life imitates fiction

Thanks to Curtis who pointed me to the article at Boing Boing (which I'm really going to have to start reading more regularly) about Pringles preparing to put advertisements on individual potato chips. I feel like I have read something like this in a novel by Gibson or Sterling. Certainly in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age , which I highly recommend for anyone interested in the fate of print culture, animated advertising crawls on every surface and holographically chases passerby in exactly the ways some people predict RFID tracking may do in the near future. I just can't remember whether the ads were so literally ingested. Talk about cultural interpellation.

It also seems especially weird that the first advertising planned for Pringles is for a Trivial Pursuit game. Which will probably subconsciously appeal to people -- if you eat the facts, then maybe you will learn them.

It might be interesting to go back to late 80s science fiction and see what was being suggested for the "future." Remember when disposable cameras first came out? All I could think about when I first saw them on display in Target was The Man Who Fell to Earth, a great Nicolas Roeg cult fave of my teenage years. David Bowie plays the alien who comes to Earth in search of a way to bring water back to his home planet. He's got more advanced technology than Earthlings, and leaks it out bit by bit to raise a fortune to try to build a spaceship that can take him back. One of the key things he introduces were disposable cameras. There's much more in the film -- including one of the most memorable scenes I know of involving contact lenses...