{"id":188,"date":"2017-10-28T16:12:41","date_gmt":"2017-10-28T20:12:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/?p=188"},"modified":"2017-10-28T16:12:41","modified_gmt":"2017-10-28T20:12:41","slug":"the-fall-of-the-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/the-fall-of-the-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fall of the Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, this<\/a> happened.<\/p>\n

For those of you too lazy to click the link, I\u2019ll provide some background.<\/p>\n

The s\/f cartoon Rick and Morty<\/em> made a craving for McDonald\u2019s discontinued Szechuan Dipping Sauce into a thing. It was a joke on the show, and as happens so often in geek culture, it became a huge thing on social media.<\/p>\n

McDonald\u2019s, sensing a marketing opportunity like shark smelling a wounded seal, jumped on it. Rather than a conventional ad campaign, they sent Rick and Morty\u2019s<\/em> creator a tub of the sauce, and advertised that it would be back for one day only, letting Facebook and Twitter run with it.<\/p>\n

Predictably, s\/f cartoon fans proved to be both plugged in to social media, and the exact demographic to whom to sell the combination of deep-fried compressed chicken parts, cheap faux-ethnic sauce, nostalgia and irony.<\/p>\n

But McDonald\u2019s screwed the pooch.<\/p>\n

Most stores got very little of the sauce, or the limited edition posters, some franchises never got the memo that this was even happening. What should have been a great opportunity to cash in on more or less free viral marketing and gain some geek cred turned into a PR nightmare.<\/p>\n

And the fans, deprived of one ounce packets of cheap dipping sauce, rioted like idiots.<\/p>\n

Seriously, the police had to get involved in a few locations.<\/p>\n

This is almost an episode of Rick and Morty<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Now, this touches us at QM because of the connection to s\/f, to the power of the web, and illustrates some of the issues with fan culture in general. That\u2019s kind of our wheelhouse.<\/p>\n

But I find it part of an even more profound and disturbing trend.<\/p>\n

This is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with America.<\/p>\n

A reality TV star is President. Who is golfing while California burns.<\/p>\n

The gladiators are revolting.<\/p>\n

And now, the biggest fast food company is the world just fucked up the Bread and Circuses. And people rioted over the lack of what is almost surely a packet of equal parts soy sauce and corn syrup.<\/p>\n

Any day now the Visigoths will be showing up at the gates.<\/p>\n

We had a good run.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m gonna go pour one out for the dream that was America.<\/p>\n

Last one out, turn off the lights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, this happened. For those of you too lazy to click the link, I\u2019ll provide some background. The s\/f cartoon Rick and Morty made a craving for McDonald\u2019s discontinued Szechuan Dipping Sauce into a thing. It was a joke on the show, and as happens so often in geek culture, it became a huge thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,3,25,26,13,33,14,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-dream","category-books","category-doomsday","category-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it","category-history","category-mr-sunshine","category-politics","category-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions\/189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inkandbourbon.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}