Astral Codex Ten

Coke

10 min read

Coke

Article

Coke is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between August 25, 2021 and March 19, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “If you’re otherwise ambivalent between companies (eg Coke vs. Pepsi)”; “ended up as a Coke marketing gimmick”; “one of the projects I worked on was for Coke”. It most often appears alongside Pepsi, United States, Abercrombie & Fitch.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: August 25, 2021
  • Last seen: March 19, 2026

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
If you’re otherwise ambivalent between companies (eg Coke vs. Pepsi), patronize ones that try hard to reduce or offset their carbon footprint.
Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 16, 2022 · Original source
This is in Hungarian because there was some brouhaha in Hungary that got it to the top of the search engines, and I’m lazy. In one kind of surreal passage, Teach discusses the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams. Dreams contain content that the mind wants to repress, but then - why dream it? Why go to a psychoanalyst specializing in dream interpretation? When the CIA wants to keep something classified, they don’t cloak it in a riddle and email it to the KGB’s Riddle Decoding Division.
As for you, you’re probably even more contemptible than these Athenians. Teach thinks the modern psyche is downstream of decisions by advertising agencies. At some point their usual trick of selling products through implied peer pressure and hot women stopped paying as many dividends. The companies did some kind of judo move where they told us “well, darn, you’re just too individual and unique a person to fall for a mass advertising campaign - and incidentally the surest way to make everyone understand that is to drink Coca-Cola, The Drink For Individual Unique People”. And everyone lapped it up. This isn’t even subtle, the highest market value company in the world uses the motto “Think Different”. Or Burger King: “Have It Your Way”. Literal actual Coke printed the 150 most popular names onto their bottles in the hopes you would see your name and think you had a special relationship with them.
Inline links: the modern psyche
Teach seems to think something like this can also happen en masse, eg how wokeness originated as a call to destroy the system and ended up as a Coke marketing gimmick.
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
For every Coke ad that plays to woke tropes and aims for associating $2 of sugar water with social goodness, there are hundreds of ads that say things like "Drink Coke, it's good" or "Coke is like balloons" and which never make it to market because they are filtered out as poorly performing by managers and focus groups and regional testing. The ads we see are not brilliant psychoanalytic strategy, they are a mechanical reflection of what the populace most wants them to be.
If Coke ads are woke today, it's not a strategy to appeal to wokeness, it is a reflection that "woke ad #27" outperformed "funny ad #16" in early tests.
This is a very common conception of marketing/advertising which doesn't really reflect reality. Advertisers and adverts in general are far less empirical/objective and far more subjective than this, even in major enterprises. Even digital advertising, which has a much greater data pipeline than mass campaigns like Coke do, is going to have a major human element.
Sure, Whatever, Let's Try Another Contra Caplan On Mental Illness
June 29, 2023 · Original source
Liking Pepsi more than Coke. You could think of this as a preference for drinking Pepsi over drinking Coke - or as an internal state marked by a strong repulsion to Coke plus a strong attraction to Pepsi.
Liking Pepsi more than Coke. You could think of this as a preference for drinking Pepsi over drinking Coke - or as an internal state marked by a strong repulsion to Coke plus a strong attraction to Pepsi. In the first two situations, it’s much more natural to use internal-state language, and in the sixth, it’s much more natural to use preference language. The middle three aren’t obvious, which is why we’re having this debate. The Buddhists say desire is suffering, and sometimes this is literally true. An itch is the clearest example; it’s in an almost perfect superposition between raw suffering and pure desire (to scratch yourself). Is it a preference or a constraint? It’s both - a preference to scratch one’s self, and a constraint to be forced to feel suffering if you don’t scratch yourself. While the person may choose whether or not to scratch themselves, they cannot choose whether or not to feel the suffering. Put a gun to their head and say “stop feeling suffering when you don’t scratch yourself” and they will have no choice but to die. It’s possible, although bizarre, to think of normal preferences like the preference for Pepsi over Coke this way. You could say “this person has the constraint that they