Branded Heretical

The Power of the Brand remains a deviance without a sell-by date. Here's my speculative take on being 'Stripped To The Essentials'.

Hi there.

Despite not being an X-rated evil social media manipulator bent on world domination, I ran a little experiment on the ‘Threads’ thing earlier this week. I wanted to assess the power of an anonymous brand randomly picked from a recycling bin. Specifically, how fast and far would any fans mount a spontaneous defence against a perceived slight.

Here was my prompt to trigger a response:

“I believe we have reached either peak corporate nannying or peak consumer stupidity.”

© = Clifftop © = Chums / ™ = Top Marks / ™ = Trash Monitor

Maybe I should have also added ‘Possibly both’. But the ‘Guardians of the Known World™ ’ didn’t disappoint, identifying the unnamed brand within their 50 millislights SLA. They rushed in, like ants defending a nest poked with a stick. It was a fascinating insight into how far human behaviour has been manipulated by consumerism.

More than seven thousand views later, I’d garnered enough material on innate brand identification and “cutesy” ad copy to create the five hundred word speculative fiction story below.

To oppose the brand-centric control of today's marketplace and mall-frequenting zombies, a recent trend amongst Gen Z is adoption of a deconsumerist lifestyle. It’s been given the unwieldy term ‘#underconsumptioncore’, and might be just another flash-in-the-pan Tik-token affectation. More optimistically, it might be the embryonic beginnings of them deconstructing their minds to heal the damage from exposure to millions of not-so-covert ‘influencer’ ads. Should we dare hope, to paraphrase David Bowie, that the children who try to change their worlds, become immune to commercial exhortations as they grow aware of what they’ve been put through?

Ch-ch-ch-Changes, indeed.

Until next time…

P.S. I didn’t even know the item was in the bin. So very random.

P.P.S Writers shouldn’t be so naïve to (or smugly reject) the possibility of their readers manipulating them. Rest assured, I will still remain your humble servant, etc., etc.

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Stripped To The Essentials

She plucked at the threadbare stitches with a small pair of scissors, the tip of her tongue emerging again to twist like an impatient child in a corner of her mouth. “There,” she said, pulling the last of the hereticals from my jumper. “That’s better.”

She tossed it onto the burgeoning pile of picked and cut labels on the old wooden table. “Anything else?” she asked, her questioning brow deepened by the bare ceiling light. I shook my head and met her unwavering gaze with practised, enlightened eyes. “You sure? You know what will happen otherwise…”

My shake became a vigorous nod as I clutched the edges of the folding metal chair. I knew. The boy pinned to the wall at the Isolate’s main entrance had been branded to death, the stapled labels weeping like stigmata. “That’s everything, I promise. Belt, shoelaces,—”

She pointed to the larger heap on the table. “Okay. Get dressed. Supper bell soon.”

I hastily pulled the only visible underwear from my upended bag of clothing, bending to pull them on. My left calf had stopped bleeding, but the exposed dermis continued to transmit painful, stinging reminders. Tattoos were a mandatory part of every inductee’s declaration. Rumour was you began screaming by the third. My sins stretched to just one, but the cries from nearby cubicles hinted at fellow arrivals with more ink than shame covering their bodies.

I donned a plainer t-shirt, my left nipple exposed by a fresh cut-hole, and dug for my glasses buried deep in a jacket pocket. The induction official stood to repack her cleansing kit as I dressed, sweeping the ragtag results of her handiwork into a bright-yellow waste bag. As she turned to me before leaving, her eyes widened on meeting mine: “You never mentioned glasses,” she said.

“I… I didn’t think. I—”

“Show them to me.”

My hands shook as I held them out. She didn’t touch the potentially poisonous item, but circled it with squeezed lips and narrowed eyes, a detective examining an unearthed clue. A gasp preceded her command: “Drop them.”

“What? No. I need to—”

“Drop them!” she yelled, as if I’d snatched the yellow bag to shower her with its heretical contents. My once precious glasses clattered to the rough-hewn floor. I couldn’t look down. A single step brought our noses almost to touching, her ice-blue eyes piercing mine. “Raybanned. Obviously…” she uttered, each syllable a slice of her white-labelled scalpel.

“Obviously,” I gulped in reply, throat tight with unadvertised tears. All vestiges of consumer desire had to be cut from my cookie-cleansed heart, but I still winced as the crunch of her boot signalled an end to any far-sightedness.

As my interrogator spun on her heels to depart, another volley of neighbouring screams pierced the dank air. They confirmed another rumour: undeclared piercings meant pliers.

A rebooted world required brave steps to remove banal brands, and I was through the worst. But I never imagined it would be this hard.