After a month in LA, I honestly felt like I was starting to see things. American fast food suffers from an identical crisis. Burger joints, juice bars, coffee shops - it's an endless parade of franchise repetition. But after I complained one too many times, I was pulled aside and informed in a hushed tones that I had it all wrong. 'You just need to know about the secret menus', said my friend. And she was right. I did need to know. Because even the most boring of brands, it turns out, have a back door.

Sameness is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. You might start life running a ultra hip underground Korean Taco truck in West Hollywood that plays accoustic K-pop remixes of the Beach Boys - but fifty trucks later, you will quickly swap unique and cool, for mass and market. But as I discovered, whether by accident or design, certain franchise brands seem to have evolved a secret language of signs and symbols known only to the select consumerati.

Here are a few examples:

- In-N-Out Burger has a very simple official menu, but a wide variety of unofficial ordering phrases. Ordering your burger "Animal Style" will grant you secret sauce and grilled onions, a "Flying Dutchman" is a burger with no bread or lettuce while "Protein Style" is a burger wrapped in lettuce instead of a bun. You can also upsize yourself by asking for a 3x3 or 4x4 (multiplies the meat and cheese). And even more bizarrely, there are small codes on the wrappers of most items. Look closely at the paper surrounding your cheeseburger and you will find the numbers 3:20, which equate to a Bible passage in Revelations: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hears my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me." God loves burgers too, it seems.

- Jamba Juice has an entire secret menu of unhealthy and rather inappropriately named smoothies including the 'Dirty Orgasm' and 'Hello Jesus'.

- Starbucks will serve you something called a 'Red Eye' which is a cup of coffee with a shot of expresso dumped in it. They also keep tiny cups under the counter which they don't advertise. Ask for a 'short' latte and you will discover the joys of more coffee, less milk. And for the real franchise fanatics, you can memorise the specific order of options used by Starbucks baristas when they yell at each other. Here's the options order: hot or iced, size, drink style, wet or dry, strength, milk style, and any final directions (extra hot, no foam, light ice).

Building secrets into brands reminds me of the art of hiding 'Easter Eggs' in games and movies. Programmers would often leave amusing pranks inside video games or software applications for those that knew how to find them. Early versions of Microsoft Office had hidden flight simulator and pinball games, and if you typed 'make love' into some Unix Operating Systems, the computer would reply 'not war?'. And according to legend, the original laser disc version of 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?' not only had naked stills of Jessica Rabbit, but the then CEO Michael Eisner's home phone number scrawled on a Toontown restroom wall.

All of this may seem a bit odd, but I think that more brands should have 'Easter Eggs' hidden within them. They provide a lenticular quality. From one side - consumers will see the mass market product - which you need in order to present a simple and consistent message to the world. But look slightly askew, and your true evangelists will have access to their own private world of special products, ordering styles, personalisation and brand mythology. And having been initiated into your secret society, you can be sure that they will be more likely to spread the word and do your marketing for you.

Of course, like any game of Chinese Whispers, things can get a little lost in translation. Think of the unfortunate Filipino man in the queue in front of me, who confident in his new In-N-Out Burger Jedi ordering skills, demanded loudly that he would like a 'Double, double... doggy style'.

There is drawer in my house that is a graveyard. Adapters, gadgets, phones, music players, digital cameras - all once proud icons of the state of the art, now just a kind of art of the static. I know a Japanese blogger who inscribes in marker pen the date he buys a new toy so that he knows for how long he has had it. That strikes me as macabre. I don't want to be reminded of the half life of contemporary treasure. But still, it raises an interesting question. Should we despair at obsolescence or rejoice in the cult of the new?

Obsolescence is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Think long enough about the logic of mass production and you will start believing in the divine necessity of building things designed to be thrown away. If we become wealthy through work, and work is created through things being made - then making something too well reduces the necessity of its continual replacement. You might remember the satirical scenario in Huxley's 'Brave New World' where the citizens of a perversely happy Utopia vie to entertain themselves in games and activities that use the maximum amount of resources. There is no doubt that waste creates wealth, but what does it do for happiness?

Well, it's hard to say - for the simple reason that the reason we buy things now has little do with replacement and everything to do with desire. Few people buy a new product because their old one is broken. They buy because objects and their ownership offer passports to worlds of pure symbolic joy.

Take Apple for example. Have you ever heard of a company where people hang on press releases like the Second Coming, turn up to product briefings as though they are spiritual rallies and immediately seize upon the latest version of whatever perfectly good gadget they previously owned to embrace the new, new thing? And it's not just technology. In Hong Kong, there is an entire black market trade in last season's luxury goods. For those that must have the latest look handbag - the handbag itself is worthless - it's the newness that counts. Cantonese fashionistas and rich wives trade in their precious commodities often months after purchase - to be snapped up by the lower rungs of mainland factory girls with their eyes on the prize.

There is an empty satisfaction in all of this. Continuous acquisition creates a kind of personal momentum that one can easily mistake for meaning. But to be honest, looking at my technology graveyard - i only feel remorse. When I think about the things that really make me happy - my old mechanical cameras, my fountain pen, my leather worn diaries, my beat up old leather satchel - it is their longevity that I prize. At some point in my owning them, they seem to have lost whatever brand signal they once possessed. Now they just radiate my own personal signature. I love that. It's like they stopped becoming mine and started becoming me.

And as to my own personal obsolescence, well - I'll guess I'll just have to get back to you on that one.

Every time I grab my bag and walk across the gangway onto a plane, I wonder just how much longer we are going to be able to get away with this. Riding these massive metal leviathans spewing out environment destroying toxins like some kind of medieval dragon. And if that sounds strange, don't forget that doctors once recommended cigarettes too.

We have become addicted to an idea of globalism. But what that really means, is that at some point travel stopped becoming a luxury and started becoming public transport. We catch planes now the way that people catch the bus. Somewhere along the line, we conditioned ourselves to to the idea that a holiday is not just a break from work, it is a removal from the familiar. Except really, there is almost nowhere left like that. The more we spread ourselves across the planet, the less the planet is less different to anywhere else. And yet because I still travel in search of elsewhere, I have in mind that I should buy carbon offset credits every time I do. The idea that somewhere a tree is being is planted might lessen one's moral checked luggage - but I'm under no delusions. Carbon credits are no more than medieval 'indulgences' re-imagined for the 21st century.

Someone once told me that the heaviest thing on a plane is actually its paint. I don't know about that. I suspect that these days there are a few heavy hearts too.

There is an old man who works at the end of my street in Hong Kong. Every day he sews clothes, repairs handbags, and stitches threads. He never looks up. When I walk past him I think of those sped up movies they play on TV of a plant growing, as the sun and stars move around in a blur. Except in my tailor's case, it would glittering skyscrapers growing, collapsing and rising again at high speed around him as he worked. I wish I could be there to take a picture of his expression at the moment he finally looked up.