The consumerist nation recently celebrated the most holy day of its year, Black Friday. There, every emotion, memory, scent and convenience is sold at a reasonable price. Buy a candle to remember the smell of real cookies, or buy a fake plastic “Charlie Brown” Christmas tree so you can remember an Xmas special that mocked buying fake plastic Christmas trees. Tis the season for irony.

Nothing is more iconic of consumerism than the multi-functioning iPod. They can get TV shows. They can get e-mail. Thanks to iWow, they can even become a vibrator. Now, online, you can get tips for turning your iPod nano into a tool for communicating with the dead. Candles and pentagrams sold separately.

The supernatural and supertechnological are merging. I’m afraid Macintosh may be meddling in forces more dangerous than it could possibly imagine.

I can envision a new Mac versus PC commercial. The Mac guy, with his spunky optimism, says that he can deliver handheld music and seamlessly integrate it with a computer. PC guy says he can do that too, except his is so bug-filled that his hand catches on fire and he runs off stage screaming. Then Mac guy, getting a little cocky, says that this same handheld device can communicate with the dead. He then puts on a U2 song and while he rocks out on his iPod, a vortex into the netherworld opens and a hound of hell drags PC guy to fire and brimstone.

I guess I never got into Ouija boards as a kid. I never really felt that the best way to honor my ancestors was by summoning the dead in order to answer my pre-teen questions about why a girl doesn’t like me. It also never really seemed like a great party game. If I was ever a ghost, I wouldn’t use that Ouija cursor thingie to greet kids at parties — I’d get a pottery wheel, have my emotions imprint my intentions in clay and then spell out my demands in wolf’s blood. But that’s just me. I wouldn’t be a very subtle ghost.

Right now, we live in an age where we build shopping malls on former cemeteries, commemorate disasters by commercializing them on T-shirts that say “I survived...” and have our famous religious figures revealed publicly as sex-crazed, drug addled, nut-jobs. People are looking for a spiritual connection, and have for their own reasons decided that the best way to reconnect with the dead is to use a tool that we more commonly use to listen to Coldplay and watch porn. It seems that the little wheel and the fact that it can go to all 26 letters makes it a prime mechanism to communicate with the deceased. The magenta-colored shell helps too.

Let’s assume that you can actually communicate with the dead here, that the roaming spirits of this world would want to communicate with our latte-loving, self-absorbed generation. I would hate to think of the second-rate ghosts you’d get communicating on an iPod Nano. Julius Caesar’s secretary. Marilyn Monroe’s agent. Jim Belushi.

Personally, the fact that the dead are upgrading their communications to meet with the changing technology makes a lot of sense. I’ve always wondered why my iPod would shuffle those same Get Up Kids songs so much — it’s a sign from the great beyond! Perhaps the ghosts haunting me are emo. Check that — the only bands that would be post-emo would in fact be dead.

Putting the ghosts into the computer shell may sound silly to some, but society is increasingly trying to reconcile the digital and the divine. Religious groups have sought to spread their message through the Internet, and many people have tried to reconcile modern technology, the new Golden iCon of iDoltery, with their own spiritualism. Others react to this consumerism with crazed boycotts against stores that don’t say Merry Christmas. But let’s face it: the new gods have white casing and USB ports and backwards compatibility. In an age where cars parallel park themselves and kids are excited about the latest Kelly Clarkson podcast, people are looking for some sign that spiritualism hasn’t been deleted from our collective memory banks.

Chris is selling an ipod that only has videos of evangelical preachers getting arrested. Behold, the iRony. Send complaints to cholt@stanford.edu.