In the Age of Advertising, many pressures press down on all individuals and social institutions, but one pressure presses hardest and runs everything, the pressure to participate in marketing. It's that -- so whispers the Age of Advertising in our ears -- or perish. Once upon a time it was 'do or die.' But that has been supplanted by 'market yourself or die.' In business and broadcasting it is blatant, and excusable even, as it's the core of what they are about. But all institutions great and small, formal and informal, have been compromised by this process, some more reluctantly than others, some without any restraint whatsoever. It infects our politics, academia, spirituality, interpersonal relations, and even the furthest backwater of the written word. The ego is no more. Now we have "the marketed self." The ego may even despise this self, but the marketed self is lord of the manner. It is hard to distinguish motives, underlying conflicts, the many sacrifices of principle to avoid extinction. MeBC is a random satire of this entire phenomenon. Random satire is one of the few ways left to make tiny cracks in the monstrous, smothering edifice. In art, the degree to which the art act itself has degenerated into advertisements for the artist is the greatest decadence we face in our entire civilization. When all impulses are generated (or even just filtered) by the mechanism of marketing itself, the buidling blocks of our social and cultural dialogue become polluted, grow false, warp, and ultimately, smother us in dysfunctional hyperbole. MeBC attempts to add to this din by foisting yet another self-consumed artist on the world. Finally, do please keep in mind that this url (mebc.net) was purchased and the attendant satire was begun long before Blogs or YouTube or Twitter or MySpace or Facebook came on the scene (ie, last century). Don't believe it? Go to WhoIs and look it up! "Okay, so who cares. You were satiring things even before they happened! So what. Are you for or against this paradigm shift in human communications? The world has enough satirists already. Are you for anything? Or just against things? What are you for?" "Oh really? The world has enough satirists already? Are you sure about that? I think the world has enough marketers already, but not NEARLY enough satirists. And that's the full extent of my 2 cents." Back to MeBC home