Okay, so a little backstory first, for those who need it...

Regular readers will of course know of a new feature here at the site I recently started called "The Heterotopia Report," which is basically my attempt at doing what most blogs do all the time - that is, simply pointing people to other interesting things found elsewhere on the internet. And regular readers will also remember that in my last report, I mentioned an item about Microsoft employee Heather Hamilton, and how it had seemed recently at her own blog that she had mistaken a fake news article in the satirical publication The Onion for a real one. (The article in particular, by the way, was a fake editorial from a viral marketer, about how much all the products that he gets hired to market in this stealthy way actually suck...well, except for the newest drink from Mountain Dew, which really is as kick-ass as he's getting hired to claim it is. And this is important to today's story, so I recommend checking it out if you haven't seen it already.)

And I don't know why I'm so shocked whenever this happens - I mean, I use Technorati watchlists just like everybody else, and know what all you little fuckers are saying about me as well - but I was indeed shocked when I actually heard from Ms. Hamilton, not even 24 hours later, to let me know that I had gotten my item wrong, that she in fact did not mistake a fake item in the Onion for a real one. No, she was telling me, she was entirely familiar with the Onion before even reading the article, and knew that the article was a fake one designed mostly for laughs...she was just under the assumption that Mountain Dew had paid to be mentioned in it anyway, as a sort of ultimate example of viral marketing taken to a ridiculous extreme.

And sure, I thought this was pretty ludicrous at first myself, just like you're thinking right now too - I mean, really, why would a company actually pay money to a publication like the Onion expressly in order to get made fun of? But then the following question occurred to me, which has now been haunting me for the last 48 hours; what if Ms. Hamilton is right? What if the Onion actually is secretly accepting money from cutting-edge marketing companies, to make sure that their particular product is the one getting made fun of in the publication's sometimes devastating satirical attacks? I mean, it seems almost too ridiculous to even contemplate at first, because let's face it - all us smartie little intellectual shits love the Onion, and love everything it stands for, and would never in a million years guess that they'd be one of those disappointing corporate fucks who would actually resort to such a thing. But hey, as I was pointing out earlier this year, pretty much every organization I've ever had a lot of respect for in my entire life has eventually gone on to profoundly disappoint me...so why not the Onion as well? Jesus, if even the staff of Wired magazine can eventually become soulless, money-grubbing, fascist degenerate corporate assholes, what hope is there for anyone else?

And this gets into an opinion of mine that I've shared here before, and which I still firmly believe - that this nation has been robbed of an entire generation of cutting-edge artists, and an entire generation of subversive, thought-provoking creative output from these artists (novels, movies, paintings, etc), because for the first time in history these cutting-edge artists can actually get lucrative jobs in the advertising industry instead. And this is just so completely and utterly fucked up, I'm not sure where to even start, frankly. Why has our generation not produced another Fellini? Because he's too busy filming a quasi-fetish commercial for Burger King featuring some creep in a dirty chicken outfit. Why has our generation not produced another Jackson Pollock? He's too busy spray-painting sidewalks with graffiti versions of Sony logos.

And I'll be the first to admit, I'm a fucking hypocrite for even bringing this up, because I too have accepted various jobs over the years doing this exact same thing, sometimes for projects that are even more ridiculous than the ones I just mentioned. (Were you one of those unfortunate people, for example, who suddenly started getting lame instant messages on your cellphone in the weeks leading up to that awful Al Pacino movie S1m0ne? Yeah, sorry about that.) But that's entirely my point - that when you are a cutting-edge artist, and you suddenly do find yourself with the opportunity to accept such a job, just the raw amounts of money being hurled at you is almost too tempting to turn down. I mean, seriously, for those who might not know, I get paid $100 per hour whenever I accept copywriting positions for the corporate world; and even on the most simple campaigns I've ever worked on, I still was able to easily log in 60, 80 hours' worth of work. And sheesh, eight thousand bucks to basically write a series of haikus about some awful movie nobody's going to go see in the first place? When the alternative is to make seven bucks an hour behind the counter at a goddamn Starbucks? When you haven't worked for months, and are actually seriously contemplating robbing a liquor store just to pay that month's rent? That's a hard thing to say no to, as I can personally attest.

But still, I feel guilty every time I do accept one of these assignments, and I feel wrong, and I feel dirty, because my job as an artist is supposed to be to fight against the very thing I've just been hired to support. And yeah, I know, that sounds awfully hardcore and pretentious, but fuck you, okay? That IS the job of an artist, no matter how pretentious you might think it sounds - to subvert, to question, to point out the weaknesses and foibles of all the rest of those assholes running around the planet who aren't artists themselves. Artists are supposed to question authority, because who else will if the artists don't? Artists are supposed to make fun of the ridiculously lame ways the ad industry tries to sucker the mouth-breathers of the world into buying their products. We're not supposed to be helping these people sucker all the mouth-breathers - we're supposed to be fighting against them, and making their goals as hard as humanly possible to achieve.

