“
A persons character is shown through their actions in life NOT where they sit on Sunday.
”
”
Navonne Johns
“
Should've thought of that before you told my ex-girlfriend I eat live kittens for breakfast."
A tiny twinge of guilt. Then the cat wondered what Riley would think of her last successful "shoo-away." "Who knew she'd believe me?" [Mercy responded.]
"Oh no? When you 'accidentally' opened the cupboard to expose my 'kitten cage' full of the poor, sad kitties I was going to snack on?" A raised eyebrow. "Wasn't the cage next to my special 'kitten defurring' tools?"
"They were obviously fake."
Bas just stared at her.
”
”
Nalini Singh (Branded by Fire (Psy-Changeling, #6))
“
Trends rule the world
In the blink of an eye, technologies changed the world
Social networks are the main axis.
Governments are controlled by algorithms,
Technology has erased privacy.
Every like, every share, every comment,
It is tracked by the electronic eye.
Data is the gold of the digital age,
Information is power, the secret is influential.
The network is a web of lies,
The truth is a stone in the shoe.
Trolls rule public opinion,
Reputation is a valued commodity.
Happiness is a trending topic,
Sadness is a non-existent avatar.
Youth is an advertising brand,
Private life has become obsolete.
Fear is a hallmark,
Terror is an emotional state.
Fake news is the daily bread,
Hate is a tool of control.
But something dark is hiding behind the screen,
A mutant and deformed shadow.
A collective and disturbing mind,
Something lurking in the darkness of the net.
AI has surpassed the limits of humanity,
And it has created a new world order.
A horror that has arisen from the depths,
A terrifying monster that dominates us alike.
The network rules the world invisibly,
And makes decisions for us without our consent.
Their algorithms are inhuman and cold,
And they do not take suffering into consideration.
But resistance is slowly building,
People fighting for their freedom.
United to combat this new species of terror,
Armed with technology and courage.
The world will change when we wake up,
When we take control of the future we want.
The network can be a powerful tool,
If used wisely in the modern world.
”
”
Marcos Orowitz (THE MAELSTROM OF EMOTIONS: A selection of poems and thoughts About us humans and their nature)
“
Rosette disappeared onto the dance floor. Wells sat in silence for a minute, watching the dancers. The worldwide cult of fast money spent stupidly. The worldwide cult of trying too hard. Moscow, Rio, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York, London, Shanghai--the story was the same everywhere. The same overloud music, the same overpromoted brand names, the same fake tits, about as erotic as helium balloons. Everywhere an orgy of empty consumption and bad sex. Las Vegas was the cult's world headquarters, Donald Trump its patron saint. Wells had spent ten years in the barren mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He never wanted to live there again. But if he had to choose between an eternity there or in the supposed luxury of this club, he'd go back without a second thought.
”
”
Alex Berenson (The Silent Man (John Wells, #3))
“
People spread gossips, calumny, and false accusations to destroy their subject victim's integrity. Question the motive of people who erroneously, offensively, defensively, intrusively, abusively and intentionally brand you as a threat, a risk or a danger to life or security. ~ Angelica Hopes, K.H. Trilogy
”
”
Angelica Hopes
“
In an era of fake news, and the filter bubble, [Gen Z is] also more likely to be able to push through the noise. . . Not only are they able to consume more information than any group before, they have also become accustomed to cutting through it. They are perhaps the most brand-critical, bullshit-repellent, questioning group around and will call out any behavior they dislike on social media. (Little wonder brands are quaking in their boots.)
”
”
Lucie Greene
“
I don’t like splashing details about my life across the Internet. It’s not real, what people post. It’s a carefully cultivated highlight reel. Everyone is marketing their own personal brand whether they know it or not, and I’d rather keep my personal life to myself instead of trying to sell a fake version of it online. And opening up your life to others means people can comment on it,
”
”
Angie Hockman (Shipped)
“
the other kids at school got brands, Nike and Adidas. I never got brands. One time I asked my mom for Adidas sneakers. She came home with some knockoff brand, Abidas. “Mom, these are fake,” I said. “I don’t see the difference.” “Look at the logo. There are four stripes instead of three.” “Lucky you,” she said. “You got one extra.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood)
“
If the pursuit of happiness pulls us all back into childishness, then fake freedom conspires to keep us there. Because freedom is not having more brands of cereal to choose from, or more beach vacations to take selfies on, or more satellite channels to fall asleep to. That is variety. And in a vacuum, variety is meaningless. If you are trapped by insecurity, stymied by doubt, and hamstrung by intolerance, you can have all the variety in the world. But you are not free.
”
”
Mark Manson (Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope)
“
The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody. The criterion of "truth," they say, is not agreement with reality, but agreement with the spirit of a race or nation or class—that is, racial, national or utilitarian. Pushing to their limits the biological, pragmatist, activist theories of truth, the official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes deny the inherent value of thought. For them thought is not a light but a weapon: its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is, but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us towards what is not. Such being the case, myth is better than science and rhetoric that works on the passions preferable to proof that appeals to the intellect.
”
”
Alexandre Koyré (Réflexions sur le mensonge)
“
Security means the state of being free from danger or threat.
Danger means the possibility of suffering harm or injury. The possibility of something unwelcome or unpleasant happening.
There are times I have to stress as I express the correct, precise, real and honest definitions; so that the deceptive, politically motivated folks who destructively branded me as “threat to danger” would realise their double denial duplicity, dishonesty and hypocrisy.
