Second Hacking

I wrote an article back in 2005 titled 'The Evil That Is Panera' or...Why Adam Smith's Invisible Hand Reaches For Lousy Chow, about having been hacked. Every time I passed a Panera, my chow-dar would ping and I'd have a strong impulse to pull my car over.

Everyone, I was forced to concede, can be categorized...and manipulated according to that category. Everyone! "Extreme aversion to marketing and manipulation" is just another demographic. Panera is for them/us. Or at least it signals that way, despite its horrendous and disgusting food.

Panera remained my sole blind spot for many years. But these t-shirts (pushed at me on Facebook, naturally) are the same. Yeah, while Panera is brutishly awful, the actual quality of these shirts is uncertain. But my point is that they're baldly inauthentic - self-consciously contrived for marketing to wryly ironic food-lovers like myself. Their sole reason for being is to capture my "demographic" (I use snot quotes, but my point here is that I seem to truly be part of one).

Bad English on many of them and everything. This is what I like. This is what I want. Not with the front of my mind, but with the more latent back of my mind. Again, I've been hacked.

Example:

Whenever I played a gig in Japan, I'd spend my free time hunting for t-shirts exactly like this. If I could have told an AI exactly what I was looking for, this is what it would have come up with.

Hacked twice, now, in 62 years. It's accelerating.