"Emotions are becoming commercialized. In the future, consumers will no longer buy products but rather lifestyles and the stories, experiences, and emotions that products convey."
— Grant Leach, managing director of The Revo Group advertising agency, 2001.

If you lie at the base of a tree and look up, it look like a road into the sky.

Direct vs. Representative Democracy

          "Everywhere people are faced with a situation in which it doesn't matter anymore who they vote for, because the economic policies will be the same as long as our so-called "democratic" structures remain the same. 

          Occupy signifies a political impasse at which we all stand whether we know it or not―an historical moment that is defined by the inability of existing democratic structures to fulfil the democratic values we have come to expect: equality, the ability to meet our most basic needs, and a way to have a political voice in determining the most important decisions that affect our lives."

— Marianne Maeckelbergh

     "Horizontal Decision-Making across Time and Place."
     In Hot Sports — Occupy, Anthropology, and the 2011 Global Uprisings. 

"In The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon describes the poverty of an Indian city. Frustrated, he points out that many of the people who could barely feed themselves owned televisions, which they took great pride in. He might not have understood this need, but anyone who has grown up with the box as a third parent knows that television infuses us with a certain value, a kind of individual cachet. 
"When you are watching TV, it is as if the entertainment is just for you. You become special, targeted, a person. TV is a way to escape the burden of say — poverty. Not necessarily because its entertainment value is so great, but because it (1) regularly features the lives of ostensibly normal people, (2) offers the illusion of choice, (3) is 'free' and constant, meaning that you can never be denied — you are entertained when you say you are ready to be entertained, and (4) permits you a connection to the world of celebrities, products, and the good life, no matter how poor or distanced from the nexus of power you may be."
-Hal Niedzviecki
p.80-1, Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity. Penguin, 2004.

"How much of your living space is specifically arranged to make it easy for you to interact with devices that allow you to engage with pop-culture, to compose your personal spectacle? ... The message to turn your life into a success story is everywhere, beamed directly into our brains. The issue is not mind control (exactly). We want this stuff. We crave it. We seek it out. Whether on film or TV or in song, the tale of the little guy making good is one that we simply can't get enough of... The majority of us don't want to destroy the system, challenge the mass-market capitalism that degrades culture, and expose celebrity worship as a fraud. To the contrary — we uphold the system; we live for the system. ... Increasingly, the relationship is one of unrequited desire: We want in."[Hence the proliferation of self-publishing of all kinds – blogs, 'vanity CDs,' books, websites, youtube videos, 'backyard wrestling league broadcasts,'  etc., etc. ]
-p.72 & 77 from the same

Dating defined

Like shopping, only for people. (Consumerism is for everything).

Marriage defined

What you do with love when you want to kill it.

Sshhh...

"The most simple reality, God, is the one which humanity has striven hardest to complicate."
- Pierre Lacout, Dieu est Silence 

"To me, Lacout's central thought is simply this: speech divides, silence unites."
-Erika Koenig-Sheridan
 
"True silence is the rest of the mind; and is to the spirit, what sleep is to the body — nourishment and refreshment."
- William Penn