Who are the victims in these daily brand skirmishes? Certainly not the objects, who continue about their business as they had before. It is the people whose senses get worn down by the increasing advertising crossfires and bombarded by the broad-spectrum perceptual attacks. After all, how much can we live in and enjoy a world where we are constantly forced to filter out the messages sent predominately to exploit our needs as consumers? The screaming voices in the head of a schizophrenic society, has become so assimilated into our culture that we don't even have an awareness of the numbness it has created. Moreover, the deader we get, the greater potential we have to absorb those messages that come screaming down from the skies and out from the walls like some parasite bent on capturing our brand loyalty and our wallets.

Rest assured, of course, that those messages have been well researched, those techniques well tuned to prey upon our every desire. In fact, the blade to our brains has been sharpened well enough that it can make a desire if it's lacking. No purpose necessary. All it takes is repetition or the right bait and new gadget number twenty-three will come flying of the shelves. Today, products can be made of hype alone. Motion pictures, books, compacts disks; the list is only limited to the creativity of the peddlers. They can specialize within any niche in the market or any gap in human reason, but the absolute crowning glory of the advertisement industry is that it has gotten away with selling you.

Yes, you. You, and your children, and anyone with eyes, ears, and a pocketbook. All your decisions go down as data to be stored and sent out to the highest bidder just so the advertising firms know who John Q. Public is and how to tell him what he wants to buy. As anybody who has been accosted by a telemarketer knows, corporations have made big business of our privacy. The threat to our individuality extends far beyond the rosters of personal information and the tracking databases of such information-gathering giants as the Internet's Doubleclick.com, it reaches into and pervades our existence and belief systems.

There's no denying the influence of that ever-present multimedia screaming in our daily lives. Pop culture is culture now. We see our intellectual freedom being sacrificed day in and day out for the Big Buck, but we have become trained to only notice the side the advertisers want to be seen, and to notice that above all other things. It's the type of training that Pavlov has gone down in the books for and would take any consumer a lot of pride-swallowing to recognize. You never saw Pavlov's dogs complaining, after all.

The blaring sirens of corporate war rooms have drowned out so many other important signals from our world, our bodies, our minds, and our souls that it's hard for people of this generation to recognize the potential to be had if only there were enough places where the missiles didn't drop and the special-ops commandos weren't always trying to bust down the door. The reality remains that we have let soldiers into our homes through our televisions and computers and have put up instruments of economic warfare on every street corner and bus stop. We have even brought the fighting into our schools, hospitals, and sports arenas.