Surrealism, Sweeteners, and Pseudocopulation

A Review of Coca-Cola Dreamworld

We sit here in the twilight of Coca-Cola Dreamworld. A brand new Coke promotional flavor has already launched for 2023 and all of the signs saying that Dreamworld will be leaving stores soon have long since come and gone from store displays. As it stands, a dwindling stock of the drink still lingers on store shelves as it all slowly disappears from the world. If I’m going to say anything about it, I should do it now before it collapses entirely into an ephemeral black hole.

I remember how I first learned about the drink. I saw some promotional signage for Coca-Cola Dreamworld up in a gas station on the day before the flavor was officially set to launch. Working backwards, I suppose this must have been August 14th, 2022. The promotional material was a bright pop of eyecatch which certainly grabbed my attention, though my main reason to be interested was due to how good the Starlight flavor had been that previous spring.

None of the actual Dreamworld drinks had been stocked out yet in the cooler at the gas station and I was tempted to ask the clerk if they had gotten any in, but then I started to think about how there was an official street date for soda these days, and frankly the idea of potentially having to discuss this topic with a gas station employee weirded me out enough that I just paid for my junk food and left without saying anything.

I’m being halfway facetious here, since drop dates on soda have been a thing since at least 2015 with the debut of Nuka-Cola Quantum, but I don’t have to be happy about this particular facet of our absurd collective reality. Anyway, Dreamworld was the fourth offering from the Coca-Cola Creations initiative, and the last one that was scheduled to drop for 2022.

Part 1: The Press Release

So, I’d like to apologize. I believe I called this thing an “initiative” just now, but I double checked and I see here that it is properly branded as the “Coca-Cola Creations platform” and that it “reimagines the brand across physical and digital worlds via sequential, limited-edition flavors, designs and experiences.” Wild, huh?

Seriously though, the press release on this stuff is a goddamn gold mine, including “bottles up the technicolor tastes and surrealism of the subconscious with an invitation to savor the magic of everyday moments and dream with open eyes,” and “every drop delivers an unexpected, never-before-seen product and experience in an only-Coke-can-do way by tapping into core Gen Z passions and cultural trends.” Other buzz words include “flips this script,” “suite of immersive digital activations,” “Gen Z,” “relevant content,” “Gen Z,” “IRL,” “get-it-before-its-gone,” and “resonated with young consumers.”

Stepping away from the onslaught of farcical language meant to efface meaning and reassure investors, what this is, in simple English, is a branding push by Coca-Cola to put some slightly more exotic novelty flavors out on the market in the hopes of reminding the youngest generation that they still like Coke’s version of carbonated sugar water, and then also backing that advertising campaign up with some musical talent and additionally also with some bullshit Augmented Reality web tie-in promotional stuff and maybe also some merch, because possibly all of that stuff together is what the kids like these days or something, the Coca-Cola Company is really not sure.

Part 2: The Augmented Reality Experience

All of this begs the age old question, does a novelty soda flavor taste better after having fully engaged with the brand and having participated in the official AR experience®?

Answer: No. No, it doesn’t.

Now, I don’t see any evidence that basically anyone else on the internet could be arsed to play around with Coke’s AR widget for Dreamworld, so I’ll do my best to provide some context. I have a video here of the full experience, but given the shaky nature of these things actually staying on the internet, I’ll write out a play-by-play as well.

Essentially you start out by running it from the website and then your phone’s camera displays a video of whatever is in front of you, only with an overlay there which prompts you to touch the screen. Once you tap somewhere on the video, an animated doorway appears within the scenery in front of you in a flash of bubbles and butterflies, along with an arrow icon inviting you to enter it.

The doorway is kind of cool, I will grant it that much, though it does appear on the screen a little too close to you which makes getting a good look at it more challenging than it needs to be. Imagine a flashing pink archway showing a pink field beyond, or don’t imagine it if you watched the video, and then near to the doorway on your side of things there are also some floating some green spheres, a shiny blue cactus, and a ladder going up to nowhere. In keeping with augmented reality, you can move your phone around and when you do your view of the door shifts accordingly so you are able to see it all that way. It’s that kind of a thing.

Unfortunately, once you tap the arrow to enter and move onto the next stage, metaphorically passing through the doorway, you are now in Coca-Cola Dreamworld which completely replaces and overwhelms the previous altered video of reality, effectively dropping the “Augmented” part of the AR experience, and instead you are treated to a completely fabricated pink landscape. The pink landscape still works according to augmented reality rules, meaning you can move your phone to see it, and it encourages you to play a simple rhythm game where you tap on oncoming spheres timed to the beat of a song in order to score points and build up the dreamworld around you. The song that plays is Cellini feat. Amos - Lose Yourself (Dreamworld Edit) and the whole experience thing is in collaboration with the Tomorrowland music festival from Belgium, which is certainly a choice but really does nothing for me personally. At the end of the song, regardless of how well you have done, a cluttered dreamscape rises up out of the landscape and you are shown a message, “Congratulations! You’ve built Dreamworld.”

Dreamworld, or this iteration of it at least, at first seems impressive. The original pink “ethereal landscape” has softened to blue skies with green and purple grass, and it’s cluttered now with geometric purple structures, striped hot air balloons, pink spheres, a wide winding skyway, and frolicking butterflies and hummingbirds. However, if you play this game and don’t score a single solitary point, the Dreamworld that emerges is the exact same one as if you had tapped your heart out and absolutely killed it on the minigame. Once the application is set in motion, the end result occurs completely independently of your participation. Everyone gets the same Dreamworld, which is a hollow little place since you can’t interact with it in any way once the song ends, and instead you can just physically turn around in a circle to look at it. The other option is you can also hang around idly and listen to more music, but they only bothered to program in a few songs, since they rightly figured that no one would really want to stay.

Even more amusing, once you are in the Dreamworld, if you look directly upwards it turns out that the whole dreamworld is visible as a reflection in the liquid sky above you, and you can see how it is laid out as a little island with regularly spaced outlying structures, and from this accidental bird’s eye vantage you can see just how small and limited it really is. What seemed like a chaotic and dynamic jumble from the ground level view is revealed as being sparse and rigid when granted the perspective that distance brings.

Does anything different happen if you ace the song instead of just doing acceptably at it? I have no idea. The responsiveness of it was just not good enough to keep playing it over and over, and it burned through battery life quick enough for me since it was technically using the camera the whole time it was running. Was there anything more to it that I didn’t see, like a hidden easter egg or something? Again, maybe. I kept promising myself I’d come back to this and look into it deeper but I just honestly couldn’t. And that’s the rub, that if I didn’t find it while actually trying to muster up the energy to care about this, the question becomes if anyone at all dug any deeper either, especially given how quickly Coke pulls their AR apps completely after the drink promotion is done.

