Coca-Cola ad from the 1970s Courtesy Coca-Cola. As a child of the 1970s, I have a distinct and curious memory about the landscapes I inhabited: They glittered with glinting metal, not the gold of El Dorado but the effluvia of the consumer society. I am talking about aluminum can tabs. If, as the saying goes, we are never more than three (or five, or 10) feet from a spider, so too did those little