Brian Sholis

- “… why are we seeing a resurgence in this trend now? I think the easiest factor we can identify is that more people entering the workforce are unafraid of textual interfaces, because they’ve been typing and messaging and tagging their friends online all their life.”

- "conscious self-branding — an exhausting obligation for many under current labor market conditions — is in tension with its underlying structure of ubiquitous surveillance: how strategically one chooses to present oneself now inescapably occurs within this unchosen context of being tracked and documented and predicted. The efforts made to avoid... See more

* "The self-honesty required here isn’t a one-time thing, it’s an ongoing process.* You may find that doing the things you once did is no longer congruent with your inner climate. This gives you, roughly, two choices—either you flow with who you’ve actually become, or you slowly descend into a hollow parody of what you once were."

* “I take extra care to prioritize extended time with friends. If you want a deep conversation, you need time. Instead of spending two or three hours with somebody, I prefer to spend two or three days with them.”

* “You imagine that you are fighting against the mob, but actually you are becoming a part of it. Within the mob there is no justice and no argument and no reasoning, no space for inquiry or investigation. The only good move is not to play.”

* “Additionally, consider how to make explicit the things that may naturally be implied in a conversation.”

- "if there is some kind of systematic, structural feature that encourages the same kind of review drift across a whole reviewing community, then we create a clearer system for companies to target. And this can happen when a whole body of reviews gets filtered through a particular portal — like Instagram or YouTube — which homogenizes the patterns... See more