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2e126cd
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People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.
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stupidity
truth
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Max Barry |
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cc0c707
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every story written is marks upon a page The same marks, repeated, only differently arranged
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Max Barry |
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54dede2
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She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn't mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.
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argumentation
openness
power
persuasion
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Max Barry |
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f67b6fe
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There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.
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Max Barry |
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0e175f4
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I just read them for fun." "Dictionaries?" "Yes." "That doesn't sound like fun. That sounds awful." "Awful used to mean 'full of awe.' The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary." He blinked. "See?" She said. "Fun."
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Max Barry |
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09231a1
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I don't think you've been in love. Not recently, anyway. I'm not sure you remember what it's like. It compromises you. It takes over your body. Like a bareword. I think love is a bareword.
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Max Barry |
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e7e88fc
|
And, hey. You. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's as creepy as hell. Thank you for seeking out stories, the kind that take place in your brain.
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Max Barry |
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cc24931
|
The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.
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persuasion
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Max Barry |
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c522223
|
I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two... But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all.
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money
love
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Max Barry |
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408a9a3
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'And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.'
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lexicon
privacy
vulnerability
intimacy
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Max Barry |
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27dd198
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Everyone's broken, one way or another.
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Max Barry |
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234997a
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That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did.
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Max Barry |
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88f9d07
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What it comes down to, you see, is that a naked body is just a naked body. But the of a naked body is something special.
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Max Barry |
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39b98fc
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Elizabeth is smart, ruthless, and emotionally damaged ... [i]f Elizabeth's brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye.
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Max Barry |
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f688d45
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All empires fall, eventually." "But why? It's not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.["]"
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empires
power
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Max Barry |
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26ad815
|
To people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below.
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Max Barry |
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0a6bc99
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You might be an intelligent person, but once you let someone else filter the world for you, you have no way to critically analyze what you're hearing. At best, absolute best case scenario, if they blatantly contradict themselves, you can spot that. But if they take basic care to maintain an internal logical consistency, which they all do, you've got nothing. You've delegated the ability to make up your mind.
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Max Barry |
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396549c
|
You come to work every day but you hardly get to know anyone. I don't even know the names of half the people I see in the elevators. They say the company is a big family, but I don't know them. And even the people I do, like you two, and Elizabeth, and Roger - do I really? I mean, I like you guys, but we only ever talk about work. When I'm out with friends, or at home, I never talk about work. The other day, I tried to explain to my sister ..
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work
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Max Barry |
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37d420a
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Stop believing what you want to believe. It's unbecoming
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Max Barry |
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d90ea88
|
It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.
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truth
speaking
language
talking
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Max Barry |
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3d042eb
|
The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.
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Max Barry |
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3a17cd6
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Monday morning and there's one less donut than there should be. Keen observers note the reduced mass straightaway but stay silent, because saying, 'Hey, is that only six donuts?' would betray their donut experience. It's not great for your career to be known as the person who can spot the difference between six and seven donuts at a glance.
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Max Barry |
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3d54081
|
Words aren't just sounds or shapes. They're meaning. That's what language is: a protocol for transferring meaning. When you learn English, you train your brain to react in a particular way to particular sounds. As it turns out, the protocol can be hacked.
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Max Barry |
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8039ab5
|
Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies. I don't understand these things.
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redundancy
jobs
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Max Barry |
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c17c04f
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Your site isn't static. It's dynamically generated. Do you know what that means ?" "No." "It means the site looks different to different people. Let's say you chose the poll option that said you're in favor of tax cuts. Well there's a cookie on your machine now, and when you look at the site again, the articles are about how the government is wasting your money. The site is dynamically selecting content based on what you want. I mean, not w..
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Max Barry |
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181884f
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She didn't really enjoy reading but she liked how the books were clues. Each one a piece in a puzzle. Even when they didn't fit together, they revealed a little more about what kind of picture she was making.
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reading
lexicon
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Max Barry |
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2476474
|
He kissed her, because fuck it, he was probably about to die.
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Max Barry |
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4ba9405
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Fifteen years ago, this would have been insider trading, but that quaint concept had disappeared a decade or two ago when so many brokers were doing it that it was impossible to jail them all. Now it was called smart trading.
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stock-market
satire
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Max Barry |
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4799fed
|
I love you,' she said. She nestled closer, her hand moving up the back of his neck. The wind lifted. 'Don't kill me,' he said. 'I'm not going to,' she said.
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Max Barry |
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6354815
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Attention words. A single word wasn't enough. Not even for a particular segment. The brain had defenses, filters evolved over millions of years to protect against manipulation. The first was perception, the process of funneling an ocean of sensory input down to a few key data packages worthy of study by the cerebral cortex. When data got by the perception filter, it received attention. And she saw now that it must be like that all the way d..
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Max Barry |
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43f45f5
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Companies were getting a lot tougher on labor contracts these days; Hack had heard stories. At Adidas, if you quit your job and your replacement wasn't as competent, they sued you for lost profits.
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Max Barry |
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0cf3d05
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Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even if the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel.
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Max Barry |
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a6c030f
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He'd basically fallen in love with her on the spot. Well, no, that wasn't accurate; that implied a binary state, a shifting from not-love to love, remaining static thereafter, and what he'd done with Bronte was fall and fall, increasingly faster the closer they drew, like planets drawn to each other's gravitational force. Doomed, he guessed, the same way.
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love
lexicon
eliot
|
Max Barry |
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64ad084
|
There are stories -- legends, really -- of the "steady job." Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job was for life, not just for the business cycle. ... The graduates snicker. A steady job! They've never heard of such a thing."
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jobs
unemployment
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Max Barry |
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7ebc6f4
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I guess it's always uncomfortable to discover you're not as individual as you thought. But it really bothered me. From one perspective, I was an independent animal, exercising free will in order to elicit predictable reactions from an inert vending machine. But from another, the vending machine was choosing to withhold snacks in order to extract predictable, mechanical reactions from young men. I couldn't figure out any objective reason to ..
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Max Barry |
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dea86e0
|
Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell.
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gratitude
reading
thanks
readers
librarians
|
Max Barry |
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100fee4
|
In the sciences, looking good was usually a negative. It implied you wasted time on outdoor activities instead of building something useful. Even using hair product or makeup implied misguided priorities. Like you thought how things looked mattered, instead of how they worked. We liked to look at attractive people. We expected it of our movie stars and TV characters. But we did not respect it. We knew physical attractiveness was inversely c..
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Max Barry |
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52f704b
|
S]he was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat.
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murder
knives
|
Max Barry |
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269de9e
|
Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people's brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.
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words
persuade
hustling
persuasion
|
Max Barry |
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6acf7b5
|
Every story written is marks upon a page The same marks, repeated, only differently arranged
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Max Barry |
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16581e0
|
I'm Australian; I know how to use a shotgun!
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australians
|
Max Barry |
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ddaf99b
|
This all seemed quaint and amusing, but as the book moved through to the modern day, nothing changed. People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality type--their true name, basically--and the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual. But no one thought of this as magic. It was just falling for ..
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Max Barry |
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e089b3b
|
I usually like to interact with people who don't speak until it's necessary but I was intimidated by Carl's physique. I didn't feel inferior so much as incompatible. Carl existed on a plane where success was measured by physical feats. He had a brain because his body needed it, rather than the opposite. I didn't understand such people. I didn't know what they wanted, or might do.
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brain
muscle
|
Max Barry |
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d7bace5
|
Body parts telegraphed complaints from faraway places.
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Max Barry |