Speaking of people caring about this, I did manage to find one other source of critical commentary about this game. A poster on r/SaturnStormCube wrote:

Coca-Cola company placed the Freemasonic All-Seeing Eye of Horus with MKUltra butterflies for their "Dreamworld" drinks, even making the Coca-Cola logo an illusory Saturn Matrix Cube with entry ladders and exit escapes between different dimensions.

This appears to be a serious post on a shitposting board? Or maybe the other way around? Either way I’m tickled by the poster calling them MKUltra butterflies because I never in a million years would have reached for that.

Colorful commentary aside, I’m being awful hard on this game, I know it, and that’s not because I think it’s a bad game necessarily, but instead because I think it’s flimsy. It’s a hollow sort of spectacle, meant to exist for about four minutes of anyone’s observational effort, and any time spent beyond that causes the whole effort to fold in on itself as being all facade and no substance. And spectacle for spectacle’s sake isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, but in this case, as something named “Dreamworld,” it just lacks imagination. It plays at being something expansive and interactive, but the actual implementation is as shallow as the words in the press release were hollow.

Some ideas that would be playfully imaginative: If every sphere during the rhythm game unlocked a different object in the landscape at the end, then every Dreamworld would be different, except that doing something like that is tricky to program and it introduces a failure condition where getting zero points means a boring landscape. Or, I’m thinking of something like the game Windosill (2009) or Islands (2016) where it mostly acts like a toy, and you can click on different items in the landscape and be surprised by how they react and move. In short I’m saying there are ways to make something small and whimsical that still lingers with a person. But I can’t get over the indignity of it here, slight though it may be, of being told by Coka-Cola that I’ve created something, only for my actual actions to not have mattered, and for the thing I created to be completely useless and untouchable, a mere diorama. Having created Dreamland you are expected as the next step to close the tab and discard it once you’ve had your look around. A completely disposable experience.

Part 3: On Surrealism

Moving on from the AR experience now and looking towards the larger campaign here, I will say that the exact aesthetic that Coke has picked for this is admittedly kind of interesting, because it’s distinctly playing towards a liminal vapor-wave kind of vibe, except that is not exactly it, but it is also not the heavy synthwave of lasers, roman colonnades, and a digital Miami sunset over line-graph mountains. Instead, this is more like a weird-core playlist where you’ve stripped out all the weird. It’s liminal without the desolate uncanny. It’s mall-core but in a popular and bustling shopping center. It’s Lisa Frank without the full-throated commitment to the craft.

In more concrete terms we’re talking about palettes that are overwhelmingly blue, pink, teal, and purple, with big fluffy clouds, rippled water, and rolling soft landscapes in unnatural colors. Their main motifs are doorways and ladders, with some hot air balloons and also one solitary life preserver rounding out their journeying symbolism. Floating spheres abound, and floating clouds of liquid coca-cola and shiny cacti are both common sights, but these don’t seem to bear any more symbolic weight than the random disco ball does. Landscapes are mostly grassy plains and mountain peaks, with sand dunes and icebergs appearing in some ancillary marketing. It's like if Rene Magritte and Filip Hodas collaborated, but their only theme was Coca-Cola. No, I’m sorry, I take that back, that’s far too pretentiously obscure at thing to say, even for me.

I guess what their “dreamworld” really reminds me of, which is to say specifically the conceptual space that they are working in, is that it is most reminiscent of very early CGI, say maybe something like The Mind’s Eye. What I mean is that it is playful and limited, and that it doesn’t have that jagged edge that all the dreamwolds that are surrounding us now have all taken on as we have all started living in them semi-permanently. The idealism in The Mind’s Eye was genuine, grounded in the early promise of computers and ideas about where people thought this new technology would take us. As for Dreamworld, I’m tempted to use a word like “uncomplicated” for their offering, but that would be ignoring the hidden depths that it does have, except here instead of peering into the recesses of the human psyche we are looking into the bowels of specific marketing decisions, which is at least still somewhat insightful still since marketing is always something of a cultural funhouse mirror.

Speaking of the marketing, I really can’t let this slide. I keep thinking about this line from the press release, saying that it “bottles up the technicolor tastes and surrealism of the subconscious,” and I have to ask the obvious and ridiculous question: Is coke Dreamworld really surrealist?

On the face of it, it’s an absurd idea to even want to have that conversation. No one would really think that the marketing cruft here has any actual merit or should be taken seriously, right? Oh, would you look at that, it looks like delish.com wrote an article where the search engine facing headline is “Coca-Cola's New Dreamworld Flavor Is 'Surrealism' In Soda Form.” That headline is presented as simply just being a statement of supposed fact. I mean, it doesn’t even have the wiggle room built in to it that eater.com gave themselves for their headline when they wrote, “Coca-Cola’s New ‘Creations’ Flavor, Dreamworld, Apparently Tastes Like Surrealism.” Alright, well then, guess we better talk about this.

André Breton, in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, offered both a dictionary and an encyclopedia definition for the newly coined term of “surrealism”:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express-verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner-the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

As a counter-point to this, user Hilley of Urban Dictionary offered the following definition in 2017 for the term “surreal”:

Surreal as in not real as in spooky as in spoopy as in happy Halloween

I’d like to make it clear before I move forward that I think these are both fine definitions, though obviously I do favor one over the other, but in all honesty I don’t fully agree with either of them and I’d like to take a moment to explain the problem.

In his manifesto André Breton identifies surrealism as having a parentage derived from both Gothic literature and from the incisive absurdities of the Dadaism art movement. In particular he goes on at length about a book called The Monk, which is a delightfully melodramatic soap opera of a Gothic novel that seems to have really resonated with him, and which practically no one in the modern era has much reason to have ever heard of. Once I managed to get my laughter under control that this was the thing that founded surrealism, a fate no less funny than The Castle of Otranto founding Gothic literature itself, I decided it really did make sense to view surrealism through the lens that it was a hybrid art that melded the ghostly beauty and grand horror of the sublime with the humor and destabilization of the weaponized irrational unconscious.

As for Hilley’s definition, I’d amend it to say something that addressed the unconscious aspect more directly like, “Surreal as in not real as in spooky as in spoopy as in happy Halloween as in dreams” but otherwise it’s practically perfect as a definition goes. We really don’t need to talk about this one any further as it’s both sufficiently expansive and largely self evident.

Moving back to Breton, my problem with his assertion is his insistence that surrealism can never be deliberate and that it must be purely a thing unto itself without editing or intention. Essentially he believes that surrealism in its pure raw state is a revolutionary force capable of changing the world for the better simply by its own existence, as people engage with surrealist creations and learn to tap into surrealism within themselves. Unfortunately this contention has had roughly a hundred years to play out and it has not yet proved to be the case, and, more than that, any time someone tells me that something is in-and-of-itself revolutionary and does not need constant human shaping and moral reflection in order to be of positive social value, inevitably I have to conclude that I’m being sold yet another well meaning utopian bill of goods. The internet was supposed to be an unalloyed good. Cryptocurrency was supposed to be an unalloyed good. Time after time this sort of thinking is an abdication of responsibility in the face of new ideas or technology where no one doing the work on the thing bothers to actually ensure that their creations lives up to its initial promise and demonstrably makes the world a better place. Keep that in mind for the next breathless article you read about artificial-intelligence chatbots.

