When I encountered Mickey and his infinitely mirrored cousins, he drew me out of the malaise of a quiet Saturday morning. Having woken up earlier than usual for a Saturday, at the inhuman hour of 10am, I drifted through the Abu Dhabi mall in search of an artifact to depict the mimetic nature of global consumer culture. With sunglasses sheltering my tired eyes, I was one of the few people participating in the Emirati national pastime that morning. Salespeople, largely of South Asian descent, clamored for my attention but I waved them away, preferring to wander silently through the palatial mall. Stuck in my usual haunts (men’s formal wear), I was having difficulty finding a fitting artifact until Mickey appeared. With infinite replications of himself, he seemed the perfect symbol of the cultural technology which created him: a worn symbol, with continual replication into the temporal and spatial distance, losing the outlines of past and meaning. He becomes Mickey Mouse, the mascot of our times.