In our age marketing has become a form of guerilla art. Every product comes wrapped in a big fat smiley promising a better future. Phones? Skin lotion? Foreign holidays? Right now several hundred thousands of highly-paid people around the western world are working to reduce you to a slab of submental broccoli dribbling for the next Motorola upgrade. Advertising has become ‘personalised’ – how lovely. Personalised advertising? Sounds about as heart-warming as giving Rasputin a blowjob.
‘Personally’, I think it would be better if they just called themselves the Bastard Gas Company, or the Bastard Phone Company, or whatever – let’s be honest, sleek corporate branding isnt fooling anyone. Companies shaft us like they always did. Shafting customers is pretty much the foundation of capitalism, so they’re not going to stop doing it just because their TV commercial is filled with a load of fucking dolphins swimming to a Faithless remix.
But you know what? I’m used to being shafted. I don’t mind it too much. It's the pretence at some kind of friendly relationship between me and a multinational limited company that pisses me off. A brand giftwrapped in a big heartfelt hug? Well, fuck that. Shitty service I can take. It’s when the phone company starts turning up on your doorstep with a bunch of flowers for your mum that I really want to start reaching for the flamethrower.
Give me strength.
It just so happens that on a recent journey home to visit family, the Bastard Train Company failed to tell me on the phone bookings line that my London-Manchester 1-Day Advance ticket (£648, including a free bottle of water) was actually in First Class. And therefore several thousand times more expensive than it should have been. I realised this only after boarding and fighting my way in a rising apoplexy of fury to the coach where an empty carriage awaited me. It’s called business class, but I couldn’t see any businessmen. Just well-heeled men and women of leisure sipping tonic water in a pool of tranquil calm. Soft lights bathed the feathery cushions in a glow of ocean blue while name-tagged waiters tip-toed round serving up organic crumpets.
Christ.
Pleb that I am, I pushed my way back into the cattle trucks. They were overcrowded to asylum levels. People lay coughing, choking, bleeding in their seats. Several kinds of medieval plagues were in action at once. Only the buzz of mobile phones drowned out the moans of the sick. The doors kept jamming on the body of a dead OAP lying on the carpet, while the woman with the hot drinks trolley groaned as she attempted to squeeze past.
I squeezed up in a seat and watched listless drizzle speckle the windows. A vista of factory flues stared back across the scarred hills. The Virgin train shot silently onward, a twenty-first century titanium turd squeezed along nineteenth century rails. The windows were all sealed tight shut, the shitty air-con blowing multiple infections through the carriages. The intercom announced that the shop was now open to sell sealed cubes of synthetic sandwich for a fiver a pop.
So this is the twenty first century.
This is the twenty first century - couped up in big metal tubes, on planes, in buses, in trains, in trains which are even called tubes. Airtight capsules shutting out the shittiness of the world outside, sleek bubbles of airconditioned, iPod calm. Even the walkways that convey us from one kind of tube to another are tubes. Soon the entire city will become a gigantic intestinal tract, squeezing us out like stomach upsets. We’ll be a blob in the system, a wrinkle in the wrapper, the lube in the tube – ready to be smeared on the end of the cap and left there for several weeks growing mouldy.
I find it hard to be too optimistic.
Just remember, somewhere out there, on a Hawaiian island somewhere, Richard Branson’s sipping a high-class mojito thinking of a way to make the world an even shitter place still. And he will. Just you wait.
