An iPod Sheep Fights Back

I've had just about enough of being called a sheep for having an iPod. Of being told that I'm a mindless slave to fashion or worse -- slick marketing hype.

It's not actually the raw accusation I mind... after all I do have a somewhat unnatural devotion to my iPod (but this isn't an intimate blog, so I'll just keep the details as my little secret). No, what I object to is the hypocrisy of my accusers.

They smugly sit in judgement of my inferiority... of my purely irrational purchasing decisions. My spending money unnecessarily when perfectly valid alternatives exist with more features at a lower cost. Just so I can look cool.

But check out their closet / garage / house / pocket and what do you find? A $6500 big screen TV. A Really Cool Car. The good toys.

And this makes no sense. After all, nobody needs to watch television. And the cheapest car on the market will still get you from point A to B, and that's what you're paying for, right? For that matter, if you live in a city with decent public transporation, who needs a car at all? Seems kind of lame to have a car just because everybody else has one.

Now that I think about it, nobody needs to listen to music, and certainly not on a portable player. so why have ANY mp3 player at all? Why is the sheep/smartGuy line drawn between the iPod vs. some other mp3 player rather than between having an mp3 player and NOT having one at all? It's an arbitrary line!

Or rather, it's a personal line. Someone decides that simply because they don't see the value (and they have the technical specs to prove it!), that value must not exist.

iPod sheep like myself can flood you with reasons:

"It's the end-to-end experience."

"Attractive products really do work better."

... and I swear there was one more, but it's not coming to me just now...

But none of that matters. What matters is that we wanted it, and we don't have to justify it to you anymore than we expect you to justify YOUR choice of Calvin Klein underwear even though--let's be honest--it's not really working for you.

There is no Sheep's Law that says the actual value of a product is somehow inversely proportional to the number of people who bought it, or the slickness of the marketing. It is possible that we all bought it because... because... because we know something you don't. Yeah, that's it. We're part of a world that, frankly, you just don't have the ability to perceive. It's not we -- the faithful flock -- who are blind--it's you.

Same goes for my iMac G5. And my obscenely expensive bubble bath. And my fine french lingerie when an old t-shirt would do just fine.

And speaking of t-shirts, I'm deeply troubled that even my beloved Hugh McLeod is hurling these accusations -- only he calls it the ignorance premium. He claims we're paying extra because we just don't know any better. In other words, we're ignorant of the cheaper alternatives that offer the same -- or more-- features.

But the adorable Hugh should not be biting the sheep hooves that feed him. In addition to owning an iPod, I am also the owner of a certified limited edition Gaping Void t-shirt. This one (#57 out of 200) is mine all mine, and when the 200 are gone, that's it.

And here's my suitable-for-framing certificate that came with it:

That makes me a certifiable Hugh/Gaping Void sheep. And proud of it. But this apparently doesn't violate Hugh's "ignorance premium" thing because, you know, the shirt is worth it. And that's my point. Hugh decided the shirt's worth it, but the iPod's not. And that's just not his call. It's mine.

I decided that even though I can buy a perfectly good t-shirt for a fraction of the cost of my certified limited edition (did I mention that I have #57) Gaping Void shirt, there was some special magic in having one of Hugh's shirts with one of my favorite hugh-toons, made sweeter by the certainty that out of the only 200 that will ever be made, the chances of my wearing the same shirt to some Blogger Party or Geek Dinner as some other hot blogging babe is outrageously slim.

And I decided that paying extra for my iPod is worth it (but it's not really extra; these folks just don't understand how the whole iPod ecosystem works and it's much too complicated for me to explain here). Unfortunately Hugh (and the eight remaining people in the world who've so far resisted the koolaid) just doesn't get it. His loss.

And to those of you who claim I bought an iPod to look cool, newflash: any idiot who spends that much on an mp3 player and then takes it out in public without covering it up in a military-grade ruggedized kevlar case doesn't deserve to own one.

And one more thing--stop abusing the word "sheep". Sheep are much smarter than you think.

That's one of my sheep (an ex-sheep, now), from a picture I took in 1998, in a little ranch I lived on in Thousand Oaks California. Notice that he's reading Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java" book. That sheep has forgotten more about software design than half the guys who call us sheep will ever know.

So all this time you thought calling us "sheep" was an insult... (idiots).

Sheep rule.