I’m suspicious of pithy T-shirts ever since I learned procedurally generated shirts are a thing.
For anyone who doesn’t know, all those ads for shirts with hip current sayings you see on websites like cough this one are often not “real” in a sense. What those companies do is they have bots scraping social media automatically for phrases and sayings. For every single one, no matter how popular or not, they generate an ad and web store entry for a shirt. This is why the ads always look like bad ‘shoops, because that’s literally what they are. Then if someone actually buys a particular shirt, they make it and drop ship it. A lot of the storefronts don’t have a browsing option for this reason, only search. The ones that do, you find thousands and thousands of nonsense phrases on shirts. Nobody ever buys those of course, but it doesn’t matter. They’re fishing with dynamite to see what people will buy and it’s all automated.
This isn’t “evil” per se, I guess, but it makes me uncomfortable. Automated capitalism can’t lead to anything good.
