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Max Barry
107 quotes
“People talk about bedroom eyes; well, Megan has the whole suite.”
“Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of PowerPoint slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies.”
“You can say this for Senior Management: it knows how to articulate a goal. The strategy may be fuzzy, the execution nonexistent, but Senior Management knows what it wants.”
“Anyway, my plan. Last week I filed a claim for disability.” “Disability? For what?” “Stupidity.” “Stupidity!” “Think about it. If I’m born stupid, is that my fault? No, I’m just an honest, hardworking Joe, doing my stupid best. And the company can’t sack people who have a disability. It’s a fact.” “Wow. That’s clever.” “Thanks.” He smiles. “See, you just need to know how to work the company.”
“The departments don’t report the problem because a good manager knows the only reason to call Senior Management, ever, is to deliver good news. People who ring Senior Management with problems do not have much of a future at Zephyr Holdings. Senior Management is not there to hold departmental hands. It is there to dispense stock options.”
“Someone tried to tell me the other day that the only habitable place in America is California. But I just don’t understand how you could spend your life restricted to summer outfits.”
“Ninety-five percent of all jobs suck, Jones. That’s why people get paid to do them.”
“The atmosphere of desperate, ignorant terror essential to healthy rumors seeps away, replaced by a silent, wary paranoia. People bunker down, jealously keeping what they know, which is nothing, to themselves.”
“The Infrastructure Control manager is a short, muscular man with a dark beard. He is an oddity in Zephyr Holdings: a person who started on the floor and was promoted through hard work. This makes other managers uncomfortable. The idea that you can get ahead through sheer competence, and not politicking, backstabbing, fleeing impending disasters, and clambering on board imminent successes, undermines everything they know.”
“What happened to sticking together? What happened to teamwork?” He gives Holly a dirty look. “Hey,” Holly says. “You know what Roger told me? He said there’s no such thing as teamwork. It’s a con. The company doesn’t promote teams. If you want to get ahead you have to screw everybody else and look after yourself. Co-workers are competitors. Roger told me the truth: there’s no I in team, but there’s no U, either!”
“The only thing more amazing than the catalog of brutal methods the company uses to demean its workers is that it thinks it’s helping. Not that the employees are going to say this. Positive feedback is taken very seriously, often ending up in annual reports, but negative feedback leads to HR investigations into employee attitude problems.”
“Mona says bravely, “I can’t see how this will work. You can’t abolish Senior Management. Zephyr isn’t a democracy. It’s a corporation.” “I believe,” Klausman says, “that Jones is advancing the theory that those two concepts are not mutually exclusive.”
“Senior Management may have been incompetent; it may have been corrupt; it was certainly full of assholes—but they were their incompetent, corrupt assholes.”
“There’s no requirement that jobs be meaningful, Jones. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.”
“But what can I say? That’s how business works. Nobody gives a crap about ethics. That’s why people like me will always be successful.”
“The first principle of marketing (okay, it’s not the first, but it doesn’t sound nearly as cool to say it’s the third) is this: Perception is reality. You see, a long time ago, some academic came up with the idea that reality doesn’t actually exist. Or at least, if it does, no one can agree what it is. Because of perception. Perception is the filter through which we view the world, and most of the time it’s a handy thing to have: it generalizes the world so we can deduce that a man who wears an Armani suit is rich, or that a man who wears an Armani suit and keeps saying “Isn’t this some Armani suit” is a rich asshole. But perception is a faulty mechanism. Perception is unreliable and easily distracted, subject to a thousand miscues and misinformation…like marketing. If anyone found a way to actually distinguish perception from reality, the entire marketing industry would crumble into the sea overnight.”
“She’s such a bitch,” Tina says, which I find a little contradictory, but overall quite true. “She’s got to be in charge of everything.” I sit next to her. “Well, I guess. But in business, that’s leadership.” Tina stares at me for a second. “I can’t believe you consider that a positive trait. How about her inability to accept other points of view? Is it good leadership to be narrow, too?” “Focus,” I say. “They call that focus.” Tina stares at me. “Her paranoia?” “Business savvy.” “Compulsive need to have everything just how she wants it?” “Organizational skills.” “Aggressiveness?” “Aggressiveness,” I say, “is already a good thing.” “Jesus Christ,” Tina says, her eyebrow ring glinting in the morning sun. “Sometimes I worry about this country.”
