Hype
Gabrielle Bluestone
Conclusion
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There had always been pressure to overshare and keep up with appearances on sites like Facebook, but it took the ubiquity and ease of the Instagram app to turn sharing a photo of your lunch into a monetizable activity. Filled with people pretending to be brands and brands pretending to be people, social media, now easily accessible by smartphone, had become by the mid-2010s a showcase in performative signaling.
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"Over time, I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million—a paltry sum by the standards of his supermoneyed peers—as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later," he wrote.
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Like Trump, Ross stood accused of routinely stealing from the little guys, and not because he couldn't afford to pay them, as well as the big guys, even though he was making plenty of his own money. To many around him, Ross was just lying for the sake of it, which the people accusing him were careful to distinguish as well beyond the pale of the more socially acceptable types of fraudulent behavior in his industry. "Everybody does some cheating, everybody does some lying. Not everybody steals from their employees," a former colleague told Forbes.
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After filling one night of reservations, The Shed at Dulwich shut down forever. But the new rise of ghost kitchens makes Butler's marketing operation look rather quaint. These commercial kitchens, which are not open to the public, are generally VC-backed, delivery-only, and might as well not exist outside of the Uber Eats and Postmates platforms. But online, they're indistinguishable from the other, real restaurant listings, which are, among other things, centered in brick-and-mortar stores and regulated by health authorities. Ghost kitchens, on the other hand, can be located anywhere, cost less money to operate since there's no front of house staff, and are often referred to as virtual brands.
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investors—they're also eating up the restaurants' profits too, not that those margins were ever that good to begin with. Still, the tech world seems determined to clean their plates. Starting in 2019, for example, Google began adding "Order Online" buttons to restaurant listings. It should have been an added convenience for everyone involved, but Google deliberately cut the restaurants out, partnering with companies like GrubHub, DoorDash, and Postmates to bypass individual, restaurant-owned delivery platforms. It's been incredibly lucrative for Google, which gets a reported 10 percent cut of orders placed through the button, and incredibly frustrating for restaurant owners, who say there's no easy way to opt out of a cut-rate service they never even signed up for. The affected restaurants can either sit back and watch up to 40 percent of their profits get eaten up in delivery platform fees or essentially stop offering takeout altogether. Even if they're still offering to-go meals, the sad truth is that they might as well not exist if they're not indexed on Google. And that's if they even can get themselves delisted—once Google assigns an "Order Now" button, it washes its hands of responsibility and directs restaurant complaints to the delivery platforms instead.
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"We're selling a pipe dream to your average losers," McFarland announced suddenly one late December evening.
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"If we hadn't succeeded so big at the beginning, we wouldn't have failed so spectacularly at the end," McFarland would moan later in a post-festival interview.
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As humans, we're deeply motivated to accept what the people around us say is true, even when it obviously isn't. We've known about this problem for a while, though that doesn't seem to have helped us resist it any. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1950s by the psychologist Solomon Asch, subjects confirmed time and time again that all it takes to convince us to think something is a sense that everyone else thinks it. In one experiment, for example, he showed subjects a series of three lines and asked them to identify the one that matched the length of a fourth line. His subjects had no problem picking out the correct line—until they were put in a room of actors who deliberately chose one of the incorrect answers. About 75 percent of the subjects chose the obviously incorrect line at least once, all thanks to peer pressure. And the pressure gets worse when the liars are our friends or people we'd like to be friends with.