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Gallstone #8 April 2, 1999 |
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CALL THE PHONE BOOTH THIS WEEKEND! (760.733.9969) |
Destroy Homogenized Retail America!-Gone are the mom-n-pop shops that used to color the country. We are a nation of strip-malls filled with nail-salons and shitty pretentious coffee-shops. Every mall in the country looks exactly the same and has the same idiotic shops full of idiotic garbage. There's nothing left in this country except what some huge corporations decide to sell you. Please stop drinking Starbucks Coffee and stop buying fluffpop CDs from Wherehouse and stop wearing lackluster overpriced Gap crap. Find something interesting, and buy it instead, while you still have a choice. |
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| For a while I was getting copy after copy of the "Bill Gates & Disney will pay us X dollars if we all forward this email..." email. I've built a special palace of bile for that morsel of inanity. <http://www.ben2.ucla.edu/~cdavis/snippets.htm> The latest wave of shit polluting my emailbox is about a virtual place called 'alladvantage.com' (hereinafter referred to as orwell-satan). Their brilliant idea is that after you sign up, a little window pops up in your browser and shows you ads while you're online, and you get PAID to look at the little ads (you get fifty cents an hour when the window's open). I'm puking already, but it gets much worse. |
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| So, naturally, every halfwit with a limited perception of the world is scrambling to sign up, and to send referral spam to every email address they can find. |
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Let's deconstruct this notion. Step back and take a deep breath. |
| 1. I see enough ads. I think aggressive ad placement is wrecking the quality of our lives. it's pollution, with a greater impact on my life than rainforests or oil spills. city buses are whored out as murals to advertise the latest bad movie. i can't piss at my local pub without staring at an ad for pizza & drycleaning. i used an atm recently, that played a little video ad while it charged me $1.50 for $20 of my own money. WHY THE FUCK would i sign up to see more ads for $0.50 an hour while I'm online? and why would I expect my friends to think this was interesting? I would PAY that much for a service that REMOVED ads from my online endeavors. |
| 2. Where is all this money going to come from? (again, those with a hazy understanding of reality are not bothered by this question). Do the math- orwell-satan will show you ads every 20 secs? that's 180 per hour. that's about 1/3 cent per ad per viewer. the (theoretically huge) referral revenues, the thousands of dollars a month that "you'll be making", will jack this figure to over ten cents per ad per viewer. orwell-satan will build in their own profit margin, so figure total cost to the advertiser would be 12 cents per viewer per ad. Superbowl commercials are the most expensive in the world. They run $2 million for a thirty second spot, for an audience of over 200 million. That's less than 1 cent per viewer per ad. What idiot in their right mind would pay 1200% of Superbowl ad rates for a little window in your browser? don't flatter yourself. no marketer on the planet would pay 12 cents for 20 seconds of one person's time. ever. |
| 3. there's a privacy issue here. i'm going to allow online strangers (orwell-satan) to plant a window in my browser, and monitor my online time, and peek into god-knows-what-else on my pc, because they *promised* to pay me fifty cents an hour? and for a nickel an hour, i'm gonna tell all my friends (and every stranger whose email address i can dig up) what a great deal this is? fuck you. a big, big fuck you. possibly the biggest fuck you ever. 'oh gee, they wouldn't sell me to a mailing list, because they said they wouldn't!' It's amazing- people won't trust a hungry man enough to feed him a hamburger (he could be a crack addict!), but they'll piss away their privacy (and urge others to do so) to orwell-satan for the age-old promise of untold wealth. People suck. I'm in constant awe of our ability to remain stupid and gullible after so many years of evoltion. shouldn't the dumbasses be dying out of the herd? |
I have sent the following reply to the many people who have invited me to join orwell-satan- |
>why do you have my email address? > i'm seriously tired of web get-rich-quick schemes, and i dont' want to hear >about this latest scam again. >email me in six months- if you're rolling in all this money, feel free to >rub my nose in it. on the other hand, if you've found yourself barraged by >phone calls, junk email, and thousands of AOL CDs, with nothing but regret >to show for your *early sign-up*, i'll be the one laughing at you. >i try to use this email account only for interesting things. your email to >me does not qualify. |
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