eBay is running this nauseating new ad campaign called The Power of All of Us (read more here). They are pointing, somehow, towards the trust and community building that eBay has definitely created, but somehow equating their “trading platform” with more familiar good deeds (picking up trash, waving hello, bringing meals to the home-bound, moving a snow-stuck car, adopting a child) is arrogant and naive. “By our count” reads one of the ads “they’ve done the right thing more than 2.3 billion times.” So selling on eBay is doing the right thing, when the ad is defining “doing the right thing” by the examples listed above? eBay is about commerce. It’s about making money, getting shit you want cheap, and it’s about their own enormous profits. Trying to reposition it as some sort of heal-the-world effort is just complete and utter bullshit.

I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Been there, done that. That’s the song I sing.