Associated Press photo
Fucking Fony: A resident of Philadelphia walks by Sony Corp's ads for its PlayStation. A city official said the ads, which are meant to mimic legitimate graffiti, violate the city's codes. Worse, the ads violate basic fucking decency -- the fucking money-grubbing corporations won't be fucking happy until they dominate every fucking square inch of the public domain. Hey, I have an idea: How about some real graffiti artists go to Sony Corp's buildings and put some real graffiti on them?
Capitali$t infiltrator$ $uck a$$
When we, the people, find something good of our own, it sure doesn't take long for the capitalist octopus to wrap its slimy fucking tentacles around it, does it?
Not long ago I was in a coffeehouse here in Sacramento and picked up among the independent publications what appeared to be a little zine. Turns out, it wasn't an independently produced zine, but was a fucking promo piece for the movie "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride."
Now, I liked "Corpse Bride" -- I never reviewed it here, but I'd have given it an "A" -- but that's not the point.
The point is that zines are supposed to be produced by regular people, not by corporations or marketers or public relations firms mimicking the real thing.
(I googled "corpse bride zine" and discovered that the pseudozine is available as a PDF here. I found it on a website that's targeted at college students [and that clearly has their best interests at heart, as it includes a webpage telling them how they can join the U.S. military and be potentially maimed or killed in Iraq]. Apparently the marketing weasels [that's redundant] expect students to download and print, and perhaps even copy and distribute, the pseudozine. Nothing like free advertising, eh?)
Recently I read about the existence of "splogs" -- like spam is fake e-mail, "splogs" (a squishing together of "spam" and "blogs") are fake blogs. Here's a definition of "splogs" from an article about them:
A splog is a spam blog -- that is, a fake blog that is created for the sole purpose of getting a high search engine "page rank" to reap profits through ad clicks, or to drive customers to an otherwise obscure e-commerce site. Just like e-mail spam, splogs don't take a rocket scientist to create, but can be built by simple automatic scripts or programs that abuse services like Blogspot, Moveable Type, Wordpress, or Google's Blogger.com.
To keep itself alive, a splog will crawl the Internet using directories, search engines, RSS feeds, etc., collecting information to give the appearance that a real person is adding content. In many cases, this involves automated "theft" of original and often copyrighted content from other authors, without their knowledge, permission, or even attribution.
There's already fierce competition within the blogosphere. Now we legit bloggers have to fucking compete with computer-generated fake blogs? Fucking great!
I already wrote about blog comments spam. Recently I've been getting a lot of blog comments spam that seems to have been computer-generated. The "comment" will be something short and very generic and complimentary to the blogger, like, "Nice webpage, good job," but the name of the "person" who left the "comment" -- a fabricated name, no doubt -- is linked to a commerce Web site.
I sure wish the fuck that Salon blogs would fix this problem. Until then, I have to delete each individual apparently computer-generated comments spam. An actual real, live individual leaving a blog comments spam -- like the assbite I wrote about the other day -- would be undetectable, I understand, but I would think that the apparent computer programs that generate copious amounts of blog comments spam would be detectable -- and thus blockable.
Zines and blogs aren't sacred to the capitalist swine (another redundancy), so why should graffiti be?
Reports The Associated Press today:
Sony Corp scouted out an unusual place to advertise its PlayStation Portable before the holidays: the side of an abandoned building in a gritty North Philadelphia neighborhood.
The black-on-white graffiti shows wide-eyed cartoon characters riding the PlayStation like a skateboard, licking it like a lollipop or cranking it like a jack-in-the-box.
But there's no mention of the Sony or PlayStation brands -- nor any hint the wordless display is an ad. [The same is true of the "Corpse Bride" pseudozine -- there is no indication whatsoever that it's not a real zine.]
The stealth marketing campaign has popped up in San Francisco, New York and other large U.S. cities.
"It's all about hip-hop, urban and all that. They're just trying to get into the teenagers' minds," said Eddie Torres, 29, who works at a nearby furniture shop. "I think it's sharp."
Anti-blight advocates think otherwise.
"They're breaking the law," said Mary Tracy, who runs the Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight, a watchdog group that fights illegal or ill-advised billboards in Philadelphia.
Tracy said Sony ignored the zoning process that regulates outdoor commercial advertising in the city.
Philadelphia Managing Director Pedro Ramos on Wednesday faxed a cease-and-desist letter to Sony Computer Entertainment's U.S. division in San Mateo, Calif. He could seek modest fines allowed by city code or sue to recover any profit the ads produced.
"My fines aren't going to scare Sony," Ramos said. "What will worry them is what the parents and their users will think. This really flies in the face of everything we've been trying to do with our anti-blight initiative."
The Sony division did not immediately respond to the letter or to a telephone message left by The Associated Press. However, Sony spokeswoman Molly Smith told an Internet news site earlier this month that Sony was hiring artists in seven cities -- Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago were the others -- to spray paint the pre-drawn designs. [My guess is that someone similarly was paid to distribute the "Corpse Bride" pseudozines that I saw in the coffeehouse -- I can't see someone doing that on his or her own initiative, out of pocket.]
"With PSP being a portable product, our target is what we consider to be urban nomads," Smith told Wired News.
In San Francisco, the ads were defaced soon after they appeared as word spread that Sony was behind them. "Get out of my city!!!" and "Fony" were written on one. [Good!]
"I thought it was sneaky. Not cool," said Zan Sterling, who works at a bar near one of the ads, which has since been painted over. "I hope that they paid for the cleanup and removal."
Critics and supporters agree the campaign is designed to crack through the clutter of marketing that pervades daily life. Others have criticized its visual appeal.
"They hired artists to just copy this same figure over and over, which isn't too creative," said 29-year-old Jake Dobkin, a New Yorker who writes for the blog Gothamist.com.
That matters little to North Philadelphia resident Leslie Griggs, 39, who said the Sony ad is an improvement over the handbills and scrawls it replaced.
"I don't think that's graffiti," Griggs said as she paused beside the PlayStation ad. "That's art."
No, that isn't fucking art -- that's a fucking ad posing as art.
Too bad the AP didn't interview any graffiti artists, who must be incensed that the fucking Sony Corp is using pseudograffiti as low-cost advertising.
I shudder to think what the money-grubbing weasels are going to try to co-opt next. They don't want us regular people to have anyfuckingthing of our own.
11:02:40 PM 
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