Part 4: On Surrealism, Continued (A Socratic Dialog)

André: Greetings, I couldn’t help but overhear you there from beyond the grave. It sounds like you are perhaps questioning the very foundations of my life’s work?

Smiley: Yeah, hi there, I’m trying to decide if the new Coca-Cola drink is surrealist, but I need a working definition for that first and I’m finding yours a bit too rigid to use. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but from where I’m sitting it has really failed to leave room for any change or evolution of the genre and so it doesn’t really sufficiently speak for the surrealism of today.

André: Hmm. While my manifesto might have some of the shortcomings of youth, ah, but the virtues of youth as well I might add, I think you’ll find that my definition of surrealism is a timeless one and that if we can get enough people on board then a new cultural era awaits us. Er, wait, you said this was about Coca-Cola? You mean like the soda fountain drink? No, that’s absolutely not surrealist. No question whatsoever.

Smiley: Cool. Hey, first off, I want to thank you for engaging in a Socratic dialog with me, I really do appreciate it! I’ve always wanted to do one of these things! And, yes, you are probably right about Coke, but I’m going to officially reserve judgment on that topic for just a little bit longer. Now, with all that said, I’m from the year 2023 right now and unfortunately I’m here to tell you that oligarchic capitalism won and that the authoritarians and robber barons are ascendant again. Surrealism as a movement has failed, well actually the broad idea of art itself having any power for change is what has failed, and anarchism in the US is more often than not blunted into a capitalistic exercise that just feeds libertarians who in turn tolerate or support fascism in the hopes of ushering in a new and more unegalitarian world where they are on top. I know you really like anarchism, so I kind of wanted to head that topic off as not really being applicable to our discussion today.

André: Oh. Well shit. I’m devastated to hear all that. Fuck fascism.

Smiley: Right on. Fuck fascism indeed, but unfortunately that particular thing is way more of a topic than I’ve got time for in this silly little fluffy think piece. Cutting to the heart of things with the art issue, my real bone to pick here with your definition of surrealism is the idea that the creation of surrealist art needs to be an end unto itself and that it can only come about through automatistic processes.

André: You do realize you are arguing with the perspectives of myself as a young man in 1924, correct? It’s really too bad you don’t want to talk about anarchism. Surrealism is inherently political I believe. I was in the French army at the start of World War II, you know? Granted, I had to flee for political reasons, but the whole world remembers the Nazis and what ends they came to. I did keep on working past that manifesto, doing work with surrealism and its meaning all my life, as well as my work on anti-fascist committees.

Smiley: Right, you were active until the mid 1960’s I believe, but that first perspective of yours from your manifesto on surrealism is what is still commonly quoted today, and that one is the conception that still has cultural cachet even now. Also I am not sure that I agree that surrealism is political in one specific way like you seem to think it is, but I will grant that I suspect surrealism is opposed to neutrality in general. It makes sense, given that our inner worlds are not really neutral places, so naturally surrealism would swing for the fences. So it’s maybe not so much a bulwark against fascism as you seem to assume, and rather another conceptual space that needs to be safeguarded and fought over. As for your life and work, don’t think you softened all that much really, well not beyond getting into mysticism, though I’ll readily admit I’m no deep expert on your history.

André: Hmm. I do have my adherents even now I suppose.

Smiley: Right! Exactly! Now, I want to venture into a hypothetical here if you will indulge me: Imagine, if you will, that the techniques and processes of surrealism that you and your crowd pioneered, suppose if they didn’t produce art at all but instead they were able to physically mine a sort of literal dream-metal into reality from out of the abundant material of the subconscious.

André: Ah, you are proposing a scenario where the active work of surrealism produces a physical item in the form of an ingot of metal? Alright, I’ll entertain the idea, please go on.

Smiley: Good, so you start doing surrealism and you are mining this stuff. It’s revolutionary! The world has never seen a material like it. But, by the terms of the definition that you have outlined for surrealism, all anyone can really do is mine the raw dream-metal, maybe sell it to others as-is, and then those buyers of it can put the raw dream-metal ingots up on display in their homes as a way of spiritually and mentally enriching themselves.

André: While reductionist, I suppose that is broadly correct enough that I’ll give it a pass. You may continue.

Smiley: Well that’s just it. From the example so far you can see that there’s no real mechanism there to exact the change you hope surrealism can provide. It also goes against everything we know about how humans use stuff. If a new material is discovered, people are going to figure out how to work with it and smelt it into different tools and then actively do things with it. It will be incorporated into all levels of human art and industry where it is applicable, because that’s what humans do. You can no more set it aside as sacrosanct than you could argue that the invention of emoji represents a novel form of communication that should not be mixed in with traditional written language. Also, please don’t get bogged down in the emoji thing because it is intentionally a specious argument serving only as an example.

André: The true idea is that everyone would be inspired by example to do the hard work of digging up their own minds. Churning the earth of the mind then goes hand in hand with direct political action. That was how I lived at least. Surrealism on its own is too delicate a thing for what you are proposing. Trying to shape or forge this raw material is a violation of an inviolable law. You will not succeed in leveraging it to your purposes, instead you will only degrade it into something that is no longer surrealism, and then capitalism will ravage it. From what you have said, perhaps it already has?

Smiley: I'm not ready to write surrealism off just yet. It's about pulling people out of the malaise and getting them to see the world right? We just had a world wide pandemic. We could use a little of that right now. I guess honestly I don't feel like capitalism really has its teeth on surrealism's throat. Not for lack of trying mind you, but what you pioneered has proved resiliant, in more ways than you ever appreciated or would have expected, and the youth do just fine in finding ways to thumb their noses at capitalism, even if on the whole we've done nothing but lose ground. It has found fertile ground in silly internet bits, in auteur directors freed by digital filmmaking, in the weird gonzo crevices of manga and literature. All together we've been sharpning the steel of surrealism into a good tool, and maybe it can still find its way into the right hands even today.

André: I see we've moved out of the realm of hypotheticals. Well go on then, paint me a picture of what you mean if you're aiming to be specific.

