Over the holiday weekend, as I sat in the movie theatre waiting for Harry Potter And The Sudden Introduction Of Deathly Hallows As An Eleventh Hour Plot Device, Part The First to begin, I became fascinated with a lengthy advertorial video segment that ran on the screen for a new reality-ish show on A&E called "Storage Wars."
The basic gist is this: All across America, people are compelled for various reasons to pack up huge quantities of detritus into rentable storage units. Then, those people fail to pay their bills. To recoup the rental cost, the owners of the storage facility crack open the units and sell the goods off to bidders. And there's a weird element of gamesmanship that at first blush seems totally unnecessary. But for the introduction of some sort of reality-show stakes, the bidders are only permitted to examine the contents of the storage units from the outside, and for a limited amount of time.
I ended up pushing aside thoughts of "Storage Wars" in favor of all the young wizards and their sad camping, but over at Gawker, Brian Moylan watched the first two episodes and got right down to "the fascinating thing about this show":
We now have so much shit that we need to buy places to put our shit, and when we forget about it, then other people come in and buy our shit and then they sell that shit to other people so that they can have even more shit that one day they'll forget about too. Round and round, people just buying, forgetting about, and reselling the same old junk. This is the ultimate extension of our rabid consumerism: the shit economy.
It just goes to show that on a long enough timeline, your life and everything you love could one day end up being a low tech credit-default swap for the speculators working the back-alleys of our economic dystopia. And you know what? The soldiers in the "Storage Wars" aren't stupid, not by any stretch of the imagination. For proof, go ahead and Google the phrase, "People who buy this are insane."
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The Only Way to Make Money in America Is Selling Other People's Junk [Gawker]
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