Some friends and I were recently discussing the particular breed of internet commenter which shows up in a discussion about, say, the best songs of 2009 solely to remark that they’ve never heard of any of them, with the strongly implied (or directly stated) assessment that the lack of personal familiarity means the songs in question must be crap. These individuals are cut from the same cloth from the folks who feel obliged to comment on articles about some platform exclusive game with “I’ll never play it, because I own a different brand of game system.” (Good thing, too, because I was lying awake at night wondering about CRazzEEdood666′s definitive opinion on Crackdown 2.)

Part of the blame for this behavior can be chalked up to the nature of the venue. The open and relatively anonymous nature of internet discourse has given rise to a situation where “participation” and “making an actual contribution” are frequently confused. Still, that doesn’t explain why someone would take minutes of their valuable and limited time on earth to comment “this is stupid” on a post about a Hannah Montana game released for a console he doesn’t own in the first place…or waste hours engaged in a circular argument with a cornered party about the superiority of the iPhone.

As sociologists and cultural historians will tell you, brand loyalty has become a civil religion in our modern consumer society, fixed stars and traditional constants by which large segments of the population identify above and beyond actual standards of quality and value. The New Coke debacle of the mid-1980s is an excellent example of this phenomenon. The company’s R&D people did extensive testing and marketing research in coming up with a formula that a majority of test consumers preferred both to old Coke and Pepsi. That extensive research meant doodly-squat, however, once the improved formula was loaded up into bottles and cans and shipped out to the buying public.

The real issue was not whether New Coke tasted better than Old Coke. It was that an iconic brand with significant and enduring cultural significance had changed, period. The resulting outrage mirrored the response of old guard Catholics — most with zero knowledge of Latin — to the adoption of the vernacular Mass.

For most folks, the religion of brand loyalty is a subtle thing. I consider myself a General Motors man in the same way my wife considers herself a Catholic. We ambivalently carry on the faith of our forbears as one of many ways in which we self-identify. There’s no little to no evangelizing involved, and we’re the first to complain about the Church’s treatment of women or Chevrolet’s chronically problematic coolant systems. Maura still makes the occasional trip to St. Anthony’s Shrine to light a candle for her brother in Iraq and I’ll more than likely trade in Super Lumina for a used Malibu at the same dealership my parents and grandparents bought their cars from.

Geeks — and I use the term in the holistic sense of any individual carrying a acute fixation, be it for a sports franchise, genre, or intellectual property — are prone toward fundamentalism in the faith of brand loyalty. Their idol of choice is Platonic and infallable, with any and all flaws the product of false prophets or heretical conspiracies. (That is to say “Dollhouse was shitcanned because of the meanies at Fox, not because the show was utter shit.”) Their beliefs are as trenchant as they are unmovable, and require public affirmation whenever the opportunity arises. This is especially true when a rival object of worship is being discussed, as the creed operates within a realm where relative merit is a zero sum game. To admit a rival’s virtues is to diminish those of your one true geek god.

Empirical (as in “I bought a 360 despite the high failure rates because it was cheaper, had Mass Effect, and I wanted to play GTA IV online with my 360-owning friends”) and live-and-let-live attitudes are alien to the ideology. It’s not about enjoying or appreciating what one has, it is about the vindication of beliefs so tightly linked to one’s self worth as to be inseparable. Nothing short of crushing the heathens beneath one’s boots (or Chuck Taylor hightops) will assure one’s place in the Halls of Eternal Righteousness, located on the corner of the Insufferable Ass Parkway and Who The Fuck Cares Avenue.

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