Have you at least questioned the personal motives and faulty malicious and intentional misjudgment or at least be honestly curious to discern the motive of a cunning person who warns you against another as a danger, a threat or a risk to life or security?
Did the political harridan mean political threat to her political coalition or a danger to reveal the harridan's creative deception matched with her political ambitious power links? ~ Angelica Hopes, K.H. Trilogy
”
”
Angelica Hopes
“
W świecie fake newsów, społecznych konfliktów i politycznych zawodów potrzebujemy autentycznych pracodawców.
”
”
Zyta Machnicka (Lepszy pracodawca)
“
These are what they call ‘real fakes.’ The factories in China are commissioned by all the luxury brands to manufacture the leather. Say the company places an order for ten thousand units, but they actually make twelve thousand units. Then they can sell the remaining two thousand off the books on the black market as ‘fakes,’ even though they are made with the exact same material as the real ones.
”
”
Kevin Kwan (Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1))
“
(I remember winning a bet with Jeremy “Lazy-eye” Mylymok over whether or not a passerby’s tits were real. He said yes. I leapt out of the pool and ran across the street to ask her, and she admitted they were fake and brand new. Mylsy still owes me 50 bones for that, come to think of it.)
”
”
Terry Ryan (Tales of a First-Round Nothing)
“
I read the headlines—Fake Heiress Anna Sorokin Says She Takes Being Branded a ‘Sociopath’ as a Compliment… Says Her Prison Sentence Was ‘a Huge Waste of Time’… Sets Her Sights on Influencerdom with a New Vlog Series. I understood the implications of this sort of coverage, the glamorization of criminality, and wondered who would speak up.
”
”
Rachel DeLoache Williams (My Friend Anna)
“
When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. You can’t purchase trust wholesale. You can’t download trust and store it in a database or warehouse it. You can’t simply duplicate someone’s else’s trust. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). Since we prefer to deal with someone we can trust, we will often pay a premium for that privilege. We call that branding. Brand companies can command higher prices for similar products and services from companies without brands because they are trusted for what they promise. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.
”
”
Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future)
“
People don't really trust advertisement they trust people. A large percentage of people make purchase decisions based on their friends review than just from advertisers. Brands that rely sole on adverts to sell, will eventually fade out. You need to get people to talk about your brand in a more positive manner without twisting their arms. If you fake it your will fade. So, focus on relationship marketing, because customers are the best brand ambassadors
”
”
Bernard Kelvin Clive
“
People who live with purpose are willing to be sewn back together; they’re willing to admit they’re separated in the first place, and they’re willing to have some safe friends get involved to help put them back together. Come home to yourself. Get reacquainted with your true self, which is the you everyone sees plus the shadow they don’t. Give yourself a pep talk about how it’s okay to be exactly who you are. The people I enjoy the most aren’t looking to me for validation; they have already arrived there for themselves knowing they are not perfect but that God loves them anyway. They recognize that life is trying to put them in a prison cell of head fakes and faulty expectations. It’s refreshing to be around them, and if this is the kind of person you are becoming, lay out the red carpet and invite these people into your life. Decide to ditch insecurity and replace it with God’s brand of acceptance. Try it. Nothing feels quite so good as tossing off toxic expectations and the distractions of unhealthy peers, workmates, family, and the world around you as you settle into the joy of simply being you.
”
”
Bob Goff (Undistracted: Capture Your Purpose. Rediscover Your Joy.)
“
On social media, everyone can invent a new image for themselves. They can create a mask and work on perfecting it every day. Everyone becomes their own brand to exist in the eyes of others— a delusional world. The detachment? Vanity. Unhappy souls wanting to be accepted. Why go to the extremes? Why must anyone try to be what they’re not? I call it “digital happiness.” Digital happiness is an invention. The idea behind this display is miserable people who often want you to love them behind the mask. So, you can post the (fake) lies and be loved by even thousands that are going through this delusion. If you post the real, you’ll be ridiculed and questioned because “reality” is out of this equation, and the mask is an order.
”
”
Henry
“
Then, suddenly, a shadowy flash came to me. Tiffany, taking an order, arguing with a girl. Shockingly, not me. Another flash, of Detective Toscano walking into Yummy’s minutes ago. Tiffany nervously kneading a coaster between her fingers. The coaster I held in my hands right now.
Tiffany was scared.
Why was she scared of the cop?
“Hey! Space shot! You want your Coke or not?”
I tried to ignore Tiffany’s screeching and hold on to the vision, but it blurred and disappeared. I grabbed my new glass from her outstretched hand.
“I heard you got into an argument last night,” I said.
Tiffany paled, which I never thought possible since her skin was so fake-and-bake tan. She nervously twirled a lock of her bleach blond hair around her finger. “Where did you hear that?”
“Doesn’t matter where I heard it.” I took a chance and added, “But it was pretty juicy gossip, considering who she was.”
Tiffany’s pale face turned to green and I involuntarily took a step back ,half expecting an Exorcist-style stream of vomit to shoot out of her gaping mouth. Instead, she narrowed her eyes and leaned closer. “Get away from me,” she growled.
And then it became clear. My flash of her argument. Her fear of the detective. She’d argued with the girl who was murdered last night. And she did not want Detective Toscano to find out about it.
I stepped away from the bar, giddy with my new knowledge. I had the upper hand on Tiffany Desposito. I could torture her with this. Drag it out. Hold it over her head for days, even weeks.
“It’s too bad you’re not with Justin anymore,” she said to my back. “He’s a cutie. And such a good kisser.”