“Art and marketing can’t coexist,” Tina says. “It’s either one or the other.” “Not this again,” 6 says from the sofa. Tina ignores her. “I made the film for you with the intention of appealing to a bunch of corporate suits. That I used artistic techniques to do it is irrelevant.” “Just because it’s aimed at a particular market means it’s not art?” I say. Tina nods once. “Exactly.” I frown. “What if I take a work of art and market it? It’s still art, right?” “You can’t take artwork and just tweak it to be more commercially appealing.” She sips at her beer. “Not without destroying its artistic merit.” “Tina, this is so crap,” 6 says, standing up. “If I showed you a painting but didn’t tell you whether it was created by a starving artist or an agency commissioned to produce it, you couldn’t tell me whether it was art or not.” “Oh, I think I’d be able to tell,” Tina says. 6 shifts impatiently. “Who cares what the intent was? It’s the result that matters.” “The intent is not divorceable from the result,” Tina says. “I know you people don’t want to face that, but it’s true.” “You don’t want to face the fact that marketing is the greatest producer of art on the planet. There’s packaging, copy, TV advertising—can you tell me why that’s not art?” “If you can’t make that distinction yourself, I won’t be able to explain it to you.” “Oh, right,” 6 says, “you think some hack’s poems that no one ever reads are more important than movie half the world sees? A lot more people have seen a Coke can than a van Gogh.” “I’ve noticed you corporate people do this,” Tina says. “Confuse popularity with quality.” “It’s a democratic society, Tina,” 6 says. “Your opinion of what’s quality is no more valid than mine. Popularity is quality. And so marketers are today’s real artists.” “Drink, anyone?” I say.”
“The room was dead quiet. “Yes, some people died. But let’s not pretend these are the first people to die in the interests of commerce. Let’s not pretend there’s a company in this room that hasn’t had to under the profit above human life at some point. We make cars we know some people will die in. We make medicine that carries a chance of a fatal reaction. We make guns. I mean, you want to expel someone here for murder, let’s star with the Philip Morris Liaison. We have all, at some time, put a price tag on a human life and decided we can afford it. No one in this room has the right to sit here and pretend my actions came out of the blue.” He took a risk and paused for effect. If the IBM Liaison was going to preach at him, now was his once. But he didn’t. He just sat there. Pussy, John thought. “Look, I am not designing next year’s ad campaign here. I’m getting rid of the Government, the greatest impediment to business in history. You don’t do that without a downside. Yes, some people will die. But look at the gain! Run a cost-benefit analysis! Maybe some of you have forgotten what companies really do. So let me remind you: they make as much money as possible. If they don’t, investors go elsewhere. It’s that simple. We’re all cogs in wealth-creation machines. That’s all. “I’ve given you a world without Government interference. There is now no advertising campaign, no intercompany deal, no promotion, no action you can’t take. You want to pay kids to get the swoosh tattooed on their foreheads? Who’s going to stop you? You want to make computers that need repair after three months? Who’s going to stop you? You want to reward consumers who complain about your competitors in the media? You want to pay them for recruiting their little brothers and sisters to your brand of cigarettes? You want the NRA to help you eliminate your competition? Then do it. Just do it.” Their faces; ah, their faces. They hadn’t seen this coming at all, John realized. He was opening the door to a brave new commercial world and they were transfixed by the pure, golden light of profit spilling from it. “I’m a businessman. That’s all. I just want to do business.”
“He flips to the section on retrenchment. A sacking, the book says, is one of the most harrowing and stressful events you may ever experience—Jones assumes “you” means the person being sacked until he realizes it’s talking about the manager. According to the book, sackings can be highly destabilizing: workers stop thinking about doing their jobs and start thinking about whether they’ll still have them. It then describes a rage of strategies managers can use to harness that fear and uncertainty and jujitsu-throw it into a motivating factor. What Jones doesn’t find in the book—and he doesn’t notice this at first; he has to flick back and forth—is any mention of the retrenched employees. How they might feel, for example, or what might happen to them afterward. It’s kind of creepy. It’s almost as if once they are sacked, they cease to exist.”
