Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/17/colorful-childrens-respirato.html
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Wasn’t there a power company giving out free inhalers? This could be the nest level!
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I am reminded of this.
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When I see products like this, I tend to categorise them by SF authors/creators. This is a Neal Stephenson, with a little CM Kornbluth/Fred Pohl (or Mike Judge for you kids) thrown in for spice.
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Late Stage Capitalism.
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I have personal memory of trying to play outside as a young child in Whittier, CA in the summers of '69 and '70.
On certain days, when there was a “smog alert,” it was impossible to run around and just be a kid, because it fucking hurt to take a deep breath.
And now, we have an ass-clown, masquerading as a president, who thinks that defunding/disbanding the EPA will “Make America Great Again.”
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I like that idea. I’m’a start doing that, too. (Hope I don’t forget)
What I like to do is associate such sights/events with a colour: This here strikes me as a forest green with a good helping of grey in it.
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absolutely! While watching I kept thinking: if this is a teaser for a dystopian sci-fi movie, it is fucking nailing 2010’s twee product introductions + EVERYTHING IS FINE depressingness. When you could see the little girl’s eyes smiling at the end but couldn’t see her mouth behind her cool new respirator, though, I wanted to fucking curl up on the floor and cry.
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Respirator? C’mon guys, there’s nothing wrong with air pollution! So sez douchebag on Trump’s transition team…
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Some color instead of neutral grey tones == “toylike”?
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And then the chinese government will ban them, citing studies that show “revolutionary air” is good for children.
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A little Stephen King’s Running Man too.
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For what it’s owrth, the company website gives a Beijing phone number, +86 (10) 67760880. Surely something that appears to make life in a polluted environment bearable would be very welcome to the Chinese government.
This has “cyberpunk dystopia” written all over it.
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I hope it’s not Kornbluth. His stuff was all about the idiots taking over the world through sheer numbers, with a few smart people behind the scenes working the levers.
I’ve always considered him one of the more insufferable old school scifi authors, and that could be saying a lot. I hope he doesn’t become more relatable.
Aside from that being the most insufferable voiceover in some time; this product reeks of greenwashed evil.
“allow kids to customize the mask the way they like it, giving them a sense of ownership and autonomy over their own safety.”
Isn’t telling someone that they have ‘ownership and autonomy over their own safety’ because they get to accessorize their gas mask either a profound misunderstanding of ‘ownership’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘safety’; or an equally profound commitment to cynically lying to vulnerable children?
And speaking of cynical lying, is 95% filtration, particulate only; very likely to be a filter that leaves the really delectable microparticles unscathed(since filtering those is both more expensive and interferes with air flow to a greater degree than your basic repurposed vacuum cleaner filter); and do nothing for the nitrogen oxides, VOCs, and ozone you find in even garden variety smog, never mind the local industry’s pollutant of the day?
Call me a buzzkill; but I’d be vastly more pleased with the honesty-in-design of protective gear that looks like full post-apocalyptic-gas-mask-mook because it’s designed for scenarios that ought to look scary, abnormal, and basically unacceptable outside of dystopian fiction, rather than something to be cheerfully accessorized.
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I’d imagine that they enjoy some protection because a high-profile squelching can be worse PR than just ignoring; but Team Beijing has long taken a…dim…view(and not just because of the smog) of independent air quality statistics; so I’m not entirely sure that they’ve given up on denial yet.
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I love Kornbluth. He died much too young.
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