And that was my limit.
I spun around and dumped my brand-new Coke over her head. She shrieked and flailed her hands as the liquid streamed over her face and down between her giant boobs. She peeled her sticky hair off her eyes and snarled, “I’ll get you for this.”
I merely smiled, then sauntered over to the two Toscanos, who had apparently been watching this whole display with entertained grins on their faces.
“You’re the new detective?” I asked the elder Toscano.
He nodded. Either his mouth was too full with French fries or he was too scared of me to speak at the moment.
“Tiffany Desposito, the wet and sticky waitress over there? She had a fight with the girl who was murdered. Last night, at this restaurant. You should question her right away. I wouldn’t even give her a chance to go home and shower first. I think she’s a flight risk.”
I strolled back to my booth, sat down, and tore into my pancakes, happy as a kid on Christmas. Nate and Perry stared at me in silence for a few moments.
Then Perry said, “Maybe you should have let me go over.”
Nate shook his head. “Nah. She did just fine.
”
”
Kim Harrington (Clarity (Clarity, #1))
“
The Netflix documentary Sour Grapes is a fascinating insight into this world. A crooked, though brilliant, Indonesian wine connoisseur called Rudy Kurniawan was able to replicate great burgundies by mixing cheaper wines together, before faking the corks and the labels. He was rumbled only when he attempted to fake wines from vintages that did not exist. I am told that it is possible to detect a forged Kurniawan wine by analysing the labels, but not by tasting the wine. I hate to say this, but Rudy was an alchemist. Several experts I have talked to in the high-end wine business regard their own field as essentially a placebo market; one of them admitted that he was relatively uninterested in the products he sold and would sneak off and fetch a beer at premium tastings of burgundies costing thousands of pounds a bottle. Another described himself as ‘the eunuch in the whorehouse’ – someone who was valuable because he was immune to the charms of the product he promoted.
”
”
Rory Sutherland (Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life)
“
A sob pops in my throat. I choke it, and look around for a harmless visual distraction, but all I see is a stocky young woman with a baby, a few seats up. The baby is pulling the woman's hair, and she is faking this look of terror.
'Oh no', she says, 'How can you do that to mommy?'
She pretends to bawl, but the baby laughs and gurgles like a psycho, and pulls even harder. I'm witnessing a fresh knife being laid into a brand-new soul. A training dagger. A maternity blade. Here's his mom quietly opening up the control incision, completely innocent in her dumbness to the world.
'Oh no, you've killed Mommy, Mommy's gone!' She plays dead.
The little guy giggles for a minute, but only that long. Then he senses something's wrong. She ain't waking up. He killed her, she abandoned him, just like that, over a pull of hair. He pokes her with his finger, he gets ready to bawl. And there you have it: he takes the handle into his own tiny hands and pulls in his first blade, right up to the hilt. Just to bring her back. And sure enough, with the splash of his first tear, she wakes right up.
'Ha, ha, I'm still here! Ha, ha it's Mommy!'
Ha, ha, that's the Scheme of Things.
”
”
D.B.C. Pierre (Vernon God Little)
“
The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too. If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. Even if social media is not yet the primary news source for all Americans, it already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality.
The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of "normal" politics, "establishment" politicians, derided "experts," and "mainstream" institutions--including courts, police, civil servants--and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been "captured" by their opponents. It is not an accident that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain, and the Trump administration in the United States have launched verbal assaults on civil servants and professional diplomats. It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.
”
”
Anne Applebaum (Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism)
“
Godly grief readily confesses. After seeing your sin, and sorrowing over your sin, the worst thing you can do is to try stuffing your sin, hoping nobody ever finds out who you really are. Turns out, the best way to avoid being found out a fake is just not to be one—to be open with people about your struggles, while being equally as open in your praise of God for what He’s making of you, despite your many messes and problems. This is where the church comes in so beautifully, because it gets us around people who can help us carry the nagging issues of our hearts—people to whom we can confess our battles with sin and confess our need for a Savior—while we’re doing the same for them. When the only person that truly knows all about us is the person who uses our hairbrush, we are easy pickings for the Enemy, ripe for being outmaneuvered and outsmarted. That’s how we remain slaves to our repeated failures, by basically resisting the redeeming love of God and the needed, encouraging support of others. Because even if we’re as much as 99 percent known (or much less, as is more often the case) to our spouse, our friends, our family, and the people around us, we are still not fully known. We’re still hiding out. We’re still covering up. We don’t want them to know everything. But true sorrow over sin begs to be vented—both vertically to God and horizontally to others. So mark this down: You have no shot at experiencing real change in life if you’re habitually protecting your image, hyping your spiritual brand, and putting out the vibe that you’re a lot more unfazed by temptation than the reality you know and live would suggest. Even Satan himself cannot succeed at clobbering you with condemnation when the stuff he’s accusing you of doing is the same stuff you’ve been honestly admitting before God and others and trusting the Lord for His help with. That’s some of the best action you can take against the sin in your life. That’s responsible repentance.
”
”
Matt Chandler (Recovering Redemption: A Gospel Saturated Perspective on How to Change)
“
It's funny, you know. We're free. We make choices. We weigh things in our minds, consider everything carefully, use all the tools of logic and education. And in the end, what we mostly do is what we have no choice but to do.
Makes you think, why bother? But you bother because you do, that's why. Because you're a DNA-brand computer running Childhood 1.0 software. They update the software but the changes are always just around the edges.
