A New Era

Over the years in this space I have brought you stories about products and services that appear to be hoaxes, and some that I can only wish were not. I’m not naïve enough to believe that PenguinWarehouse.com was ever a real business, or crazy enough to try keeping a live penguin as a pet if it was, but I was deeply disappointed to learn that the service purporting to send people you don’t like a box of elephant droppings was a hoax, and quite cheered to learn that the company that will send people you don’t like a selection of obscenely-shaped greeting cards was real. Now, however, the Salon.com website has brought us the story of what may be the new winner in this category, which if true has the potential to usher in a new era of Internet-based pranks…

I’ve never actually heard anyone use the obscenity “Eat a Bag of Dicks” (hereinafter EABOD) outside of cyberspace; it seems to be common on certain discussion boards, in occasional comments sections, and of course in online chat over video game networks, but I can’t recall anyone actually shouting it in public except as a reference to one of the above cyber interactions. However, according to the Salon article, it would appear that there is a new company calling itself “Dicks by Mail” that will send your specified recipient a large bag of gummy candy in the shape of male genitalia, along with a gift card containing the aforementioned EADOB invective. The company is promising complete anonymity, although I suppose that if you wanted the recipient to know that you had sent them a bag of obscenely-shaped candy you could always arrange to have it sent to your own address and then add a more personalized message…

Now, clearly this isn’t a serious product or a serious service. If all you want is to insult someone, with or without the use of obscenity, there are far more convenient, cost-effective, and untraceable ways to do that. For that matter, if your recipient really likes gummy candy and isn’t particularly fussy about what shape said candy is in, they might not actually mind receiving such a package. The company insists that its product and service are not intended to bully or threaten anyone, and that they will not be party to any such actions if they find out what their customer is up to, stating that anyone who would use this service to do actual harm should in fact EABOD themselves…

How this will work out in the long run I can’t imagine. There has always been a small but devoted market for obscenely-shaped candy and pastry, including offers made over the Internet during the last few years to supply chocolate models of parts of the sender’s anatomy that would not normally be something you would show to another person, let alone make a mold from and cast in chocolate. None of these companies has precipitated the collapse of our civilization, or indeed ever risen above the level of somewhat risqué novelty products, and it seems likely that even within the culture of Internet gamers no one is likely to take the EABOD offering all that seriously…

On the other hand, as e-commerce continues to develop there will be fewer and fewer limitations on the products that can be manufactured, sold and shipped from websites, and we should probably note that there are concepts which are common online that could lead to consumer products that would be even more disturbing than the EABOD product referenced in the linked story. If this venture proves to be economically successful I would fully expect that you will be able to economically and untraceably send people whom you do not like a whole range of insulting, embarrassing, or simply disgusting products within a few years…

This would, in fact, be a new era in both e-commerce and Internet communications. Just not in a good way…