The weekend before I was set to start my senior year of college at UC Santa Cruz, I was visiting a friend in Los Angeles. We went out drinking pretty hard the night before, and when I woke up around 9am, I had around 30-something missed calls on my LG flip phone. All from my mom. I called her back and she was in a frenzy’: “DO NOT GET ON THAT PLANE TODAY”
“Huh?”
“Turn on the TV”
It took me a few minutes to understand what was going on, but once I did, I understood why she was in a frenzy. My mom, who had grown up in Red Hook, Brooklyn, had literally watched the twin towers being built as she was growing up…and on this morning, she had watched them fall before her eyes.
The rest of the story isn’t really related to where I’m going here, but long story short - I did not get on any plane on September 11th, 2001, and the start of my senior year was off to a different start…this was the year ‘terrorism’ hit pop culture.
Coincidentally, this was also around the time that I discovered Netflix. And their DVD mailing service. And I lived about a block away from a Blockbuster. So, every night, I’d usually throw on a DVD regardless of what was going on. Homework? DVD. Drinking? DVD. Friends? DVD. Girls? DVD. At the beginning of some of these DVDs…some of them started popping up with this commercial thing about piracy…and how pirating DVDs was actually funding terrorism…
Now…I don’t know about all of that - I mean, at the time, I was a young, impressionable 21 year old so I suppose anything could be possible - but looking at it now, it seems to me that the movie companies were riding the wave of ‘terrorism’ and somehow pushing their own agenda on the situation. I can see how movie piracy can hurt the film industry. But terrorism?
So…sneakers. This made me think of fakes/reps/bootleg argument we all love to have. It made me wonder…do fakes actually *hurt* or *help* the corporations?
I think I can expand upon this a bit more later on this week or next, but I really just wanted to get a gauge on where people stand on the topic…because, to me…these fakes/reps/bootlegs actually *benefit* the brands more than they damage them…where do you stand?