The $1.2 Billion Pants-Optional Cyber Holiday

November 28, 2011, 9:00am

Ah, the holidays – a time for visiting with family and friends. A time for giving, and receiving, and too much food. A time for brawls at malls, mass macings, open-field tackles and busted faces.

What’s that? Didn’t tear yourself out of bed to go risk bodily harm and stand in retail lines to shell out fractions of the roughly $11.4 billion spent on Black Friday? Don’t worry – it’s Cyber Monday. Rejoice. Because on the Internet, you can’t be punched, pepper sprayed or brought face-first to the tile, at least not literally. So pull out the plastic, and be merry.

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Almost every major retailer is offering product deals right now, strategic cyber hawkings aimed at harnessing a buying public that’s skewing more and more toward so-called “couch commerce.” As noted in an IBM Coremetrics report, 15 percent of all Web traffic in the States this November will trace back to tablets and smart phones, not PCs.

Judged by any metric today will be a record-setting success, then, whether you buy in at the office (pants) or at home on the couch (sans pants), if you buy in at all. This year’s one-day online-shopping orgy is expected to pull in $1.2 billion, a nearly $200 million bump over 2010. The economy may still be in the shitter (thanks for everything, Supercommittee) and the jobs market is still a cruel joke, but damnit do Americans still love to spend money on stuff.

Well, not only Americans. True, Cyber Monday is distinctly, and not surprisingly, an American phenomenon: The term debuted in a 2005 press release by Shop.org, an arm of the National Retail Federation, the biggest retail trade association in the world. But the scheme has been catching on worldwide ever since. Retailers across Canada, the U.K., France, Germany and Portugal are all enticing shoppers today, which also marks Chile’s inaugural Cyber Monday foray.

This raises an interesting thought. You’d think that if ever there was a time for the globally decentralized hacking collective Anonymous – whose oftentimes commendable hacks and data-dumps seem more and more overshadowed by gaffey false alarms and pullouts – to really kick up some dirt in the face of capitalism during this moment of widespread Occupied stirrings, it would be today, specifically in the takedown of behemoths the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and OpenSky, a meteoric-rising shopping platform. Right?

Knowing nothing about the logistics behind those sorts of breeches, maybe that’s a ludicrous assumption. Or maybe Anonymous just can’t resist today’s steals, either.

For me, at least, and probably countless others, the thrill of cruising around the Internet without pants on has been dead and gone for years.