(originally posted at Take the Flower, Curse the Thorn)
The Legend.
Corporate Barons rule the city with an iron-fist, but a thirst for change is in the air. As a “Seeker,” you have the chance to return choice to the people. To do so you must embrace adventure, face your destiny, and help create the next Mountain Dew.
Starting November, 2007, you are invited on a mythic journey through interactive Chambers of adventure that, once entered, will let you vote on new features for the next Mountain Dew: flavor, color, name, logo, label and tag line.
To succeed, you will need all of your cunning and strength. Each Chamber is blocked by a Guardian and ruled by a Master, epic creatures of adventure and deception. There are enemies to fight, lessons to learn, and tools to earn – like a 2-sided battle axe or a coral divining rod to point the way. And there are points to be scored. The more points you win, the greater your fame in the fellowship of Seekers everywhere.
Upon your return to the city for a final showdown with the Authorities, the people will be set free to vote on which elixir shall pour across the land – the People’s Dew. Your destiny will become clear. Choice and creative freedom will become the rule. And the next Mountain Dew will become reality.
Even advertising acknowledges the captivity in which we are held by corporatist capitalism, and exploits the desire to be liberated from that captivity in order to increase sales. How do you escape corporatist hegemony? Buy Mountain Dew, of course! This is the new advent – we do not, in this advent, await the enfleshment of our God, but the unveiling of a new sort of soda, created (uniquely!) by the purchasing masses – a new union of Consumer and Product that claims to destabilize the relationship between the two, and so bring redemption. In reality, of course, (as Thomas Frank has shown), this new advent, rather than bringing freedom by destabilization of the reigning ontology, actually calcifies our captivity to the ruling hegemony.
So next time there’s a WTO protest in Chicago, will everyone from PepsiCo downtown be rushing out to join in? I doubt it.