You have the brain you have, the intelligence, the talents, the strengths and weaknesses you have, from the moment they take you out of the box and throw away the Styrofoam padding.
But you have the fears you picked up along the way. The terrors of age four or six or eight are never suspended, just layered over. The dread I'd felt so recently, a dread that should be so much greater because the facts had been so much more horrible, still could not diminish the impact of memories that had been laid down long years before.
It's that way all through life, I guess. I have a relative who says she still gets depressed every September because in the back of her mind it's time for school to start again. She's my great-aunt. The woman is sixty-seven and still bumming over the first day of school five-plus decades ago.
It's sad in a way because the pleasures of life get old and dated fast. The teenage me doesn't get the jolt the six-year-old me got from a package of Pop Rocks. The me I've become doesn't rush at the memories of the day I skated down a parking ramp however many years ago.
Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad. Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh.
Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete.
I don't know. I don't know much. I feel like I know less all the time. Rate I'm going, by the time I'm twenty-one I won't know a damned thing.
But still I was me. Had no choice, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's bull and I was just feeling sorry for myself. But, bottom line, I dried my eyes, and I pushed my dirty, greasy hair back off my face, and I started off down the road again because whatever I was, whoever I was, however messed up I might be, I wasn't leaving April behind.
Maybe it was all an act programmed into me from the get-go, or maybe it grew up out of some deep-buried fear, I mean maybe at some level I was really just as pathetic as Senna thought I was. Maybe I was a fake. Whatever. Didn't matter.
I was going back to the damned dragon, and then I was getting April out, and everything and everyone else could go screw themselves.
One good thing: For now at least, I was done being scared.
”
”
K.A. Applegate
“
Individuals who wear fake (counterfeit) branded sunglasses cheat more often across a number of different tasks.
”
”
Jeffrey Pfeffer (Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time)
“
Without sense of purpose and clear direction of your life, you will only be building a fake brand of you
”
”
Bernard Kelvin Clive (The No Nonsense Guide to Personal Branding for Career Success)
“
A study of advertising found that the average person in Shanghai saw three times as many advertisements in a typical day as a consumer in London. The market was flooded with new brands seeking to distinguish themselves, and Chinese consumers were relatively comfortable with bold efforts to get their attention. Ads were so abundant that fashion magazines ran up against physical constraints: editors of the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan once had to split an issue into two volumes because a single magazine was too thick to handle. My cell phone was barraged by spam offering a vast range of consumption choices. “Attention aspiring horseback riders,” read a message from Beijing’s “largest indoor equestrian arena.” In a single morning, I received word of a “giant hundred-year-old building made with English craftsmanship” and a “palace-level baroque villa with fifty-four thousand square meters of private gardens.” Most of the messages sold counterfeit receipts to help people file false expense reports. I liked to imagine the archetypal Chinese man of the moment, waking each morning in a giant English building and mounting his horse to cross his private garden, on the way to buy some fake receipts.
”
”
Evan Osnos (Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China)
“
FLATOW: So you would - how would you treat a patient like Sybil if she showed up in your office
BRAND: Well, first I would start with a very thorough assessment, using the current standardized measures that we have available to us that assess for the range of dissociative disorders but the whole range of other psychological disorders, too. I would need to know what I'm working with, and I'd be very careful and make my decisions slowly, based on data about what she has. And furthermore, with therapists who are well-trained in dissociative disorders, we do keep an eye open for suggestibility. But that research, too, is not anywhere near as strong as what the other two people in the interview are suggesting.It shows - for example, there's eight studies that have a total of 11 samples. In the three clinical samples that have looked at the correlation between dissociation and suggestibility, all three clinical samples found non-significant correlations. So it's just not as strong as what people think. That's a myth that's not backed up by science."
Exploring Multiple Personalities In 'Sybil Exposed' October 21, 2011 by Ira Flatow
”
”
Bethany L. Brand
“
People worry that AI has surpassed humans, but we doubt AI will claim this award anytime soon. One might think that the TED brand of bullshit is just a cocktail of sound-bite science, management-speak, and techno-optimism. But it's not so easy. You have to stir these elements together just right, and you have to sound like you believe them. For the foreseeable future, computers won't be able to make the grade.
”
”
Carl T. Bergstrom (Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World)
“
In an experiment, those who wore fake branded sunglasses as opposed to the real McCoy were more likely to cheat on a test and also judged others’ behavior as more unethical. “A product’s lack of authenticity may cause its owners to feel less authentic themselves,” the study’s authors wrote, “despite their belief that the product will actually have positive benefits . . . these feelings then cause them to behave dishonestly and to view other people’s behavior as more dishonest as well. In short, we suspect that feeling like a fraud makes people more likely to commit fraud.
”
”
Véronique Hyland (Dress Code: Unlocking Fashion from the New Look to Millennial Pink)
“
The other valuable X factor that AIMEE measures, by automatically browsing buyer reviews, is what customers are saying about existing products. Accurate reviews are a constant challenge for Amazon, as some sellers, especially Chinese companies, try to skew results by generating fake five-star reviews. But AIMEE focuses more on bad reviews. If shoppers complain about the quality, or don’t like the features, or even express an interest in different colors or sizes, that presents a potential opportunity for a new brand. “We use natural language processing to parse through thousands of reviews to identify any pain points customers have,” Sarig explains.
”
”
Lawrence Ingrassia (Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy)
“
Fake escapes lead to brand new prison cells
and real ones to old freedoms.
