I Give Up Trying to Win a Free Car

You may have heard about a certain car company launching their new hip vehicle for the youth via social media only. Five hundred finalists, 50 free cars awarded. I'm one of the 500 finalists for the car.

No, really.

On Thursday, April 23rd, at approximately 11pm, I gave up:



Full text of screenshot here:

I Don’t Deserve a Cube

I say that with no false modesty. This is not an attempt to win your pity. It’s a statement of fact. I thought I would be able to create something clever and convincing, but in the past week I’ve realized three things:

• I lack the time and energy to generate something that might possibly earn me a car. It turns out that selling out is much more work than it might first appear.

• I lack the requisite (sub)cultural capital necessary to produce something hip or enticing enough to earn me a car.

• I feel icky about pestering my social networking to help me win a car. As I wrote in the online questionnaire, explaining why I might be cubeworthy:

To be brutally honest, I'm outside your target demographic and I find this "viral" campaign fairly distasteful. But then that's exactly the sort of person you're looking for, right? A free-thinking individual with a sophisticated bullshit detector who isn't afraid to speak their mind. I can promise you that I will refuse to solicit my friends or otherwise sellout my social network in order to win a free car. If that's the sort of "edgy" authenticity you're looking for, then put me behind the wheel of a cube. And yes, I acknowledge the contractions inherent in me entering the contest in the first place. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

I now realize that the above answer contains a serious flaw in logic. Either I want the free car, or I don’t. Entering the contest, but refusing to play by the rules of the game, makes no sense. People are writing cube songs, running around in cardboard cube costumes – even getting cube tattoos. They deserve a cube. It’s time to admit that I don’t want a free car that badly. Or, to put it another way, I can’t afford the cost of a free car – my time, my creativity and my integrity are worth more than $15,000.

Ryan un-sells out