The Wrong Logo

(This post originally appeared in May 2008 but was lost when the server was hacked in 2015. This is a recovered version.)

I was in a supermarket yesterday, on my way back from other errands, buying a few staples. In my hand was a really well made cloth shopping bag from another company, not the sort of thing that chain provides. I noticed the security guard flag and follow me, and indeed, whilst I was checking out there was Mr. Friendly. ‘We provide baskets for our customers, you see, and as that’s a bag from another store, ya ken, then you really shouldn’t use it in our store.’

Sigh.

I suppose it’s a natural extension of the privatization of the bazaar. Herewith the sorrow I felt when reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar: there are few, if any, bazaars in state capitalist countries, only malls where privately hired goons crush all public dissent. Try setting up a stall recruiting for an anarchists’ picnic club in your local shopping mall – even just in the carpark, or on the pavement nearby… A wonderful tactic: walking meditation in a shopping mall. Not useful here, though.

I contemplated a number of responses on the way home. I could ask them to provide decent bags; I could hack the bag so that it carried the name of a nonexistent competitor; I could paint the bag black; I could put two different logos (both false?) on either side of the same bag.

Or I could just get on with setting up the Cunning Plot, about which more later.