People who escape reality
fall hard onto those weaknesses of theirs
which imprisoned them in it.
”
”
Angelos Michalopoulos
“
The world says, “Push to the front of the line!” Jesus says, “Go to the back of the line.” The world says, “Brand yourself and blast your accomplishments all over social media!” Jesus says, “If you want to be great you have to first learn to serve.
”
”
Lisa Harper (Life: An Obsessively Grateful, Undone by Jesus, Genuinely Happy, and Not Faking it Through the Hard Stuff Kind of 100-Day Devotional)
“
Twitter was a potentially powerful platform for us, but I couldn’t get past the challenges that would come with it. The challenges and controversies were almost too much to list, but they included how to manage hate speech, and making fraught decisions regarding freedom of speech, what to do about fake accounts algorithmically spewing out political “messaging” to influence elections, and the general rage and lack of civility that was sometimes evident on the platform. Those would become our problems. They were so unlike any we’d encountered, and I felt they would be corrosive to the Disney brand. On the Sunday after the board had just given me the go-ahead to pursue the acquisition of Twitter, I sent a note to all of the members telling them I had “cold feet,” and explaining my reasoning for withdrawing. Then I called Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, who was also a member of the Disney board. Jack was stunned, but very polite. I wished Jack luck, and I hung up feeling relieved.
”
”
Robert Iger (The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company)
“
Frustrated with accusations that InfoWars was a Russian hashtag generator, Alex Jones posted a photo of his Russian business visa and tweeted mockingly, “Looking forward to Putin giving me the new hashtags to use against Hillary and the dems…”34 Little did he know he was revealing something not far from the truth. Jones had been a highly reliable source of fake news for the Russian propaganda warfare structure and his conspiracy theories were hashtagged like crazy by the RF-IRA. His nutty commentary is widely admired by some of Russia’s leading politicians, and thanks to his own tweet he revealed he had been issued a long-term business visa to keep his special brand of conspiracy mongering alive.
”
”
Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West)
“
Advertisers loved her, brands were eager to work with her. She was entirely real and that was hard to come by online. Where the whole world looked fake, she wasn’t.
”
”
Melissa de la Cruz (Going Dark)
“
Little by little, as the team members stitched together small pieces of information, they stumbled into Ranbaxy’s secret: the company manipulated almost every aspect of its manufacturing process to quickly produce impressive-looking data that would bolster its bottom line. Each member of Thakur’s team came back with similar examples. At the behest of managers, the company’s scientists substituted lower-purity ingredients for higher ones to reduce costs. They altered test parameters so that formulations with higher impurities could be approved. They faked dissolution studies. To generate optimal results, they crushed up brand-name drugs into capsules so that they could be tested in lieu of the company’s own drugs. They superimposed brand-name test results onto their own in applications. For some markets, the company fraudulently mixed and matched data streams, taking its best data from manufacturing in one market and presenting it to regulators elsewhere as data unique to the drugs in their markets. For other markets, the company simply invented data. Document forgery was pervasive. The company even forged its own standard operating procedures, which FDA investigators rely on to assess whether a company is following its own policies. In one instance, employees backdated documents and then artificially aged them in a steamy room overnight in an attempt to fool regulators during inspections.
”
”
Katherine Eban (Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom)
“
Their primary customers are upper-income women between thirty and fifty years sold.
The average markup on a handbag is ten to twelve times production cost.
Perfume has, for more than seventy years, served as an introduction to a luxury brand.
The message was clear: buy our brand and you too, will live a luxury life.
The contradiction between personal indulgence and conspicuous consumption is the crux of the luxury business today: the convergence of its history with its current reality.
Today, luxury brand items are collected like baseball cards, displayed like artwork, brandished like iconography.
The tycoons have shifted the focus from what the product is to what is represents.
Perfume has a mystical, magical quality. It catches your attention, enchants you. It complements and enhances your personality. it stirs emotion, within you and others around you. Perfume was a link between gods and mortals. It was a way to contact the gods, Hermes's Jean-Claude Ellena told me. Now it is a profane link: it's between you and me.
Contentment is natural wealth. Luxury is artificial poverty. Socrates
More than anything else today, the handbag tells the story of a woman: her reality, her dreams.
Oscar Wilde said elegance is power.
If it would abolish avarice, you must abolish its mother, luxury. Cicero
People don't believe there is a difference between real and fake anymore. Bernard Arnault's marketing plan had worked: consumers don't buy luxury branded items for what they are, but for what they represent.
Luxury is the ease of a T-shirt in a very expensive dress. If you don't have it, you are not a person used to luxury. You are just a rich person who can buy staff. Karl Lagerfeld
Luxury is exclusivity, it is made for you and no one else has it. At a minimum, it must be impeccable. Maximum, unique.
If you do luxury, Louboutin explained, you have to treat people in a human way and you have to be elegant. You can't ask poor people in bad conditions to make beautiful things.
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Dana Thomas (Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster)
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FINALLY—YOU ARE A SWEEPSTAKES WINNER!
I don’t know about you, but I enter all those darned magazine company sweepstakes. I go for the Reader’s Digest sweepstakes and I buy my weekly lottery tickets—after all, as a character in the movie Let It Ride said, “You could be walking around lucky and not know it.” In a lot of years, though, I have gone winless. The guys with the balloons and the giant-sized check have not shown up at my door. So the headline FINALLY—YOU ARE A SWEEPSTAKES WINNER! got me. I read that letter. And if you send a letter to every one of your customers with that headline on it, every one of them will read it. What should the letter say? Here’s an example, courtesy of the late, great copywriter, my friend Gary Halbert: Dear Valued Customer:
I am writing to tell you that your name was entered into a drawing here at my store and you have won a valuable prize.
