This article about youth culture got me excited about thinking about the Unidentified again.

We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted.

The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.

And this bit about rebellion:

All this is why, unlike those of previous youth cultures, the hipster ethos contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent — remarkably so, given that countercultural opposition would seem to be essential to the very idea of youth culture. That may in turn be why the hipster has proved to be so durable. The heyday of the hippies lasted for all of about two years. The punks and slackers held the stage for little more than half a decade each. That’s the nature of rebellion: it needs to keep on happening. The punks rejected the mainstream, but they also rejected the previous rejection, hippiedom itself — which, by the late ’70s, was something that old people (i.e. 28-year-olds) were into. But hipsters, who’ve been around for 15 years or so, appear to have become a durable part of our cultural configuration.

Here’s a short radio program from 99% Invisible about the group called Anonymous. I hadn’t heard of them while I was writing the Unidentified, but the similarities are exciting. This program also mentions branding their own image before anyone else did it for them. Really interesting listen. Really inspiring phenomena.

Preach.

Great for malls? Sure. Great for consumer privacy? That’s where it gets complicated.

Hm. Sounds like another good reason to consider supporting Buy Nothing Day.

Thanks to cat hellisen for the creepy link.

I’ve been getting links from people saying: Look! It’s the Unidentified for real!

Thought I’d share them.

The revolution will be trademarked and put on a t-shirt . . .

Thanks to ktjoy and mcnorth.

Simmone Howell has a really cool series on her blog where she invites authors to tell some of the behind-the-scenes info about their books. The secret inspirations of the Unidentified are revealed on Anatomy of a Novel.

This is EXACTLY what I was thinking about when developing the Game.

Here’s the full video. I’m going to watch it now because I’m a geek.

Thanks, Cat Hellisen for the link!

This is funny-weird. I didn’t write the sound of Kid, Mikey, and Ari’s music with anything particular in mind. But in late stages of drafting, I heard Micachu and since then I imagined the characters’ music to sound similar to that band’s music. There were a lot of tiny synchronicities. I felt like they have similar approaches to creating sound, and similar awkward response to media interest… And look how cool hunters agree!

This one is hard. I love it, but I’m a nerd.

PLAY IT