Smiley: I guess I’m thinking of the ways that surrealism has been a boon to the advancement of horror as a genre. This sort of comes full circle since you were at least partially inspired by Gothic literature in the first place. The director David Lynch in particular has mastered the use of surrealism as an incorporated element in what are otherwise grounded narratives, or half-grounded sometimes, and the way he uses it specifically is as a way to more fully explore the emotional weight of the situations he presents. In his work the surreal is a tool of empathy, to add resonance to the frightful or to the sad so that the audience is coaxed to actually engage with the emotional dimensions of the story, unable to disregard it in favor of only engaging with the analytical and plot driven aspects. And the same could be said of the generation of authors and directors and video game developers that he has inspired. Silent Hill 2 is surreal and has met huge acclaim, but it’s not famous because it’s so out there or somehow too weird to understand, instead I think its appeal is how tragic and relateable it is even within the ambiguity of its dreamlike structure.

André: You’re then arguing that surrealism can, what? Heighten disposable melodrama?

Smiley: No, don’t be an ass. I’m saying that dreams are doorways to epiphany and catharsis, that they can shock us out of our jaded reserve, that they can speak ideas to us in simple and direct ways that would otherwise require an outpouring of words to even approach the same level of clarity. To borrow from the field of psychiatry for a moment, the electrical shock from a modern electroconvulsive therapy machine benefits from a century of refinements and restraint versus the much more blunt force version that was once used at its inception. A shock without deliberate direction doesn’t cure the brain.

André: If I may make a personal remark, you seem to me to overstate the definitiveness of your arguments when you are flailing the hardest to connect your points. You are on the mark about surrealism being the shock, but you seem to want to make the dream a subservient partner to reality here. I’ll tell you, you bow down to mediocrity when you do that. When I was a young man I wrote, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.” I still believe that, and to my last dying breath I will not yield my positions. Since we are talking here now, then beyond that point even.

Smiley: Right, that’s the problem. I agree with that part. Fundamentally I like your ideas, granted you’re no Hilley from Urban Dictionary, but the sheer adherence to dogma about there being one true way is the problem. I know I’m not the first one to say all this, but still just the same I’m saying it right now. Surrealism is thriving in the current era and it’s happening in an organic root level way. Indie video games are thick with it, children’s animation has gotten beautiful strange, and surrealism is as much a backbone to the internet's culture as trans-Atlantic optical fiber is to its function. Granted people aren’t really talking about surrealism by name all that much anymore, but it is there. Look, you aren’t even the primary definition for most encyclopedia sources on surrealism, instead you’re just an obligate explanation about its historic roots. The world agrees with me on this and has largely moved on, outside of some overly dug-in art majors. I don’t know why I’m taking the time to argue with you here.

André: So why are you? This whole thing was principally about a confectionery beverage of some kind, wasn’t it? If I’m so irrelevant then let me just rest.

Smiley: Surrealism is poised for a resurgence, if that hasn’t happening already, and that begs the question of what is surrealism, really. What is the core of it? Without a good grasp on that, it’s poised for a future of wormy shallow exploitation for crap advertising purposes. Like the soft drink, yes, Coca-Cola Dreamworld.

André: And you hope to change that?

Smiley: Oh, hell no! I couldn’t be more relieved to have absolutely no reach or audience. That shit is someone else’s problem. Also this is still nominally a soft drink review. No one is going to read this shit. The world is not so absurd a place that this would be the little bit of grit that finally caught in the wheel and gave a resurgence in surrealism some traction.

André: Tell me, have you ever tried writing using automatism?

Smiley: No, honestly I haven't.

André: Well, go on then, give it a try. If you wish to defend your position, you owe me that much.

Smiley: Um, here goes… I feel it and we want it and that’s all there is to the meaning and the glory of the shadow and the cowl, shroud and cloud above and below the equator and the line of scrimmage rises up to meet the moment of the pines, shivering alone, tired and dark, with the scars of time and duty fleeing back and past the past to the back of track.

André: There you are, how was that?

Smiley: It felt great! I don’t think there’s much substance to it though. Mostly I’m surprised at how close to the surface of my brain In the Pines appears to be for me, especially considering I was listening to other music while I wrote that. I guess honestly I feel like it’s overly self indulgent and that I can do better, and I don’t just mean as far as automatistic processes go.

André: To be candid with you, though my specter may loom large over surrealism still, it is ultimately up to the living to carry on and to do what they will do. Putting up any real opposition is for the living to do, and I am but a phantasm before you trying to guide your path, so, with my blessing, do what you think you must. We may disagree here in a way, but it’s not as if I can stop you. Nor did the weight of the past stop me. Now, this has all been an amusing episode but I’m about done with it. Did you care to suggest your version of a definition then? Since apparently you read that I’d defined it definitively, once and for all, and then you immediately decided to exhume me so you could fight me on it.

Smiley: Surrealism is an artistic discipline engaged in the revolutionary search for truth which attempts to depict the actual functioning of thought and of the unconscious inner state of the mind, ideas which are typically explored through an examination and resolution of the inherent tension between the subconscious area of dreams or imagination and the conscious area of reality by using a juxtaposition of the familiar with the unexpected, incongruous, or irrational.

André: A bit cobbled together, no? You’ve certainly grave robbed me for it. Well, how do you feel about what you’ve proposed?

Smiley: There's no law against grave robbing! But, yeah, it’s alright. My apologies to Hilley from Urban Dictionary for my lack of brevity. I feel like someone else can do better then I did here, but it’s not a bad place to start from, pastiched though it may be. What matters is that I’ve staked out my ground.

André: You could probably have just gone with something out of a dictionary right from the start rather than go to all this trouble. Nonetheless, now that you’ve got a definition, where do you fall on the Coca-Cola thing? I’m finally actually curious at this point.

Smiley: I think the doorway iconography is the closest that Dreamworld comes to anything real or meaningful in a surreal sense. Taste and scent are indelibly linked to memory and encountering them again years later can transport you back mentally to a certain time and place. It isn’t produced anymore, but a giant can of original formula Rockstar and a bag of sour gummi worms blasts me directly back to my time in college attending anime club and watching Psycho-Pass.

André: And we were almost having a nice conversation here. I’m shocked that you’re defending them now.

Smiley: No, let me finish. Giving them credit for the doorways is as charitable an interpretation as I can muster, and it’s still pretty weak. If we read the press release as being a kind of artist’s statement, there’s really no hint that this interpretation is at all what they mean to evoke, and instead they are really just relying on empty signs and symbols that ape actual surrealist works, as well as trying to cash in on the vaporwave and liminal internet aesthetics before our hyperactive culture has moved on from them entirely. There will never be a re-release of Dreamworld to trigger that nostaliga. Probably no one will really remember it outside of an entry on a wiki somewhere. Ultimately we are in complete agreement that, fuck no, Coke Dreamworld doesn’t bottle up “the surrealism of the subconscious” in any appreciable or honest way.

André: A suitable conclusion to a rather farcical conversation. Thank you for your time but on that note I’m going to take my leave back to the realms subconscious and beyond.

Smiley: Good to know you. Thank you as well! You’ve given me a lot to chew on.