And I think of all this myself, each and every time I accept $5,000 to help promote the newest cardiac-producing sandwich from Arby's, every time I accept $10,000 to write haikus for cellphones promoting some piece-of-shit movie that nobody wanted to see in the first place. Which of course is why I've been accepting less and less of these assignments, the older I get, and have chosen instead to simply remain unemployed, and to sometimes borrow money from friends and family, and sometimes simply not eat for three or four days at a time because I actually am that poor. Which, again, yes, I know, is an awfully hardcore and pretentious attitude for me to have, like something out of a bad Objectivist novel or something. But once again, I am a hardcore and pretentious person, have been my entire life in fact, and I'm not about to start apologizing for it now. (And once again, just for good measure - fuck you, okay?)

So where does it all end? That's the question I always ask, every time I hear of the latest ridiculous viral marketing campaign. Is there literally anything that viral marketers won't do, in the cause of selling another hamburger? I mean, just last week Kodak hired a bunch of sluts in miniskirts to walk around a photography convention, "accidentally" dropping things every ten or twenty seconds; and whenever they bent over to pick the thing back up, of course, everyone suddenly got this wonderful little view of the Kodak logo screenprinted on the back of these sluts' panties. I'm not making this up, people! That's the thing that I guess alarms me the most about all this; that the ad industry is in a free-falling downward spiral right now, and so desperate to justify their existence that they're willing to do just about anything, like out of a goddamn Paddy Chayefsky novel or something.

How much worse will it get before it gets better? Will viral marketers start hiring criminals to break into celebrities' homes, just to steal something really specific so that the news articles about the break-in will talk about it? (And frankly, this may already be occurring - in fact, there's still a rumor floating around that T-Mobile was the one behind Paris Hilton's Sidekick getting stolen and hacked earlier this year, simply so that the Sidekick brand would get all that free publicity for weeks on end. And hey, it worked, better than anyone could've even imagined.) I mean, we now live in an age where entire cities are legally changing their names into URLs; where people will accept money to have a company's logo temporarily tattooed on their forehead; where videogame companies are building temporary utopian societies in the middle of the desert, just to promote their latest gaming console. Where does it end? I can't answer that any better than you can, of course; but just the fact that we need to ask the question itself is what's really starting to bother me these days. It's my sincere hope, for the sake of all of us, that you will maybe spend a little time soon asking the question yourself.

And a couple of random notes as well, as long as I'm here:

--Okay, chat capabilities now set up! And this is something I almost never have an opportunity to play with, to tell you the truth, since I don't have home internet access up in Chicago and have to rely on my mobile device (a Palm Treo) for all my online activities. (And mobile chat clients for the Treo suck, by the way, each and every one of them, because I've actually tried each and every one of them and can attest to this fact.) So anyway, if you feel like gabbing a little in real time, anytime from now until December 29th, you can reach me on chat through the following accounts: Google, Jabber and MSN - 'ilikejason'; Yahoo - 'jasonpettuschicago'. Please do your part to keep this car-challenged suburban visitor entertained over the holidays!

--United Airlines' CEO, talking recently about why United customers were having to wait sometimes up to four hours at O'Hare earlier this week to check in, most of that time standing outdoors in 10-degree (-12 C) weather: "We didn't know so many people would be flying over Christmas." Morons! FUCKING MORONS!

--And speaking of the nightmare which is Chicago airports, don't forget that the city of Chicago sponsors a really great website with all kinds of powerful options when it comes to our local airports - real-time parking updates, maps of terminals, even a mobile portal to check the status of your flight in real time. It's a great resource, and one I highly recommend to those just about to deal with the debacle themselves.

--Are you a Gmail customer, and want to track which mailing lists you belong to are selling your address to spammers? Kevin Gunn reminds us that this is in fact really simple to do - simply add a qualifier to your mailing address when originally signing up. For example (his example, actually), let's say you sign up for a mailing list for exotic flowers; instead of listing your address as 'johndoe@gmail.com,' then, you would list it there as 'johndoe+exoticflowers@gmail.com.' Then every time a message from that mailing list comes in, the qualifier will be right there in the heading itself; and of course, any spam from a company who bought your address from that mailing list will show up with this qualifier as well, definitively proving that that mailing list did in fact sell your address to a spammer. (By the way, it's also incredibly easy to tell Gmail to do certain things with such emails, like send them straight to the trash if such a qualifier exists; see Mr. Gunn's original post for details.) Thanks, Kevin, for the great tip! (And thanks to Lifehacker as well, for originally pointing out Mr. Gunn's post.)

Okay, so I think that's it for today. I hope you're having a happy holiday season, wherever you are, and please feel free to tune in tomorrow for yet more self-righteous ranting.