Turning Rebellion Into Money

Or not

How doth thou annoyest me? Let me count the ways:

www.Budtrap.com, My oh my – another one of those things that looks like a satire on pre-crash, dot.com optimism-over-reach. One of those ones that has absolutely every web 2.0 cliche packed into a space the size of a… well, a web-site… and with an underlying “product” that has about the same intrinsic value as the paper that the price-tag is written on. But it’s beautifully designed, and holy fuck, how much have they spent on marketing?

Check the word cloud from one of the pages : it reads like a brand-exploration brainstorming-session:

It’s a thing for wrapping your cellphone headphones up with.

There’s a top half and a bottom half. When you buy one, you get one top and five bottoms (A Bit Like Hotdog/Bun Package Mismatch Syndrome) – and the idea is you then give away 4 of the bottom halves to people from the “community” that send out requests on twitter. Or Facebook. It’s viral see? It brings people together in a new and fun ways!. And they also give $1 of the $5 to charity!

The model is the tried and true Web 2.0 tiered setup – free basic; paid premium – but applied to physical things (albeit a physical thing where the production costs are likely to be fairly low)

It’s something that needed to be tried out somewhere sooner or later, and it needed to be tried on something fairly small… so I can’t begrudge them that. It’s a good thing to be experimenting with – it’s just that all that shiny-happy effervescence gets up my cynical celtic nose, and this whole notion that people should get all evangalistic about a “product” seems somewhere south of authentic to me.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe this is what people are actually like now… and it’s not all a symptom of a bubble of some sort. I hate all this joiny-inny stuff. I’m a paranoid recluse.

There’s this other thing they (apparently) do that I can’t quite get my head around either – what they call “Packing Parties” which sounds like an 18-25 Vacation version of stuffing envelopes.

I’m kindof torn on this one – on the one hand, it would be good to make work a lot more fun and adaptable than it currently is. About 60% of people (who live in the west and who have jobs) hate their jobs. This is bad. We really ought to fix this… and if Packing Parties is a way to do it, well and good.

On the other hand it also sounds like cheap labour to me, with no employer responsibility whatsoever – and maybe that’s good with young startups where everyone is a shareholder… but it ain’t no way to run a society. But what do I know? I’m a freelancer – I’ve spent the last 10 years working in startups, with no rights or corporate responsibility to or from me either. I’m not exactly practising what I preach.

So there you go. Nothing personal etc, and I get a feeling that part of the marketing “attitude” of these guys is to court “debate”… so maybe they won’t mind me saying “I can’t quite decide if this is bullshit or not”. I hope not.