The company doesn’t want us dwelling on the factories where our cookies are being made, especially when they could just as easily have been baked by a friend in town without the need for long-distance shipping or unhealthy preservatives. So instead of telling us the true story of the factory, the corporation tells us the story of how elves baked the cookies in a hollow tree. This is what is known as brand mythology; it was not developed to enhance the truth, but to replace it.


—Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: when everything happens now