Rage against the machine

An excerpt from a recent e-mail I wrote, intentionally pretentious but completely serious:

"A sophisticated analysis might suggest that Rage used Sony, the very symbol of the corporate, political, economic machine they were raging against, to get the anti-machine message out to more people. In this sense, it's a guerilla tactic; you steal weapons from the very army you're fighting against, and use that army to defeat itself, enriching yourself in the process.

At the same time, one could argue that Sony recognized the marketability of the anti-machine message, and that the truth of the message would be lost on the masses who consumed it. There is no "alternative," and there is no alternative.

As Rage got richer then, and Sony gets richer still, who is the winner? Surely not the consumer. If there is a joke on someone here, if someone has been the victim of marketplace warfare, it's not Sony or Rage."