Part 5: Flavor

With the ghost of André Breton put to rest, we are finally getting to the least important part about Coca-Cola launching a new flavor, which is the physical product and what it tastes like! Like the dream-eating Baku of Japanese folklore I have answered the call and swigged down many a great many bottles of this stuff. What I have found at the bottom of my cups is a terrible revelation.

The bottle for Dreamworld is specifically marked as being “Dream Flavored,” while the contents inside are the typical looking dark Coke color. Upon opening a bottle I’d describe the smell as tangy and tropical, distinctly very sweet. My girlfriend Fauna called it “husky” which I kind of like. Tasting it, it is overwhelmingly citrus at first. It’s not a bright clear citrus, it’s something muddled and complicated, but that’s what comes through more than anything else, that flavor distinctly overwhelming the even the cola component.

My first instinct upon trying it was to sigh in despair since apparently we are doomed to have Coke try yet again to push Coca-Cola Orange on us, except they are doing it by using subterfuge this time. I honestly don’t know what I was expecting from this drink. Based on the premise, if I were doing it, I might have done something like mixing Thums Up Cola with a shot of raspberry flavoring, for a kind of spicy whimsical flavor profile that most of the world would have a hard time pinning down. Or cotton candy flavor, since that would work with the color schemes they want. But here’s the thing, here’s the terrible revelation I promised, the flavor of Coke Dreamworld is not orange. No, no, instead it’s a groan worthy dad joke quality pun instead.

It’s tangerine. The flavor here is tangerine dream. You know, like the band Tangerine Dream?

In the interest of absolute honesty, my actual guess was initially mandarin orange, but for obvious reasons I concluded that tangerine fits better. But wait! That’s not all! That’s only half of the flavor profile! And the other half is mango.

I’ve read online that some people think Dreamworld is flavored with peach, and I’m here to resoundingly say, “nah.” Peach cola is one of my absolute favorite flavors, accessible thanks to the alchemical wonders of Freestyle soda machines, and with myself as maybe the singular person thanks to Prunus Girl who is inexplicably the most familiar with that particular flavor profile, I can confidently say that Dreamworld doesn’t hit any of the same notes for me. I can see how the confusion could happen, because elements of pure flavor, divorced from all context, are elusive and phantasmagorical things. Dreamworld is definitely a very tangy drink, and it distinctly seems like it has got some kind of a stone fruit flavor to it, so peach isn’t an unreasonable conclusion, but it’s mango is what it is.

Incidentally I don’t usually mind the zero sugar version of most of Coke’s drinks, but this one is way way way off the mark. Dreamworld isn’t really my flavor, not like Starlight was, but honestly it’s quite drinkable and really a sort of bright and chipper experience, really kind of a good high summer drink. I kind of got hooked on it and decided to just keep drinking it until it ran out, since there is something decidedly pleasant about it. The zero sugar version of it tastes so much flatter and maybe almost bitter afterwards. You know about all that stuff I was talking about now, about the tangerine and mango? If you’re doing the zero sugar version, forget about all of it, since it all gets muted out to shit and in the end it is kinda just an off version of Coke but you can’t tell what it’s trying to be.

So, doubling down on this, because I’m too far in not to double down, I want to do a side by side comparison on Dreamworld here. It’s going to have it defend its existence from both Coke Vanilla Orange and from Pepsi Mango simultaneously.

Coca-Cola has been messing around with variations on Coke Orange in various forms since as early as 2007, the irony of which is that they already have a perfectly good orange cola called Mezzo Mix that they’ve been selling in Germany and related environs since the 1970s but which has super low name recognition anywhere else. Naturally, it makes sense that they’d love to repeat that specific success worldwide, and so in 2019 Coke finally bet big on the American market being ready and released Coke Vanilla Orange. It didn’t take. Now here in 2022 it has been diminished already to being a Freestyle machine only drink after presumably having under-preformed. That’s where I’m getting it from here for this.

Pepsi Mango is Pepsi with mango juice in it. It came out a couple of years ago. Its tagline is "Pepsi With a Splash of Mango Juice." It is pictured above being served out of a hollowed out mango, as that is the only right thinking way to drink it.

Trying them side by side here, Coke Vanilla Orange is much more mellow in flavor than Dreamworld, the vanilla aspect really calms it down and smooths out the tang compared to Dreamworld, but not in the impoverished way that the zero sugar version of Dreamworld mutes it all out completely.

Pepsi Mango meanwhile is bold as fuck, with no apprehensions about subtlety. It's got the oversweet Pepsi buzz going for it, and it has just got the one flavor added and that's fucking clarified mango juice concentrate 1%.

Side by side like this it's easy to see how much more Dreamworld has more going on flavor wise. So here's some dumb science that no one asked for, if you mix those other two together, how close is it to Dreamworld?

The answer is no, not at all. That was really really silly to suggest.

Coke Vanilla Orange and Pepsi Mango together still just tastes like fucking Pepsi Mango, except now with a slight vanilla aftertaste. Stupid. God damn it Pepsi Mango. Well, kind half-way not stupid, since as an experiment it really reinforces my judgment about the mango-citrus notes of Dreamworld. Like say what you will about it being an artificial "candy" flavor, but Dreamworld is hella tangy.

I hate to say it, but Dreamworld comes out on top over either of these separately, and especially combined. Though, I will say that I do hold a certain deep seated respect for how shamelessly brazen Pepsi Mango is, and drinking a single can of it is kind of awesome, but drinking a case of Pepsi Mango is a real slog, which isn’t equally true of Dreamworld, which is much more consistent and appetizing to have multiple cans of. And then on the other side, Coke Vanilla Orange is almost too chill, where I also like it more on first taste than Dreamworld, but it’s not all that exciting and I find myself thinking I’d prefer just plain Vanilla Coke in the long run.

So there you have it! Coca-Cola Dreamworld is honestly kind of tasty, like I’m glad it’s a limited edition flavor since I don’t think it has true staying power, and it probably isn’t doing any favors to increase the chance for Coke Orange’s revival, but it is way more drinkable than I expected when I first tried it and ultimately I’ve been having a good time with it. Also, it’s not surreal in any way whatsoever, and its advertising campaign is a cultural abyss, just a pure fucking morass of horseshit and despair that should be avoided at all earthly costs.

I mean, if you want! It’s still just a soda though, and health-wise it’s not really good at all for you, but it’s nice as a treat. So remember, make weird art, drink more water, and stand up to fascism in all its incarnations!

Appendix A: Virtual Clothing

I’m back with a quick post-script. Continuing this is probably ill advised, but part of why this essay has dragged on so long without being published is that I just can’t be rid of bullshit Dreamworld marketing. I was all done. All set to just release this months ago and move on, more of less content with what I’d written and the tone I’d struck. But Dreamworld won’t be done with me.

