There are wholesale visual borrowings from The Terminator, Blade Runner and Minority Report, the last of these being called to mind with some crass product-placements for Fed-Ex, Audi and a particularly outrageous plug for Converse sneakers.
Of course, the busy pop marketplace has no lack of crass, pandering products.
The levels of alienation, of trivialisation, of crass cultural products (not least the tabloid press), and political ignorance and cynicism – all of these speak to the depths of the problems we face.
"The blue/pink thing for kids' products is crass marketing, as is the hyper masculine/feminine nature of the toys.
In India crass adverts for skin lightening products are ubiquitous - a fact that invariably shocks South Africans of all races.
This sounded to the Hillaryites like a diss, and, indeed, Obama did appear to be suggesting that she was the product of long-running crass ambition while he, reluctant soldier, was simply responding to his country's call.
LeBron's event looked pretty much like a crass, over-commercialized and industrial-strength product of the sports/media hype machine.
But Sandlin's incessant name-dropping — song titles, lyrics, rock groups from back in the day — quickly grows irritating; it's a first cousin of Madison Avenue's crass use of classic John Lennon and Ray Davies to sell product.
Prior to 1848, Marx used the Hegelian idea of estrangement (which Hegel had used in a metaphysical sense) to indicate the alienation of the worker from the enjoyment of the products of his labour, the crass treatment of human labour as a mere commodity and human beings as mere things, and the general dehumanization of individuals in a selfish, profit-seeking capitalist society.
Still, the process and the product that they describe — admittedly, from the crassest possible perspective, which is the perspective of publicity and marketing — do seem soulless.