will feel suffering when they are forced to drink Coke instead of Pepsi”. It’s not very useful. But it’s possible. Whether it’s more useful to think of any given situation as a preference or a constraint depends on things like whether you can easily satisfy the preference, whether the preference is ego-syntonic or ego-dystonic, and whether it seems normal by social standards. Consider Prader-Willi syndrome, caused by damage to a region of chromosome 15. Symptoms tend to include short limbs, mental retardation, and extreme hunger. Here’s how the NYT describes this last problem (content warning for body horror): One result is a heightened, permanent sensation of hunger. “They describe it as physical pain,” Jennifer Miller, an endocrinologist at the University of Florida who treats children with Prader-­Willi, told me. “They feel like they’re going to die if they don’t get food. They’re starving.” Parents must lock their pantries, refrigerators and trash cans, and their children frequently lie and steal to get something to eat. They have been known to memorize credit-card numbers and secretly phone for delivery, use a drill to remove the door from a locked refrigerator and break into a neighbor’s garage and eat, uncooked, an entire frozen pizza. And here’s how it describes one particular patient’s last moments: In 2004, Peter and Gayle Girard held their annual Christmas Eve party for family members at their home in Orlando, Fla. Before dinner, they set out chips, vegetables and dip, shrimp, a bowl of punch and sodas. Their 17-year-old son, Jeremy, had Prader-­Willi, and they often hosted events at their home so he could join in while they kept an eye on him — as they believed they were doing that night. But the next morning, Jeremy’s belly was distended, and he complained of pain. At the emergency room, doctors pumped his stomach, but his condition worsened. A day passed before surgeons discovered that his stomach, which had been distended long enough to lose blood flow and become septic, had ruptured. Jeremy died that night. Only afterward did the Girards learn that other family members saw him eating more than he should have but didn’t alert them. I insist on calling Prader-Willi syndrome a disease, and a serious one, even though the extreme hunger of Prader-Willi is continuous with/shades into the normal hunger where I would like a slice of pizza. My preference for pizza is so easily satisfied that it rarely bothers me. It’s ego syntonic - I am fine with being the sort of person who likes pizza. It’s socially normal - everyone likes pizza. It doesn’t cause much trouble - it wouldn’t improve my life much if I stopped wanting pizza. So I think of it as a preference. If it were otherwise - the extreme hunger of someone with Prader-Willi - it would be more natural to talk about it as a compulsion, a sense of extreme pain inflicted on me when I wasn’t eating enough, something ontologically similar to a stomach flu that also produces extreme pain in the abdominal region. IV. None of this really addresses Caplan’s most recent post, which is, I think, a much worse point. His current post says that either you have to believe that mental illness doesn’t exist and is just voluntary preferences which are stigmatized by society, or you have to believe that homosexuality is objectively a mental illness. Not only are each of these incoherent ideas, they’re not even the same incoherent idea! You could easily accept one of the incoherent ideas and reject the other! Consider the following three positions: Down’s Syndrome is a terrible disease that inflicts vast suffering on its victims. Also it inflicts suffering on society by making people unproductive. We should be very angry about this, and do everything we can do make people with Down’s Syndrome normal.
Inline links: Here’s how the NYT describes
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
December 04, 2024 · Original source
It must have been incredibly jarring and impressive, like an embassy from the future. Imagine that you’re Pepsi, Coke just built the glass building, and you’re still in the brick building. Doesn’t seem great.
Being John Rawls
March 19, 2026 · Original source
“I’ll have, uh, the fried chicken, and a Coca-Cola,” he said. The waitress beamed at him. “Great choice. And your guest says he’ll be just a little late.” “My guest?” asked John Rawls Alcoholic. “Don’t worry about it, sweetie,” said the waitress, and went back into the kitchen.
The waitress brought him his fried chicken and a Coke. “Anything for you, sweetie?” she asked John Rawls Brahma. “Coke for me too,” he said, and she retreated back to the kitchen.
John Rawls Alcoholic took another sip of his Coke. “I always thought morality was pointless,” he said, “just another trick the rich play on everyone else. If it can actually make me better off, maybe there’s a reason to do it. And if there’s a reason to do it, I can go back to the Rawls Foundation and pass their screening test and live like a king!”