The real problem is that Coke did like presumably a six month marketing stretch for all of this and towards the end of my period writing this they decided to release virtual outfits related to Dreamworld and it was a blighted wreckage that I couldn’t look away from. The more I dug into it the more I found it overwhelmingly demoralizing due to the craven stupidity of the whole thing. I realize I’ve throw language like that around a bit already here, but I’m being serious, even beyond the contempt I have for regular marketing, this whole thing is all just hate inspiringly insipid and potentially actually corrosive to my ability to have cognition and to be creative.

I’m going to try to avoid editorializing for a moment here and just deliver facts. Coke released a set of outfits titled Fizzy, Liquid, and Spongy. These are not just any old pieces of clothing, they are free virtual outfits! Which, really, uh, takes some explaining…

There is a website called DRESSX which sells virtual clothing. What I mean is that they create a 3D model of a piece of clothing, and then you can try it on in augmented reality app before paying them money, after which point they will photoshop it into photos of you so that you now appear to be wearing it. Haven’t you always wanted the kind of cheap particle effect clothing clutter that your character avatars can wear in free-to-play MMOs? Also they have a really small selection of clothing that you can try to “wear” during video chats, the practical details of which are incredibly scarce, so I have no idea if that works as advertised but I honestly doubt it based on the mechanics of how their live preview app functions. Also they sell NFT clothing, because of course they do.

Right away, some red flags. This clothing is priced kind of exactly the same as if you were buying real clothing, because of course that’s the only coherent way to make the leap into a post scarcity marketplace. One of their taglines is literally, “Don't shop less, shop digital fashion.” What a business model! Here you can pay the same money as physical closes for the privilege of looking way worse! Price always equates to quality after all, even if there is no longer any physical production that takes place past the design stage, and if that tactic doesn’t work then we can just use NFTs and invent new schemes that recreate scarcity in some other way to justify the whole enterprise. That’s not to say that I don’t think the idea of digital fashion isn’t interesting or compelling to think about, just that on a commercial level we are still in the early days of it with some pretty janky technology and that once it actually matures as an art and works easily for the general public it’ll probably be more like how the market for 3D print models currently is priced and operates. Also that it will never replace physical clothes because clothes are inherently functional and sensual items as well as art items, and this only addresses one singular aspect of what clothes are.

Um, let’s see, what else? No refunds it looks like. Also no one seems remotely interested in it. They have a deal with Meta to sell Facebook avatar clothes? Yuck.

Okay, here’s the real dirt. They have an item called “DRESSX THE MTRX Red pill look” which costs $40 and makes you look like one of the daring computer hackers fighting the system from recent sci-fi hit film The Matrix Resurrections.

Yes, buying an imaginary dress in a simulation of the valiant red pill individualist lifestyle, that is certainly what that film was about, that our best life can be had by valuing style over substance, and by engaging in exploitative digital systems in order to mass project our desired image to others, because that’s where true happiness lies. Deeply experiencing actual reality through an orgiastic cave rave where we connect in our mutual humanness? Forget about it! Rejecting the ever evolving rubrics of control that surround us and which demean and cheapen everything dear and sacred to us and instead reaching out to those people we wish to be closest to and through our mutual support with them reaching a place of meaning and worth? Don’t need it! Maybe even something as shallow as just dressing up in some fetishy leather number and going to a cool night club to get laid? Completely outmoded! I can buy the Red Pill Dress instead, and make the Real Red Pill Choice™ of looking great on TikTok!

Right. Right.

Now that I’ve said everything I need to say about what DRESSX generally is, let us circle back. Coca-Cola initially partnered with DRESSX to release three outfits. Spongy is a teal outfit that looks like it is a traditional piece of garb worn in Dr. Suess’ Whoville, only there is also a swirl of Dreamworld random object clutter spiraling around it. Liquid is a brown chainmail long coat made out of liquid Coca-Cola I guess? Finally, Fizzy is a pink jumpsuit with fluffy shoulder pads from hell on it, and also four pet clouds floating there in front of you. All of these looks are really ugly. Not fun ugly where I want to download the app and see what they would look like, but ugly ugly where I don’t want to do that instead.

Again, I’m being very hard on this portion, but that’s because it sucks. Like, it just sucks. Essentially Coca-Cola has released three outfits which are a subsidized free trial for the DRESSX service, a service that no one currently really cares about or is talking about that I can find, and it’s just a gross situation. When I say no one cares, I mean DRESSX has 72.7k Instagram followers and no Wikipedia article. This isn’t so much about Coke being on the cutting edge of fashion technology to advertise Dreamworld, rather this feels like DRESSX buying relevance and attention through them. Or failing to buy it through them is more accurate. Maybe attempting to prop them selves up so that what they do with Meta has relevance? Who knows.

Against my better judgment I went ahead and downloaded the DRESSX app to try their preview function out and I feel like I should have known better. Their app was rated with 115 reviews that were five-star, and 38 reviews that were one-star, and then nothing else in between. I did know better.

I had my friend Orchid model the dresses for me as you can see in this video, and it turns out their app uses a truly cartoonish Snapchat filter to let you see how the clothing might look on you. I want to emphasize that when I say that it is a Snapchat filter, I’m being very literal, their policy information says that they use the CameraKit SDK from Snap Inc.

All of the outfits were much worse than expected, the Spongy one had a texture like an actual sponge, the Fizzy one looked like it was on backwards, and Liquid was ugly in a poorly stretched texture way that was just bafflingly bad. Oh, and to conclude the clownishness, the Matrix items all had had bullet time bullets hanging in the air around them. Which ties into one of the core ideas of the fourth film, that bullet time itself had been coopted as part of the system of control within the Matrix. You can’t make this up. Also there are Matrix sunglasses where one lens shows a hand offering a red pill and the other a hand offering a blue pill. I don’t know what more I could say about this whole thing that it isn’t already broadcasting all by itself in more violent and vulgar terms than I’m capable of.

I’m not going to take the next step and get my free Dreamworld outfit pictures. I just can’t care about this enough and I don’t want to chase this to its inevitable and demeaning pinnacle where I own a picture of myself in any of those tacky fucking outfits. That’s it. I’m done.

DRESSX is probably doomed no matter what. I would strongly hope that they are doomed in the immediate short term, but I’m sure we wont be so lucky. They are exactly as much of being both a scam and not a scam that the entire fashion industry is. On top of that they are for sure exactly as much of a scam as the entire NFT market absolutely is. And as for their technology, the preview level was bad Snapchat filter quality, but the end result of their photoshop efforts seems to be a step up at the bad CGI level of quality. So, either they actually have some useful tech they are using to automate the photoshopping process in a reasonable way, or else they are secretly a very labor intensive Mechanical Turk style enterprise where some underpaid worker has to adjust a digital model to match your photo’s pose and then do some half assed clean up work when they composite it in to the photo, in which case as a company they don’t really have any hope of scaling up their business if this ever catches on. Given that they licensed Snapchat for the app, I’m guessing that the second scenario is probably closer to the truth. And, even if I am wrong and the technology is semi capable, and that in the future there is a demand for what they want to provide, even then there is only a brief window in which they can exist unless they manage to make themselves essential for Meta or some other big name, because other portal companies out there will key in on it and just roll their own version in whatever little enclosed internet garden they are running, because there’s no reason to let an outside company have a say and take a cut of that market. Outside of that corporate clusterfuck, I assume the hobbyist market will do just fine for itself, and it’s just the squishy middle like DRESSX that will get crushed.

