Поддельная экономика (обратная сторона глобализации)

Anna · 8 мар 2005

The Sham Economy

They say you can't understand people until you've walked a mile in their shoes. I just walked across Belgrade in a brand-new pair of Nikes. Now I understand something: The citizens of this city are the vanguard of a new phase of capitalism. They're busily subverting conventional multi-national commerce and creating a dark parallel process - call it black globalization.

My new shoes look authentic, but they're a scam of ominous sophistication. The insole logo is silk-screened on; my socks erased the Nike swoosh in a single afternoon. The stitching is coarse and sloppy - the pull tab at the heel ripped loose the first time I tried to use it. The sporty soles are slippy, not grippy. The tag proclaims MADE IN KOREA, although the product is almost certainly a fake churned out by a Chinese factory. Adding insult to Nike's injury, the phony barcode denotes a pair of Reeboks.

These shoes cost me only $10 in dinars, but they weren't a bargain. They're like a phishing scam, an international email message that looks official and goes through all the proper, high tech, image-making motions - with the intent to rob. Will anyone ever catch the perpetrators? Hell no. These shoes probably scampered across a dozen national borders on their way to Belgrade, and the hucksters involved must number in the thousands, each one pitching in his bit, in P2P fashion.

During the 1990s, Serbia and Montenegro (the latest official title for this part of the former Yugoslavia) suffered under United Nations sanctions that deprived the populace of imported goods. Today the locals suffer from brand fever. Here, the golden arches of McDonald's are viewed as voodoo protection against cruise missiles. People can't afford Western luxuries, so they have a warm, affirmative feeling for smugglers. Global branding makes it easy to create fake products with broad appeal on someone else's promotional dime. So stores are filled with upscale-looking, marginally functional fakes in food, clothes, cosmetics, even car parts...
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Anna Аксакал

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Поддельная экономика (обратная сторона глобализации)

Anna Аксакал

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