Alex Jupiter

“A few months later, Procter & Gamble tried something similar. Its CEO, A. G. Lafley, had begun talking about the need for P&G to get closer to its consumers. After reading about this, Facebook ad salesman Colleran did one of his masterful cold calls to find out if P&G was targeting any of its brands at the college market. It turned out that while P&G’s Crest White Strips teeth-whitening product had never been aimed specifically at college students, company data showed that the strips sold particularly well at Wal-Marts located near campuses. Colleran and P&G marketers came up with a Facebook campaign called Smile State. Much as Chase and Apple had done, P&G created a sponsored group on Facebook for Crest White Strips. It advertised the Smile State group only to users who were students at one of twenty large state universities located near Wal-Marts. Any student who joined got tickets to an upcoming college-oriented Matthew McConaughey movie called We Are Marshall. In addition, the schools that enrolled the most members in the Crest White Strips group got a concert organized by Def Jam Records. Over 20,000 people joined. To have 20,000 people explicitly expressing affinity for Crest White Strips using their real name is the kind of thing that gives marketers goose bumps. It was a huge win for P&G and for Facebook.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“Ralph Gerard, the neuroscientist, was reminded of a story. A stranger is at a party of people who know one another well. One says, “72,” and everyone laughs. Another says, “29,” and the party roars. The stranger asks what is going on. His neighbor said, “We have many jokes and we have told them so often that now we just use a number.” The guest thought he’d try it, and after a few words said, “63.” The response was feeble. “What’s the matter, isn’t this a joke?” “Oh, yes, that is one of our very best jokes, but you did not tell it well.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“Right-wing populist movements appeal to historically dominant population groups that have been left behind economically relative to their expectations: the poorly educated, those who live in rural areas, and workers who have lost jobs because of international trade.18 Arguments made by the leaders of right-wing populist movements for trade barriers and immigration restrictions fall on willing ears. But rather than explicitly appeal to class identity or distributive justice, the leaders of right-wing populist movements appeal to the ethno-nationalist creed of “blood and soil.” These groups look nostalgically back to a past when people like them enjoyed greater economic security and higher status.”
― Eric A. Posner, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

“It’s also the word Fox associates with Barack Obama, whom this generation’s door-knocking helped elect but whose administration strengthened the corporate oligarchy, waged unaccountable robot wars, and imprisoned migrant workers and heroic whistleblowers at record rates. So much for “socialism.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Anarchism