Look at it this way, I’ve owned Apple branded earbuds in the game Team Fortress 2 for over a decade now. Digital fashion isn’t anything revolutionary, it’s only that we’ve just recently been trying to turn ourselves into avatars in our offline world as well. This whole exercise isn’t really about sustainability or art, or as Coca-Cola would put it “digital wearables from another dimension,” no it’s just about crass consumption and a contemptible hustle to try and bilk tech fetishists and influencers.

Appendix B: More Clothing, Both Real and Virtual

I think I promised a quick post-script a bit ago. Right. Still not done. I am sad to say that the first “Appendix” was not the only one after all, and was really only something of a preamble. Honesty, I’m stuck in this morass here but you can just be done you know. I already said that the flavor was tangerine mango, that’s the real meat of this whole thing. Well actually the meat of this thing was where I popsted Hilley’s definition of surrealism so that we could better understand and appreciate it as a genre of art. As the author I’m the one who keeps looking at this trash marketing junk, but you are free to cut your losses.

What’s that, you’re in this with me? We’re doing this then? Well, hell yeah! Ride or die! Let’s do this. Let’s critically examine the ever loving shit out of all this rubbish. Let’s make like Casey Jones and crash this fucking train!

Following their success with the first drop of virtual clothes, and by success I mean that no one seemed to notice or care that it existed, Coke then released three more new outfits with DRESSX. Those outfits were Icy, Bubbly, and Cloudy.

I don’t know what to say. These ones are just as bad as the first batch and have also failed to penetrate into public awareness at all. Reading into this I realized that I was going to have to reinstall the DRESSX app and sign up again, because no way whatsoever did I save that shit the first time around.

This time I got a 500 Internal Server Error from DRESSX when I tried to sign up by email, so that is heartening. Oh, apparently also they just raised $15 million in investment funding a few days ago. Just found that out. Huh. Really makes you think.

Anyway, after some fussing I got onto the app and Iwakura Lain was kind enough to try on the new outfits for me this time so that I could see them in action. The requisite video for that is here.

The three new looks are described as “Icy, Bubbly, and Cloudy” by Coke, but are listed on DRESSX as Ice, Buble, and Cloud. This is only notable because the names were the same on both sites last time, and this is seemingly more evidence of an increasing lack of fucks being given about all this, even internally. DRESSX DIDN’T EVEN SPELL BUBBLE RIGHT! BUBBLE IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE TWO “B”S!!

Do you know what else also says that they don’t give a fuck? The Icy design is nearly the same as the previous Fizzy clothes, except it is clear colored instead of pink and replaces the hat with a balaclava. I guess Fizzy had more of a shoulder poof going on, while Icy is going for actual wings instead, but they both have the busy little floating clouds as well. Icy also has an integrated can of Coke Dreamworld on the sleeve, as if they didn’t trust the consumer to be holding one already when they pose for their Instagram photo.

Dreamworld Cloudy looks like a something out of a Sci-Fi original movie that would be worn by a sexy spacewoman, complete with built in offscreen fog machine. No, no, whatever you are imagining, make it look a few steps worse than that. It’s a white jumpsuit with teal strappy bits over the chest and crotch, and it has a bizarre three section pair of sunglasses that would be perfect for an alien that had a third eye right in the middle of the forehead.

Finally, Bubbly looks like if the Michelin Man were a metallic blue jumpsuit with extra noodly arms. A miasma of coca-cola particles float behind it.

In case it seems like I’m going out of my way to make this seem worse than it is, consider looking at this article by Wonderland Magazine where a real live human tries to make this stuff look appealing, or even make it look just nominally competent, and then is forced to say something as self-degrading as “This was a super exciting project for me because it was completely new shooting through the metaverse,” so that the website that hired her can work the word “metaverse” into the byline.

None of this addresses the actual real clothing that was sold alongside this all, which was produced by KidSuper Studios, but it is all irrelevant anyway so what does it matter. We’re talking three tee shirts that just say KidSuper and Coca-Cola on them, a purple-pink set of a soccer jersey and shorts that would run you $250 to own both pieces, a pink corduroy Coke hat, and a Madotsuki style rugby shirt in trans colors that would be sort of cool except for it saying “Coca-Cola Dreamworld” in a white box placed awkwardly over the checkerboard pattern on the chest and also without it costing $160.

If an item is already partially sold out on the webstore and there are zero scalpers on eBay trying to flip it, then you can rest assured that what you are doing probably didn’t land all that well with anyone.

Appendix C: Installations and Global Reach

I’ve got one more topic in me and then I’m done for real. In order to sell this thing further, Coke also had a few physical installations of various types that are possibly worth mentioning.

There was an “immersive journey” up in Toronto for a few weeks. What this seems to mean is that people stood in an empty rectangular room and then imagery and sound that were in alignment with the other marketing materials were projected on all the walls and floor. Cue the obligatory joke about Plato’s allegory of the cave. Some blessed soul got a video clip of the event which helps un-vaugeify the marketing buzz about what this was.

Romania had some kind of motion capture thing where a singer preformed some of her songs while wearing a mo-cap suit and then she was also projected onto the screen behind her as a virtual avatar in a Dreamworld landscape and both she and her avatar did the same dance at the same time. Which would sound more exciting if both VTubers and Gorillaz hadn’t already been invented.

Spain got a booth at the Mad Cool Festival involving a robotic camera arm? I’m not totally clear on the concept of this one.

South Korea got a pop-up museum which seems pretty similar to the one in Canada, except the imagery looks like it might have been more interesting. And also the k-pop group NewJeans was there. Never heard of them, whoever they are, but they were there.

New York got a pop-up bus, which is significantly less thrilling than what either Canada or South Korea got. But also they got other things too and plus they are only just a city and are not literally a whole country.

Norway got a makeup booth and launch party? Something in the article too about being excited about getting the sugar free version in their country since not everyone got that, which, joke’s on them I suppose since that stuff tastes super terrible.

There was also an “interactive dream mural” that was another AR widget that could be experienced in either New York city or Atlanta. I don’t know what this was. It was on the main Coca-Cola Creations page but the app for it is deleted, no one documented it that I can easily find, and it didn’t even warrant a line in the press release. It is just gone.

