Identity Theft

The ads have strange voices coming out off peope's mouths, not their own voices. A substantial burgher, a man of color, speaks and the voice of a Valley Girl emerges: Yes, it is true! It is an epidemic: California girls are stealing working men's credit cards! Or the elderly white couple sitting around, and talking in a white southern trashy voice. Never, ever, a white businessman speaking in the voice of an uneducated black American urban thief.

Barthes. The message is: This is how your identity is stolen by these cards. The joke is: we viewers know that this is NOT the meaning of having our identity stolen. We don't talk with the voice of the corporately-imagined Other. We speak with our own, wounded voices. So we discount the message as parodic. Therefore we accept the lesser version, parodied before us: that the issue of identity theft is nonetheless somehow real in such terms.

Whereas in reality, Identity Theft does not exist. It cannot preexist the card. It cannot touch what makes us us. It is theft of money from a banking network.