been an annoyance to the end consumers, but maybe it caught their (or someone else’s) attention. Getting someone to stop and think (or giggle) for a moment is worth slowing them down a day or two on their latest quest for expensive consumer goods.
[story via BoingBoing]