I have to wonder whether our tolerance of things like viral marketing are a really bad sign for our society and whether it's Bush's fault that such strategies aren't seen as fundamentally fraudulent and bad by one and all.

Most stories I have heard about viral marketing have been creepy, but more or less innocuous, like they send young men out to play a video game in a coffee bar and try to attract attention to it, or they have pretty girls go to bars and ask men to buy them a specific alcohol. For one, if you're reasonably clever you can tell what's going on, and for another, there is some direct exposure to the product, you get to try it yourself or see it in action. Second, you can understand the difficulty of marketers trying to reach our generation (the current 20-40 set) because their own studies have shown again and again that we don't trust anybody but people our own age group and advertisements don't work as well on us (as opposed to boomer and the current youth who have been shown to be very susceptible to classical methods of advertising).

But this story from the consumerist now has me convinced that viral marketing is yet another evil, bad, horrible thing companies do that should probably be criminalized as fraud. I think I just needed a more clear cut example of how bad this technique is before I fully understood what about it was creeping me out. It is now clear to me, they're undermining our trust in literally every last source of objective information. If you can't even talk to geeks on a message board without worrying that it may have been infiltrated by some company's agents, then there really is no where else to turn for unbiased or fair information. Our peer group is being contaminated by immoral turncoats selling out their fellow paranoid gen-xers for a few bucks. If we allow this to continue I'm sure the marketers will see every last source of information will be contaminated with biased and bullshit material mixed in with the true or unbiased info.

It just keeps getting harder.