If, as Susan Sontag suggests, a capitalist society requires a culture based on images, no image is more important to business than the image -- or illusion -- of choice. It invites the customer to choose from a series of predesigned modules, adding and subtracting features whose relevance has already been decided by the company. I'm guessing that this is why Nike, trend-creator extraordinaire, does not offer bedazzling rhinestones as an option in Nike I.D., its own customization venture.

In their Harvard Business Review book "Markets of One" (2000), B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore instruct businesses to "look for the 'common uniqueness' found in all customers in your industry." This seems to be a rephrasing of Alfred Sloan's high-end Cadillac niche. But let's say I want a 2004 Mary Kay-pink El Dorado with front-end hydraulics. Sloan's model only goes so far. Mass customization accounts for the additions and subtractions desired by the consumer by "identifying and focusing on a few areas of sacrifice (or perhaps only one) and developing modular capabilities that address those unfulfilled needs." I need a 2004 Mary Kay-pink El Dorado with hydraulics to fulfill my unfulfilled needs, and if you do too, we may just share that special sort of common uniqueness serviced by mass customization.

So this idea of "need" is important. What is a "need" in today's dominant postindustrial world? Is Motorola addressing my "needs" by giving me the option of a Matchbox 20 hit alerting me to my incoming call? In "Society of the Spectacle" (1967), French philosopher Guy Debord suggests that the idea of economic necessity as something that one truly needs -- food, clothing, shelter -- must be destroyed by the economy itself and replaced by a "ceaseless manufacture of pseudo-needs." I would argue that the economy is entering individuality into the realm of pseudo-needs, and marketing it accordingly. Not only do I need Levi's jeans, I need to have my Levi's emblazoned with my personalized ensignia, a modern territorial pissing of sorts.

"We're just recycling the ideas of the past," says Burbano. "In the '60s, girls would shrink their jeans in their tubs at home. This was the first instance of customization. People have always used jeans as their own personal canvas." The personification of this idea was of course snaking up the stairwell behind her back as we talked. "We just took it to another level."

So who determined mass customization as a deliberate and well-executed plan thought up by big business? Was its arrival inevitable as both a labor -- and consumer -- backlash? Debord writes that the turn toward automation in modern 20th century industry naturally results in a net job loss, therefore "new forms of employment have to be created. A happy solution presents itself in the growth of the tertiary or service sector in response to the immense strain on the supply lines of the army responsible for distributing and hyping the commodities of the moment."

Tailoring the mass-produced product to a specific customer or customer base creates a more specialized product at the end of the line while still producing the base product on a robot-driven assembly line. This also blurs the binaries of what is a good and what is a service.

"Customizing a good automatically turns it into a service, and customizing a service automatically turns it into an experience -- a memorable event that engages a customer in an inherently personal way," state Pine and Gilmore in "Markets of One." In this way, mass customization becomes one of the most desirable strategies for businesses in the face of the mass-produced backlash for both the growths in service-related jobs and consumer satisfaction.

But am I part of the EveryCustomer? If Horkheimer and Adorno thought in 1942 that "Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previous determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type," does that apply to the market mutation of mass customization?

I decided to become part of the experiment, to see whether I was the chump Debord, Adorno and Horkheimer thought I would be or if I would somehow transcend the culture industry through my own subversive customization. I asked Karen if she thought I could write this paper on a pair of Levi's, and she said that it was entirely possible with silk-screening but that it would require several individualized screens and would get pretty pricey. She suggested I use one screen and have it repeated a few times; that would cost about $80, including labor.

When I went home that night, I looked to Adorno and Horkheimer for counsel. I picked a quote from "The Dialectic of Enlightenment" that reads, "The principle of individuality was always full of contradiction," something not blatantly pornographic or anti-Levi's that could slither under the barbed-wire censors. The next day, just as I had set foot in the customization area, Karen called to offer me a deal: If I'd let them copy my jeans and put them on display in the customization area, she'd give me the whole thing for $30.

Imagine my sheer giddiness at the thought of having my countercustomization jeans on display for everyone to see! Maybe someone would even get "The Dialectic of Enlightenment" in rhinestones! I was handed over to James, and we discussed the specifics. It would be ready on Sunday at noon. Although I had entered Levi's armed with a century's worth of anti-mass-anything rhetoric, ready to blast the illusion of choice spewed forth by their fascist customization department, I was going to leave it with a pair of jeans.

I spent the next few days reveling in my cleverness, fantasizing about other ways to subvert other systems and just generally enjoying my sneaky, innovative consumerism. This all came to a dramatic halt, however, when I went to pick up the jeans. Supposed to be ready on Sunday at noon. Not ready on Sunday at all. Called Monday at noon to see if they were ready. Sent through a maze of tertiary-level employees -- a self-guided tour, if you will, of Levi's customer service.

I finally got to speak to Eddie, who told me they had just shipped my package. I was staring at my receipt, outlining all of my customization and personal information, and noticed the circle around "no" for shipping. As Eddie went to look more thoroughly for my jeans, I was treated to a little snippet of Telepopmusick's chart-topping club hit "Breathe."

Jenny got on the line, asked for whom I was holding, and I said, "MY GODDAMNED JEANS!" Well, not exactly, but I did explain my situation and Jenny found my jeans. I hopped on my scooter and went back downtown to pick them up, and when I triumphantly opened the bag, I was incredibly disappointed. The quote was entirely unreadable, as they had shadowed the words in black instead of the orange I had requested. The dark blue was not the light blue I asked for, and the new pocket I wanted installed to showcase the drawing of Theodore Adorno was missing. "Looks great!" smiled the woman behind the counter. "Not really," I said, but I was late to class, so I left.

Maybe my complacency in settling for less sabotaged my own chances of escaping the cultural dead end of mass production into the shiny happy new world of mass customization. Now I would never experience the potential mass transcendentalism it had to offer me, the market of one. Or maybe the end product was what my individuality project looked like chewed up and spit out by the culture industry: a little bit of me and a whole lotta Levi's. I guess the principle of individuality was always full of contradiction.

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