Sharing
In the new edition of The Giving Tree, the tree uses social tools to share with its friend all the best places to buy things.
In the new edition of The Giving Tree, the tree uses social tools to share with its friend all the best places to buy things.
Cueball and Megan encounter a USB dead drop in a tree, placed in such a way as to simulate the tree itself having a "USB port". This might be a socket to which a compatible USB cable can be attached from a computer (e.g. the laptop that Cueball and Megan happen to have with them, along with a suitable cable), or could in fact be a trailing length of cable and compatible USB plug to negate the necessity of their own adapter cable. USB standards were not originally designed with the idea of connecting two USB hosts together, but the intimation (perhaps in part by the lack of obvious power at the 'tree side') is that it is some form of peripheral device which the laptop can interrogate. Upon doing so, it reveals itself to be a data storage medium.
The Giving Tree is a book in which a tree gives everything it has to a little boy out of love and a desire for the boy's company: apples to sell, wood to build a house, even letting the boy cut it down to make a boat. At the end of the book, the boy comes back as a grown man and the tree tells him sadly that it has nothing else to give. The man tells the tree that he only wants a tree stump to sit on, and the tree gladly gives him that. Notably, the tree's moments of greatest distress come when it fears that it can give the boy no more and that the boy will leave it.
.azw is an e-book file format used and created by the online company Amazon.com, which makes and sells the popular Amazon Kindle e-reader. Complaints against the format have been made concerning its closed nature: some people claim that all information should be free and imposing restrictions on its usage is limiting growth in the modern world. This comic was published two days before the release of the fifth generation of Kindles, alongside complaints that Amazon would continue to use Digital rights management "encumbered" e-book formats.
The comic is a criticism of the usage of DRM in digital commerce. The tree's willingness to offer up its file is parallel to the generous nature of the tree in The Giving Tree. The tree is prevented from sharing its file however, by DRM in the file. With nothing to gain from the tree, Cueball and Megan leave the tree alone, in a manner similar to the fears of the tree in The Giving Tree. The final frame is a reference to the iconic silhouette of a tree that is used in the loading screens of Amazon's Kindles, a link between the abandoned tree in the comic and an abandoned Kindle.
The title text is an elaboration on the idea of a more modern Giving Tree. While in the original book, the tree gives the boy various gifts, in the new, modern version, the tree shows "its friend" (presumably the boy) all the places the friend can buy things, using social media to do so. This, like the DRM on the book from earlier, is a criticism of some aspect of the modern world, in this case, the increased commercialism due to social media.