Last week I was lying on my bed late at night procrastinating homework when I stumbled upon a music video that gave me some inspiration. The song "Fake Empire" shows us the harsh reality of our world, a world controlled by the few corporations and their products. The most obvious one of these is Apple, and that's emphasized in Ryan Lewis' video.
This video's image of people's mouths being covered by corporations made me think about my own life and how dependent I was on certain companies, mainly Apple. I sit and write this post on my Macbook pro while checking texts on my iPhone as my mom sits in her room looking for Christmas presents on her iPad and my dad does work on our iMac. Apple truly is a company that my family relies on to function, and I think it's frankly too much.
Technological advancement is supposedly an exponential function. This means that for all the new technology that gets created today, twice that will get created tomorrow. And four times that the next day, eight times that the next day, and so on and so forth. If technology seems advanced now, it's barely scratched the surface of its full potential. This can be explained further by Dan Brown in the video below.
What really scared me as I looked around my house and saw all the Apple products is the idea of the future. If Apple can already dominate technology on the relatively miniscule scale of technology that exists today, imagine where we'll be in twenty years. Will Apple lose its popularity and ultimately become a small company in a large conglomerate of tech overlords? Or will our entire existence be controlled and dictated by one megacorporation?
Talk about a dystopia.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Shoe Game
Although it looks like I won't be able to do my documentary on this subject because another group is already doing it, I wanted to at least write a blog post about this interesting subject.
The Shoe Game is the business of buying, selling, and trading shoes. It's somewhat like a black market, except there isn't really much illegality associated with it, the shoes are just treated as such. People buy these shoes, mostly varying types of Nike Jordans, for 500 hundred dollars or more, compared to the limited release retail price of around 200 dollars.
In many malls and schools (including Blair) you can see these shoe deals happening all the time. One guy hands another a seemingly new shoe box, and the other hands over either a giant wad of cash or another box of shoes. Apart from the "resellers", people only involved to profit off desperate shoe-gamers, the goal of the trade is to be able to wear the "freshest" and "rarest" pair that everyone else wants but can't find.
While this business can actually be good practice for business in the real world and some people can even make substantial income from it, there are inherent dangers in such high value merchandise. This video shows a store being broken into by a stampeding crowd in order to get these shoes first.
In addition to the dangers of these actual shoe releases, there are dangers in the deals themselves, where a buyer may mug a seller or the other way around. I spoke to one student at Blair who was held at knifepoint for his Nike Foamposites.
Overall, the shoe game can be an educational and profitable business, but there are risks involved and any shoe gamer should be aware of them and take necessary precautions.
The Shoe Game is the business of buying, selling, and trading shoes. It's somewhat like a black market, except there isn't really much illegality associated with it, the shoes are just treated as such. People buy these shoes, mostly varying types of Nike Jordans, for 500 hundred dollars or more, compared to the limited release retail price of around 200 dollars.
In many malls and schools (including Blair) you can see these shoe deals happening all the time. One guy hands another a seemingly new shoe box, and the other hands over either a giant wad of cash or another box of shoes. Apart from the "resellers", people only involved to profit off desperate shoe-gamers, the goal of the trade is to be able to wear the "freshest" and "rarest" pair that everyone else wants but can't find.
While this business can actually be good practice for business in the real world and some people can even make substantial income from it, there are inherent dangers in such high value merchandise. This video shows a store being broken into by a stampeding crowd in order to get these shoes first.
In addition to the dangers of these actual shoe releases, there are dangers in the deals themselves, where a buyer may mug a seller or the other way around. I spoke to one student at Blair who was held at knifepoint for his Nike Foamposites.
 |
| Pink Nike Foamposites |
Overall, the shoe game can be an educational and profitable business, but there are risks involved and any shoe gamer should be aware of them and take necessary precautions.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)