Soul Marketing 2.0

December 2, 2006 2:48 PM

Old and Busted: Selling Your Soul. The New Hotness: Raffling It Off.
(Why not? I'm already going to hell.) (via mentalfloss)
posted by wendell (14 comments total)

he's not selling his soul, he's just selling his accessories ...
posted by pyramid termite at 4:17 PM on December 2, 2006

Or not. This is alot more like The New Lameness.
posted by fenriq at 4:41 PM on December 2, 2006

Old and Busted: using Fark posting cliches on MeFi?
posted by Schlimmbesserung at 7:37 PM on December 2, 2006

I don't know. In college one of my friends sold his soul for half a calzone. I thought he should have held out for the whole thing.
posted by caddis at 11:45 PM on December 2, 2006

I actually used to buy peoples' souls in High School, if they'd go through with it. Most people, even straightforward atheists were insurmountably reluctant at $20.

It made me think, yeh know?
posted by Richard Daly at 11:55 PM on December 2, 2006

I'll sell you my soul for $20, Richard Daly. But only because of your summary comments. That's the only reason for the deal. In any other circumstances, my soul's worth at least $40, maybe a little more. caddis's friend definitely didn't get market prices.
posted by cgc373 at 12:27 AM on December 3, 2006

OK, but if I outbid Richard and get your soul, you will have to participate in all political threads in which I do and sycophantly agree with every thing I say, no matter how crazy. Remember, I own your soul.
posted by caddis at 1:24 AM on December 3, 2006

I think of my soul as a sort of intellectual property, caddis. It's infinitely reproducible via various methods, digital and otherwise, so the copies don't degrade. Part of the deal would perhaps involve a sockpuppet you could claim was me, and I won't deny anything, but I'm not stuffing my hand up there. Not for forty bucks, anyway.
posted by cgc373 at 1:38 AM on December 3, 2006

I get all the copies too.
posted by caddis at 5:48 AM on December 3, 2006

In college I bought a good friends soul for three tacos at 2 a.m. we were both in Student Government so I put it up for resale on eBay and invited everyone else to place bids on it. Within 24 hours it was up to like $20. eBay took it off and sent me a formal letter explaining their policy.

It went something like this, "if the soul does exit, then it falls under our 'human body parts' guidelines and cannot be sold on eBay; if the soul does not exist, then there's nothing to sell and it can't be in eBay."

I put it up again and it went to $30, but clarified that now you were buying a physical deed to his soul which "might or might not be acknowledged by the gods of the East and the West"... but they took it down again and sent the same letter.
posted by trinarian at 9:05 AM on December 3, 2006

If the soul is a kind of intellectual property, then it wouldn't be sold, just licensed. And Sony would try to put DRM on it.
posted by wendell at 9:12 AM on December 3, 2006

You get all the copies you want, caddis, but to possess all of some arbitrarily large number, which may be infinite if I understand infinity correctly, seems to be unreachable.

Note: I consider this entire line of thinking to be consistent with the original post, entitled "Soul Marketing 2.0."
posted by cgc373 at 9:28 AM on December 3, 2006

Sorry, I'm not donating money to a guy who made over $100k in 2004. Does that make me a bad person?
posted by Deathalicious at 10:50 AM on December 3, 2006

I tried the same thing you did, trinarian. I own my sister's soul, having been given it many years ago in exchange for an ice cream cone. With only one scoop and no sprinkles, because she's a moron.
Considering she was 8 when this happened (and thus the soul was unsullied by the egregious decadence of her life thereafter) I figure I could get a pretty penny for it.

I think Ebay ought to be petitioned to allow this sort of thing. Who exactly does it hurt? Did Sarbanes-Oxley have some sort of divine indemnity clause that I'm not aware of? Auctioning off a bunch of souls could establish their baseline value, create a market where we could compare their relative worth....
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 7:40 AM on December 4, 2006