You’ve probably seen this meme: Fry holding out a handful of cash and angrily declaring, “Shut up and take my money.” This moment comes from “Attack of the Killer App,” the third episode from the Comedy Central revival of “Futurama” back in 2010. In that episode, the latest craze was an iPhone parody — or rather, eyePhones, since these ones were literally implanted in the user’s eye socket.
To hammer in the point, MomCorp adopts a new logo parodying Apple’s. Once Fry accumulates a million followers on the platform Twitcher, Mom sends out a virus to those followers, compelling them to buy the eyePhone 2.0. The episode ends with them shambling through the streets toward the nearest MomCorp store. George Romero long ago predicted that shopping would turn people into zombies and even in the 31st century, he’s still right.
So, “Futurama” has lampooned tech and consumerism before. What sets “Related to Items You’ve Viewed” apart is that it’s not parodying what people buy, but how we buy them. Online shopping is even more dominant now than a decade ago, and algorithms that track consumer behavior and hook them with new but familiar products are a hot discourse item. iPhones and social media are now old hat. Revolutionary technology becoming yesterday’s news before we can truly appreciate it — is there a more galling indictment of consumerism than that?
Source From: www.slashfilm.com
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