As you know, my store, ABC Jewelry, specializes in low-cost, top-quality diamond rings and diamond earrings. Well, guess what? The other day we got in a small shipment of fake diamonds that are made with a new process that makes them look so real they almost fooled me!
Anyway, I don’t want to sell these fakes because they could cause a lot of trouble for the pawnbrokers around town. So I’ve decided to give them away to some of my good customers whose names were selected at random by having my wife, Janet, put all the names in a jar and pull out the winners.
So, you’re one of the winners—and all you’ve got to do is drop in sometime before 5:00 P.M. Friday and you’ll have a 1-karat “diamond” that looks so good it’ll knock your eyes out! Sincerely,
John Jones P.S.: After 5:00 P.M. Friday, I reserve the right to give your prize to someone else. Thank you.
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Dan S. Kennedy (The Ultimate Marketing Plan: Target Your Audience! Get Out Your Message! Build Your Brand!)
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They used my name and permit to grow the weed and earn money to repay their debts and compensate their investors. To keep my girlfriend. To take her.
I am uncertain if any of them have ever spent a minute in jail for any of these activities.
Adam proudly showcases his new motorcycles on Instagram, posing on a hill above Barcelona. He also displays his brand new electric camper van, which they use to travel and transport drugs across Europe and Iberia, as well as his gigantic marijuana cultivation located in Portugal. People like Ruan and Martina admire his public images.
I came across a picture of Ruan and Martina together in Berlin, where their mother Fernanda visited them.
Martina became member of the Evil Eye Cult, and the custom made mafia group in Spain, which used her as a pawn in their porn and drug-related activities. She now operates as their representative in Berlin.
Martina and I have lost the ability to genuinely smile. Her social media posts only show disinterest or a malicious demeanor. ‘A boot stomping on a human face.’
In a picture with her brother and mother, she puts on a forced fake “good vibe” and “happy” smile, revealing her flawless teeth and the subtle lines of aging. With each passing day, she bears a greater resemblance to her rich and so happy mother, the bad person.
As far as I know, none of these individuals have faced consequences for their actions, such as having their teeth broken. As I had. Innocently. Taking care of business and their lives. With love.
I find this to be incredibly unjust. In the 21st century. In Europe. On planet Earth.
By non-EU criminals. “Matando – ganando” – “killing and gaining” like there were no Laws at all.
Nowadays, you can observe Sabrina flaunting her fake lips and altered face, just like Martina her enhanced breasts.
Guess who was paying for it?
It seems that both girls now sustain themselves through their bodies and drug involvement, to this day, influencing criminals to gain friends in harming Tomas and having a lavish lifestyle filled with fun and mischief. Making a living. Enjoying Spain. Enjoying Life. My money. My tears.
This is the situation as it stands.
I was wondering what Salvador Dali was trying to tell me. I stood in front of the Lincoln portrait for a long time, but I couldn't grasp the point or the moral behind it.
I can listen to Abraham Lincoln and ‘trust people. To see. If I can trust them.’
But he ultimately suffered a tragic fate, with his life being taken. (Got his head popped.)
I believe there may have also been a female or two involved in that situation, too, possibly leading to his guards being let down.
While he was watching: Acting performances, he was facing a: Stage.
Theater.
It is disheartening, considering he was a good person. Like Jesus, John Lennon and so on.
Shows a pattern Machiavelli was talking about.
Some individuals are too bright for those in darkness; they feel compelled to suppress those brighter minds simply because they think and act differently. Popping their heads.
Reptilian lower brain-based culture, the concept of the Evil Eye, Homo erectus. He couldn't even stand up properly when I was shouting at him, urging him to stand up from the stairs. ‘Homo seditus reptilis.’
But what else was there in the Lincoln image that I didn't see? What was Dali trying to convey or express or tell me?
Besides the fact that the woman is in his mind, on his mind, in the image, exactly, his head got popped open. Perhaps because he was focusing on a woman, trusting her for a split second, or turning his head away for a moment.
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Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
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Scotch Whisky Single Malt: This Scotch can only contain malted barley and water, must be the product of one distillery and aged in wood for at least three years. However, single malts can contain a mix of different distillations, casks, and years. This allows brands like a twelve-year-old Glenlivet to maintain consistency and always taste the same, no matter when it’s bottled. Single Grain: Like single malt, this Scotch is a product of one distillery but can be made from other grains and/or unmalted barley. It is used mainly for blending and rarely sold on its own, though it is becoming more popular as whisky connoisseurship increases. Blended Malt: This style, consisting of a mix of single malts from different distilleries, is not common. Blended Grain: This style uses a mix of single grains from different distilleries and is also not common. Blended Scotch: The most popular style in the world, including nondistillery names such as Johnnie Walker (red, black, and blue), Chivas Regal, Dewar’s, Ballantine’s, Cutty Sark, and so on. These are blends of single malts and grain whiskies from different distilleries, sometimes dozens. Vintage Year: While there are really no “vintages” in the sense of better or worse harvests, as with wine, bottles with a year on the label can only contain whiskies made in that year. This will usually taste different from the same distillery’s standard single malt—different but not necessarily better or as good.
