Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Apple Jacks
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2011 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Today I learned that TV advertisements for Apple Jacks cereal used to emphasize the apple taste, then (coinciding with my watchership) proudly renounced any claim to tasting appley, and now have a talking apple mascot who goes on about how apple-infused the whole production is.
My childhood overlapped with a historically aberrant period. Mass media was a business model that worked. Cheap and abundant fossil fuels made long-distance travel easy. And Apple Jacks was honest about the faintness of its apple connection. Peak Copyright, Peak Oil, Apple Valley.