I could probably keep going but I’m getting bored now and also I’ve made my point. My point is that there is no point. Even after all this effort, with all these voices coming together, all of it only to prove that there is nothing that Coca-Cola really has to say here. There is nothing more being conveyed by the Dreamwold marketing and imagery than the same kind of brief experiential thrill that is contained in the fleeting spectacle of a beautiful firework explosion. Well, I mean, that is, unless you buy into the position of the anti-cubist r/SaturnStormCube reddit weirdos that this is all some new world order propaganda or something. Me, I’ve always been a Time-Cubist at heart and I’m not sure I can get onboard with their platform.

Dreamworld is empty. Desolate. A wasteland of doors and ladders that only ever go in circles, recursively leading back to itself. All this human creativity and art, all across the globe, all harnessed for nothing more than hyping up some sugar water. And I like sugar water. I’m very fond of it. But it isn’t revolutionary. It’s not even new. I don’t know. Warren Buffett is the largest shareholder of Coca-Cola, so I guess all of this to make Warren Buffett a little richer?

There isn’t any surprise here, it was a forgone conclusion from the start that all of this is utterly hollow, but think about that press release that I quoted earlier and how it was full to bursting with all those words and promises. And all for what? The marketing blitz team would have one believe that beyond the obvious main message of “Drink Coca-Cola” there is a secondary theme of “Imagination is Good,” but all these artists around the world who are being paid to find some way to promote Dreamworld instead all move in shaky lockstep because fundamentally you can’t express individual imagination at the same time as you are promoting a brand identity. If you did there would be no unity of color palette, no repeated usage of the same pre-approved all-ages-apropriate imagery, and worst of all, someone might steer off course and break out of the little recursive garden of ideas that Dreamworld will live its whole life and die in. Art is a discourse of ideas, and discourse by its very nature invites debate and room for disagreement. Art is a back and forth. Dreamworld is all one way. Not discourse, because fundamentally there is nothing here to say.

Perhaps most discouraging, all of this flatness is what people want out of a marketing campaign. No one wants to get the off-brand version of a product launch that isn’t up to snuff and looks kind of cobbled together in comparison to what other countries got. When you take artistic risks, not all of them pay off, and from a marketing perspective that’s unconscionable. A marketing campaign can make an uneasy alliance with art in situations where it’s a single artist who has been given a limited scope to act and the company just wants to ride the attention and doesn’t care about a carefully crafted message, essentially where actual artistic output is a not-valued but acceptable secondary outcome of what is otherwise a financial deal, like Tim and Eric promoting vodka or pizza rolls, or the spongemonkeys promoting Quiznos subs, but I have a hard time imagining it for something of this scope. I suppose it would be possible to design a mass ad campaign around the idea of individual voices, in a way where the people carrying it out would have leeway to be creative, but that’s almost what this is already and it didn’t happen, so maybe it’s just impossible for anything this big to have even a slight ring of integrity.

I want to be clear. Emotionally, I like Dreamworld as a drink. It’s tasty! I like Dreamworld as an advertising campaign too. It is bright, the designs are good, and it evokes things I’m fond of! But that’s the problem. That’s the reason I went to all this length. Well alright, there were also a couple of longform jokes I wanted to do, but those are miles ago now. Just because I like Dreamworld doesn’t mean that it is good, or that it is worthy of the feelings I have towards it. I like it because it reminds me of The Mind’s Eye which was the optimistic twin to my early love of cybepunk. I like it because it reminds me of vaporwave, which deconstructs and examines a lot of the bullshit mass capitalism and homoginized corporatized spaces of my youth. I like it because it says it is surrealistic and somewhat evokes the landscapes of Salvador Dalí, and that’s an area of art that I’m really passionate about.

But it isn’t any of those things. It simply isn’t. I know that because I’ve publicly and exhaustively cataloged here all the ways in which it is not and can not be any of those things that I like so much. It is pleasant and empty, which is a far sight better than being pleasant and smuggling in abhorent worldviews like some other companies do, but I still feel like it's a pernicious state of affairs that it should gain so much goodwill while giving so little of anything back. Perhaps I'm undervaluing the social good that a simple positive vibe is worth, but even if a good vibe is all that Coke really has to give here, well that's certainly not what they've said they are selling or how they have positioned themselves and if I go too far it's because I'm meeting them here head on at where they claim to be.

I kept digging because I wanted to give Dreamworld every chance it had to prove itself. Not because I believed in it, but because I didn’t. If there had been something cool actually beating at the heart of it all I would have been willing to recognize it and say as much. In nature the concept of mimicry refers to “an evolved resemblance between an organism and another object, often an organism of another species.” An example of this would be orchid flowers, which frequently lure in male wasps to act as pollinators by evolving their flowers to look like a female wasp of the species. The wasps will try to have sex with the flower, an act known as pseudocopulation, and some species of wasp like the Orchid Dupe Wasp will reach climax with the mimic orchid and completely waste their load, which sounds funny but is a bigger deal when you are a tiny short lived insect.

Dreamworld, the idea of Dreamworld that is being sold by coca-cola, is a predatory mimic of things I actually like. Selman Careaga, Coke representative, stated in an interview, “We’re engaging with people. They’re interacting with us, and they’re trying to guess what’s in it.” And you might say that's fine, after all everyone loves a good marketing gimmick, and selling a mystery flavor has been a winning hustle for ages already. The problem is that's not what this is. Coke isn't fundamentally selling a physical product here, instead they are selling a cultural idea, and it just so happens that the idea is tied to and built around a physical product. With this in mind, the only fair way to evaluate it really is in totality like this. In another interview a Coke rep named Oana Vlad just flat out states as much, "We talk about the Creations platform as bottled culture." Dreamworld is a mimic, and all the wasted energy spent positively engaging with it is pseudocopulation at best, by which I mean it’s all a bunch of jerking off and is a drain on society.

I can’t say that making this broad pronouncement here leaves me personally in a much better position. I’ve also wasted my time on all this rather than tuning it out and creating original art or something instead. At this point I’ve probably drunk like a dozen cases of Dreamworld, not really even for this article, but more because it was convenient to have, and because sometimes I like to stamp a certain section of my life with a specific flavor for the sake of memory and nostalgia. I’m not actually going to miss Dreamworld though, is the thing. I’ll finish the last of what I’ve purchased this week, and while I’m not in any real rush to get rid of it, just the same I’m totally fine with being done. I miss Stardust, for instance, but this? This was only good.

I talked about the flavor already, right? It’s bold and brassy, with a little zing to it. It would have been a better early summer drink because it has that sort of pop to it, a brightness like a flash of fireworks, but no matter. And then after the citrus of it fades on the tongue. The web apps get deleted. The instagram pictures get feed-buried. The weight of ephemera collapses it all to a vague memory and maybe this essay is the only thing left over with any kind of notion at all of the full shape of what it once was. And wasn’t. The aftertaste is just Coca-Cola.