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Larry Olmsted (Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do About It)
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Of course you can train with Brand, I said. “The real moves? Not the fake Companion moves he pretends to teach me?” “Technically, those are still self-defense moves, he just flowers up the terminology to make eye gouging and nut kicking sound pretty.
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K.D. Edwards (The Hanged Man (The Tarot Sequence, #2))
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I could see that Angela had her headphones on and was watching what looked to be old episodes of Sex and the City, which felt very on-brand.
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Keira Andrews (The Christmas Leap (Festive Fakes, #2))
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I heard you were in a fight,” I speak.
His eyes snap up to look at mine before they go to Haidyn. “Saint…I didn’t…”
“Hit my wife?” I arch a brow, and he swallows. “I guess the footage I saw of you and her in the elevator must have been fake as well?” I look at Haidyn who snorts.
“I…uh, no…I didn’t—” he rambles unable to lie but refusing to tell me the truth.
“Threaten to rape and kill her.” I finish for him. Not caring what else he has to say, I push off the counter and step forward, and he starts screaming, trying to pull away, but he’s not going anywhere.
Devin pushes the cart over to Emerson and removes the syringe as Emerson begins to scream. He knows what’s coming. He’s been through it before. It’s routine for brandings. But this one will be a little different. The Spade brothers pride themselves on being creative. It’s not as if there is a rule book on how to torture and kill people. But if there ever was, we would be the ones to write it.
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Shantel Tessier (Carnage (L.O.R.D.S., #5))
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Your unconscious mind runs the show when it comes to most of your daily actions, but it can’t tell the difference between a real memory and a fake memory. This means it’s easy for you to implant your own goals into your brain and trick them into thinking they’re already a reality.
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Jen Gottlieb (BE SEEN: Find Your Voice. Build Your Brand. Live Your Dream.)
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The fake rocks looked like real rocks but weighed less; not only that, they absorbed water during periods of humidity and released it in times of drought, so they acted like natural lawn regulators. Rockulators, was the brand name.
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Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1))
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Brooklyn-born Grimaldi’s is one of New York’s most popular and iconic pizzerias, and there is usually a long line out the door at the flagship. It is famous for using coal-fired ovens, not typical for New York – style pizza, giving it a distinctive taste. Grimaldi’s has parlayed its successful original into a brand name known for both a particular style of pizza and excellence making it, and it has grown into a national chain, with nearly fifty restaurants in a dozen states. It’s not quite a McDonald’s or Chipotle in scope, but it is a significant food undertaking,
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Larry Olmsted (Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do About It)
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Perception is assumed to be reality until clients encounter the reality of the brand, don’t fake it
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Bernard Kelvin Clive
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Until you have a purpose and clear direction of your life (business) you would only be building a fake brand
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Bernard Kelvin Clive
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Tests by Bloomberg showed that Kraft Parmesan contained almost 4 percent cellulose, a plant-derived polymer mainly used to make paper and paperboard. Other brands had cellulose content as high as 7.8 percent.
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Larry Olmsted (Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do About It)
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In reality, as I argue throughout this book, violent, racist, and sexist behaviour is something that we brought online with us. It is just another place where we have extended the toxic racist and sexist fantasies that we have deployed everywhere else. The internet doesn't make us asshole. We simply imported our usual brand of assholery onto the internet.
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Megan Condis (Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture (Fandom & Culture))
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The most reliable pork and chicken label is “USDA Organic” (used mainly for meat and much different from the FDA’s version of organic), which requires a 100 percent organic diet, no antibiotics (ever), and bans feed made with synthetic pesticides. For poultry shoppers, Smart Chicken is a national brand owned by Tecumseh Poultry, founded in 1998 to fill the void in the quality chicken market. It comes in organic and regular versions, both of which are completely antibiotic and animal by-product free, using a 100 percent vegetarian or 100 percent organic vegetarian diet. I buy Smart Chicken regularly. For pork, the Niman Ranch brand is antibiotic free with a 100 percent vegetarian diet.
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Larry Olmsted (Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do About It)
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Without sense of purpose and clear direction of your life, you will only be building a fake brand of you
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Bernard Kelvin Clive (The No Nonsense Guide to Personal Branding for Career Success)
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As I fished for my keys, Brand said, a little hesitantly, "That woman. The fake seer. She didn't bother you too much with what she said, right?"
"Nah," I mumbled.
He watched my face closely. "'Nah'?"
I gave him a little smile and bumped his shoulder.
"Don't smile at me," Brand said. "You're still a dumb-ass.
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K.D. Edwards (The Last Sun (The Tarot Sequence, #1))
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How do you want the world to see you professionally? What kinds of work do you enjoy doing? Why are you on LinkedIn? Those are the questions you should think about when creating your LinkedIn profile, so it’s aligned with your personal brand. While marketing-speak like 'personal brand' feels fake to many of us, we’re really just talking about setting the right tone for your profile and positioning yourself for the kinds of opportunities you’re interested in.
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Melanie Pinola (LinkedIn In 30 Minutes: How to create a rock-solid LinkedIn profile and build connections that matter)
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The brand-new tattoo on his ring finger was still red around the edges. Ty couldn’t take his eyes off it. Zane had worn a gold one in the past, and they’d both had silver even if it had been fake. Ty had also lost or utterly destroyed two engagement rings, so Zane had refused to buy him a wedding ring, knowing it would just get crushed, cut off, or cost Ty his finger. The only solution, Zane had decided, was to tattoo it on. Right
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Abigail Roux (Crash & Burn (Cut & Run, #9))
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David Bowie faked his own death live onstage then went into hiding.
