Tag: Instagram

  • Brands As People, People As Brands

    Brands As People, People As Brands

    People strive to be brands creating a loss of self, and often a loss of any potential brand. Brands try to be people, in programmatic and contrived ways. Both are organic as a Twinkie asking how the fellow kids are doing.

    On a call for a long-dead startup building its empire on Google+, someone, a person, objected to being paid to appear in a commercial promoting a class they sold because of how it would impact their brand. They were a chef, not a famous one. But in July of 2011, they had quickly amassed a following of about 6,000 in under a month on the hot emerging social network that was Google+, and they believed fame was on the horizon.

  • TikTok, Drugs, Congress, and Monopoly

    TikTok, Drugs, Congress, and Monopoly

    Very few accusations are unique to TikTok. But, to the extent that members of congress know about data brokers, I assume they feel the U.S. data brokers’ selling lists of all the closeted gay people, with cancer, taking anti depressants in Kentucky are good and clean. But first party data collection by the Chinese Communist Party is bad, and dirty. The drug harm-comparison analogy here is alcohol you distilled yourself versus GHB you made in your bathtub; both being less than ideal.

  • Snake Oil Sales Dominant Social Media

    Snake Oil Sales Dominant Social Media

    Snake oil sales dominate social media to the extent that burns my eyes. Instagram booty models want me to buy a useless detox tea, and if you call out a guru selling the word salad to success, they will flag your YouTube video for copyright infringement. All while the MD’s of Twitter, are either cringing […]

  • Online Gurus Are Beyond Parody

    Online Gurus Are Beyond Parody

    I used to make videos mocking the folks you see in ads on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. selling you some form of info product. I had to stop, because, while standing in front of a U-Haul place and talking about the haters who will claim I the great, “Dutch Ovens” don’t own all these trucks, […]