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For my sins I've had to spend some time in a Management Theory course where they handed down such gems of wisdom as "Quality is a state of mind". Myself I am no stranger to mental correction facilities. The good Doctor had his moment in the incarceration spotlight when the Pearse street boys in blue interrupted one of his wilder psychedelic experiments. We're familiar with the babblings of the mentally subnormal. We have heard some shite in our time. But this one takes the big thick creamy pint of porter. If quality really is a state of mind then there are some truly empty headed inbreeds producing the gear that floods the World's Marketplace. Me and my mates forked over our hard-earned for a Playstation that banjaxed itself as soon as the warranty expired. That box bit the dust faster than a bunjee jumper whose chord has snapped. By strange coincidence it bore Mr. Sony TM Mark of Cain. Where did I see that before? Was it in that epilepsy-inducing cinema advert?
In fact it was all three and more. After three weeks they had me believing that I was going to shag Laura Croft, win the NBA Championships, and destroy the Death Star All in one day! One year later I'm still living in a house with more vegetation growing on the walls than in the garden. The only thing you can do with a busted Playstation is fuck it out of the window in the hope of braining a passing Sony marketing executive. I need a dead grey box in my house like a need an extra arse - there's enough shite in the world as it is. I reached for me Da's favourite tool, the 4lb hammer - Jaysus, he could fix anything with that - including unwelcome enquiries about back rent.
On Tomorrow's World they used a CD as a slice of toast and claimed it was the indestructible medium. Bullshit! Then how would they sell you your record collection again when CD goes out of fashion? There are labs full of scientists solving problems that you didn't know you had, and they hadn't even come up with before they saw last week's marketing report.
Truth is obsolete. Less is more. A chipped mug of Nescafe is going to taste like you're sipping a cappuccino on the Champs Elysee. A bar of chocolate will give you the warm afterglow of an orgasm. Yeah, right. They insult your intelligence with mindless slogans and inane contradictions. Wash and Go solo - now you can take two bottles into the shower instead of one. Brilliant innovation there, lads. Concentrated soap powder - we took the water out! They must have spent a few late nights in the Research Department on that one. We are living in the belly of the Beast, 24-7 exposure to newspeak and doublethink that makes 1984 look like Gilbert & Sullivan. Advertising tells you that choice comes down to cola flavoured battery acid or cola-flavoured battery acid with a hint of lemon. So you're standing there, sweating like a maniac under the Spar interrogation lamps, stoned out your mind, trying to figure out which brand of battery acid means you get to have sex with beautiful babies right there on the counter. Meanwhile back at the ranch, Mr Nike is cutting five dollar cheques to the kids in his south-east Asian sweatshops. A few thousand miles away, kids in Compton are killing each other for his seventy five-dollar footwear. That's five dollars for the shoes, twenty dollars for the weasels' coke and fifty dollars for Mr. Nike. Can you see the reality gap in this picture? Truth comes for free. Serious bullshit costs fifty million dollars for sixty seconds on primetime.
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Doesn't make the cut in the world of solid state electronics though. They design these things so that they can't be repaired, and then they sell you the new improved model to take your mind off your problems. Like the threat of being buried under the European shit mountain building up in your cupboard. The Volkswagen Beetle, the best thing to come out of the Third Reich, was cheap, reliable and you could fix any part of it with a shot down Spitfire. That's why they stopped making it. 