Life Inc.

For his first client, Dichter took on Betty Crocker. The new instant cake mixes were failing, but why? Dichter’s free-association sessions with housewives revealed that the product’s image of ease and convenience made these women felt guilty—as if they weren’t really providing for their families, or being adequate mothers. So Dichter suggested that

The woman taking Km tonic or wearing magnetic jewelry passes it on to others more as a way of confirming her own belief in its efficacy than to help her friends. But it’s a win-win, because the friends will be helped, too. A win-win-win, in fact, because she’ll get to keep some of the profit as she passes the proceeds up to her supplier.

The more we are asked to adapt to the biases of our machinery, the less human we become.

An ad ridicules a grandmother for daring to knit Christmas presents for her family and shows just how disappointed they will be by her pathetically homemade gifts. Is she that stupid—or just that cheap? Doesn’t she know there’s a dotcom merchant who lists the presents they already want? Ones labeled with real brand names that people know? Cagier ma

Commerce is good. It’s the way people create and exchange value.

Instead of just giving existing fringe groups the imagery and anonymity they need to reinforce their secret cynicism, these networks can also connect those looking to reinforce their sense of hope and connection to others. We can share new models that work, collaborate with like-minded members of other communities, and build decentralized constitue

Bush, FDR’s former war advisor, wrote of a hypothetical computer or “Memex” machine he intended as an extension of human memory.

re-create some value ourselves. Instead of fixing the problem, and reclaiming our ability to generate wealth directly with one another, we seek to prop up institutions whose very purpose remains to usurp this ability from us. We try to repair our economy by bolstering the same institutions that sapped it. In the very best years, corporatism worked

How does one grow in an ecology defined more by brands and corporations than by whatever it may have once meant to be human? Become a brand and a corporation oneself.