The Real Revolution

All this talk about blogs and bloggers, etc, etc as they relate to the democratizing power of the internet has callously ignored a really important player. An entity so powerful it feeds thousands of fledgling hipsters needs on a daily basis (not to mention wannabe political stars, family reunion planners and middle-aged ladies who like cats and work in accounting everywhere). Even though it's linked to all over the place and must have crazy high traffic, you probably can't even guess what I'm talking about because it gets no ink anywhere.

No more suspense: I'm talking about cafepress.com. And I'm being totally serious. Steve sent me a link to this cruel yet funny web site and I followed the "store" link to a cafepress page. Looking at the merch, I felt the warm sense of the familiar. I'd seen these coffee mugs, these baby tees, these thongs before. Never before with cute little bunny logos, but with random political sayings, with cheesy "I'm #1!" style successories, and with countless pseudo-ironic phrases that make all five people who buy those products feel oh-so-hip.

How huge is it that anyone with internet access can so easily create and sell their own merchandise? Pretty huge. Not predicting that the fashion industry will crumble or anything, but seriously, now that seventh avenue no longer has a corner on the whole hip-t-shirt market, we're looking at a whole new America. Well, you know what I mean.

UPDATE: This post kind of reads like rambling to me now (9:30 am Friday). What I meant to say is that in a consumer culture, like the one we live in, control of the marketplace of goods, not just information, is really powerful. That is all.