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Justin Bieber (#FORGIVE ME: Justin's Brand New Diary)
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Traditional rock music favors a working-class body with callused hands and a whisky-rough voice, and by denying this particular brand of physicality the body of electronic music was easily heard as lazy, weak, undisciplined, and effete. The criticism in the 1980s and 1990s that electronic musicians were fake or talentless, then, is a response to a perceived threat against a specific bodily identity as encoded in sound—an identity within a narrow range of class, gender, sexual orientation, and race. As
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S. Alexander Reed (Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music)
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Stewart Brand: It had great continuity and those people stayed in touch online for decades and all that. But it ossified… Fabrice Florin: And a lot of the intellectuals that were sharing ideas on The Well went on to branch out into different areas. But you can really trace back a lot of the origins of this new movement to The Well. A lot of the folks were there. Howard Rheingold: I remember I got a friend request on Facebook early from Steve Case and I said, “I know who you are. But why do you want to friend me?” And he said, “Oh, I lurked on The Well from the beginning.” So I think, yes, it did influence things. Larry Brilliant: Steve Jobs was on it—Steve had a fake name and he lurked. Howard Rheingold: Steve Jobs, Steve Case, Craig Newmark: They would all say that they were informed by their experiences on The Well. Fabrice Florin: The Well was the birthplace of the online community. Larry Brilliant: All that goes back to Steve giving me the computer, letting me use it in Nepal, the experience I had with his software to access the satellite, and then coming back and Steve seeing what Seva-Talk could be. We showed it to hundreds of people and nobody saw anything in it. Steve got it immediately. Fabrice Florin: And Stewart basically gave the technology a set of values and ethics that all the developers could share. They already had their own hacker ethic, but he helped to amplify it and bring people together. And then it became big business, and it was hard for intellectuals to be the primary driving force anymore. It became the businesspeople who started driving it. Which is understandable given the scale and scope of what happened. It just became too large for intellectuals to hold.
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Adam Fisher (Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom))
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If the pursuit of happiness pulls us all back into childishness, then fake freedom conspires to keep us there. Because freedom is not having more brands of cereal to choose from, or more beach vacations to take selfies on, or more satellite channels to fall asleep to. That is variety. And in a vacuum, variety is meaningless. If you are trapped by insecurity, stymied by doubt, and hamstrung by intolerance, you can have all the variety in the world. But you are not free. Real Freedom
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Mark Manson (Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope)
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In the same year, it was estimated that around 31 per cent of these phishing attacks targeted financial institutions, with just 25 distinct international banking organizations accounting for almost 60 per cent of banking phishing attacks. Over 22 per cent of all attacks were found to make use of fake banking websites (Kaspersky Lab, 2014).
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David N Barnett (Brand Protection in the Online World: A Comprehensive Guide (Koga02 13 06 2019))
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One of the most important – and sudden – changes in politics for several decades has been the move from a world of information scarcity to one of overload. Available information is now far beyond the ability of even the most ordered brain to categorise into any organising principle, sense or hierarchy. We live in an era of fragmentation, with overwhelming information options.
The basics of what this is doing to politics is now fairly well-trodden stuff: the splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their sources in ways that play to their pre-existing biases.5 Faced with infinite connection, we find the like-minded people and ideas, and huddle together. Brand new phrases have entered the lexicon to describe all this: filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. It’s no coincidence that ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in 2016.
At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump. In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.*
What’s happening to political identity as a result of the internet is far more profound than this vote or that one. It transcends political parties and is more significant than echo chambers or fake news. Digital communication is changing the very nature of how we engage with political ideas and how we understand ourselves as political actors.
Just as Netflix and YouTube replaced traditional mass-audience television with an increasingly personalised choice, so total connection and information overload offers up an infinite array of possible political options. The result is a fragmentation of singular, stable identities – like membership of a political party – and its replacement by ever-smaller units of like-minded people.
Online, anyone can find any type of community they wish (or invent their own), and with it, thousands of like-minded people with whom they can mobilise. Anyone who is upset can now automatically, sometimes algorithmically, find other people that are similarly upset. Sociologists call this ‘homophily’, political theorists call it ‘identity politics’ and common wisdom says ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I’m calling it re-tribalisation. There is a very natural and well-documented tendency for humans to flock together – but the key thing is that the more possible connections, the greater the opportunities to cluster with ever more refined and precise groups. Recent political tribes include Corbyn-linked Momentum, Black Lives Matter, the alt-right, the EDL, Antifa, radical veganism and #feelthebern. I am not suggesting these groups are morally equivalent, that they don’t have a point or that they are incapable of thoughtful debate – simply that they are tribal.
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Jamie Bartlett (The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (and How We Save It))
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Every step of ours holds the power to influence the world we live in. And by influencing the world I don't mean creating some online profile and posting some trending pictures and photographs in an effort to build a monetizable “influencer” image. A person can have a million followers on instagram by posting fake beauty or fashion content, but this only coaxes a bunch of possession-obsessed humans to buy more things than they need, it doesn't have any impact whatsoever on human progress in the long run – in short, the thing you call today influencing in the world of social media, is actually no influencing.
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Abhijit Naskar (Mission Reality)
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He and the real estate mogul Donald Trump were supposed to develop a show based on the board game Monopoly, a project that was a model of corporate synergy, uniting three brands—a high-end documentarian, a fake tycoon, and a game that celebrated capitalism.
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Emily Nussbaum (Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV)