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 ^{(it's beta!)}

The "office" setting in the world of a comic strip is left mercilessly blank, an everyman setting, like any other office where walls of cubicles divide and conquer, leaving us free to imagine that Sally Forth has a job just like ours. This absence of specificity is meant to make it easier to identify with these characters, but instead feeds into the machine-age identity angst that comes from the interchangeable workplace. We all fulfill meaningless purposes filing for companies that make consumable products so we can buy from the competing brands.

The ethics of consumption are identity ethics. Reebok, vans, nike, coke; logos that textedit's spellcheck authenticates in a way it refuses "hyperthermia." Too hot to handle is for brand names only, a marketing slogan applicable and applied in a self-stick label on the trucker hats of the privileged and elite. Hand-made, artisan, green, local, organic, too, are ways of forcefully defining oneself by tic-boxes, pick any three. These are all efforts to distinguish ourselves from the cog in the cubicle to our right, to assure ourselves that the four years of a foreign language or playing volleyball on fridays actually makes a difference, and that we are not engineered for the assembly line. We refuse to be one-size fits all, and sensible companies market to the amateur enthusiast in all of us, as we are ground down to smoothness in their offices, attending company bowling more often than volleyball night.

Not all identities are created equal, however. Filling in the scantron bubbles for local and hand-crafted sends that money into the pockets of someone outside of the traditional corporate hegemony. A choice not to franchise choses not to enfranchise Costco's marketing department in the legislature of your heart and mind. When artisan cheese is more than a tactic to make the other mommies in your coffee klatch feel inferior over their starbucks, then you have more than an identity-substitution. The key is in distinguishing between a farmer's market and whole foods.