So I just noticed a really unsettling new development to my whole Amazon account. In addition to the previously discussed Gold Box, I now have a whole new tab entitled "Your [i.e., Rob's] Lifestyle." This is pretty scary. By clicking on it, Amazon's super-Hal computers come up with this whole holistic lifestyle portrait based on my purchases and give me reccomendations on what to buy based on three global activities: Work, Home, and Play. Based on my most recent purchase of a book, and Joy Division and Beck CD's, it gives me really bourgeois, yuppie items that kind of alarm me. In Home, for instance, it gives me wine guides, bottle openers, and a cookbook from Nobu, the famed NYC sushi joint. In Play, there's an entire section on Health, with really insidious subcategories like "Ab-Solutely Fabulous" (read: ab exercisers, though we all know I don't need that!), and "Project: You" (which contains a further delineated sub-category called "Thinking Positively" (which, again, well all know I don't need any help with...). Also in Play, in the "Grow your Library" fetishistic lists, it gives me what they think my lifestyle calls for: a couple of Derrida books and critiques of Derrida, a German hermeneutics reader, and a couple of more 'literary' books by Harold Bloom.

I think this is some kind of society of kids consuming itself and its materialsim alive...oh wait, no, it's just unsettling.
posted by rob at 4:57 PM [edit]