The other day I got an direct message from someone on LinkedIn called Shell Redfern. I suspected she was a whore or a scam, but given that her photo resembled Cybil Shepherd and she seemed to work at the sort of company that often turns into revenue for GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I was intrigued.
I was 99.7-percent sure she was a whore or a scam, but even so, one thing or another stopped me from deleting Shell's message. I checked back in on the message just now. And over the weekend Shell transformed from a tall, willowy blonde into a tall, willowy Asian.
She's been both deleted and blocked.
What can be neither deleted nor blocked is a bigger issue. About 99.7-percent of what you see online, from connections and brands and politicians and news organs is about 99.7-percent fake.
When I get text messages from "Kelly," telling me I can make between $400 and $1200 for one hour's work and get paid at the end of each day, I quickly respond: "Are you a whore or a swindler?" That usually gets me blocked, saving me the trouble.
Even when I get a message like this from a politician I nominally respect, or at least regard as decent, I feel like responding, "Are you a whore or a swindler?"
Sorry, Adam, the moniker "Team Schiff" is so patently pandering it makes me want to throw rocks at your Senate office. I've been told I'm on a team before. But the leaders of the "team" never respond to notes you write to them. Even when you offer to help with their marketing.
Team in this parlance is a fund-raising artifice. An excuse to send you a lot of mail and a lot of requests for money. C'mon, pitch in for the team.
By the way, whenever I do give money to a cause I believe in, I use an assumed name. Teresa or Horatio.
My name has been sold so often to people I've given money to that I get hundreds of emails a week addressed to Teresa or Horatio.
In other words, I donate to what I consider a good cause, but the people running the cause are scoundrels. They're selling my data. It's not enough to take my money. They want more.
I can scarcely think of a single commercial, social post, or email I've gotten over the last few years that even dances in the neighborhood of honesty.
When there are no facts, no truth, no trust, no credibility, there are communications just the same, but there's no communication. Because nothing is believable. Therefore nothing has any value.
I remember when I worked at R\GA. It was stretched across four grimy buildings on one of the grimiest blocks in New York. Between cheap hotels, cheap massage parlors and the garages hotdog carts would park in for the evening, after draining theor hotdog water onto the sidewalk. Someone decided it was ok to call that disconnected assortment of crumbling buildings a "campus."
That's something like calling a puddle on the Van Wyck a Great Lake.
I'm not one-hundred percent sure how blandishments and hyperbole can be addressed on a macro level. When I write ads for myself, I avoid using adjectives and bombast. I use facts and I include citations where I can.
I wonder what would happen if the CEOs of brands--the guys making the big money, or at least, privately held brands wrote something like this.
I'm tired of being lied to at every turn. And worse being treated like I'm too stupid to know I'm being lied to.