“Customers are vermin, Mr. Jones. They infect companies with disease.” He says this with complete solemnity. “A company is a system. It is built to perform a relatively small set of actions over and over, as efficiently as possible. The enemy of systems is variation, and customers produce variation. They want special products. They have unique circumstances. They try to place orders with after-sales support and they direct complaints to sales. My proudest accomplishment, and I am being perfectly honest with you here, Mr. Jones, is not the Omega Management System and it associated revenue stream—which, by the way, is extremely lucrative. It is Zephyr. A customer-free company. Listen to that, Mr. Jones. A customer-free company. In the early days, you know, we tried to simulate customers. It was a disaster. Killed the whole project. When we started again, I cut every department that had external customers. It was like shooting a pack of rabid dogs. Now, I’m not claiming Zephyr Holdings is perfect. But we’re getting there, Mr. Jones. We’re getting there.”
“When someone asks for the ethics tape, we know they’ve already decided to invest. They just want some reassurance so they can feel good about it, too. That’s the thing you learn about values, Jones: they’re what people make up to justify what they did. Did you take business ethics in college?” “Yes.” “They teach you people’s behavior is guided by their values, right? That’s a load of crap. When you watch people like we do, you find out it’s the other way around. Look, I believe in what Alpha does, I really do. But do I worry about whether every little thing we do is ethical? No, because you can rationalize anything as ethical. You talk to a criminal—a tax dodger, a serial killer, a child abuser—and every one of them will justify their actions. They’ll explain to you, totally seriously, why they had to do what they did. Why they’re still good people. That’s the thing: when people talk about the importance of ethics, they never include themselves. The day anyone, anywhere, admits that they personally are unethical, I’ll start taking that whole issue seriously.”
“She dabs at her eyes. “Jesus, you nearly killed me.” She takes a deep breath. “Whoo. Okay. Tell me how you justify buying a new pair of shoes.” “What?” “When there are starving people in Africa, what kind of person spends two hundred bucks on shoes? See, once you buy into that paradigm, it’s a bottomless pit. You can never feel good about yourself while there’s anybody in the world poor or hungry, which there always is, Jones, and has been since the dawn of time, so you feel guilty and hypocritical all the time. I’m consistent. I admit I don’t care. You want me to reassure you that Alpha is ethical, but I’m not going to do it, because ethics is bullshit. It’s the spin we put on our lives to justify what we do. I say, be big enough to live without rationalizations.”
“There are two ways of looking at Senior Management. One is that it’s a tightly integrated team tirelessly pulling together in the service of whatever’s best for the company. The other is that it’s a dog pack of power-hungry egomaniacs who occasionally assist Zephyr as a side effect of their individual campaigns for wealth and status. Nobody believes the tightly knit team theory anymore. Once, a long time ago, it may have been true, but the instant a dog-pack person made it into Senior Management, it was all over. It’s like a fox getting into the chicken house; pretty soon there are only foxes and feathers. If Senior Management ever was ever made up of selfless individuals who put teamwork ahead of self-interest—and this is a big if—they were long ago torn to pieces.”
“Jones says, “What if we could make the company better? If we could change things…make it a better place to work. I mean, there are so many things we could do.” Holly looks at him blankly. Freddy says, “Jones…you’re still new here People suggest ways to improve the company every day. Their ideas go into the suggestion box in the cafeteria—where the cafeteria was, I mean—and they’re never heard from again, except during all-staff meetings when Senior Management picks out the most useless one and announces a cross-functional team to look into it. A year or two later, when everyone’s forgotten about it, we get an e-mail announcing the implementation of something that bears no resemblance to the initial idea and usually has the opposite effect, and in the annual reports this is used as evidence that the company listens and reacts to its workers. That’s what happens when you try to make Zephyr a better place to work.”
“Sydney feels an affinity with Human Resources. She likes the name, with its not-so-hidden implication that employees are an exploitable resource, like stock or real estate. And not a particularly valuable one, despite that old chestnut about employees being the company’s most important asset. Sydney knows the truth: give the company cash resources, give it strategic partnerships, give it inventory; give it anything but prickly, unreliable, idiosyncratic humans. People are the worst: you can’t stack them, or (easily) relocate them, and you can’t even just leave them alone to accumulate value. That’s why the company requires HR: a department to transform humans into resources.”
“Busiest part of any store, always the new releases,” said the tall man. “That’s what attracts people. Not the best. The new. Why is that, Will, do you think?”
“In my city we spent $1.6 billion on a new ticketing system for the trains. We replaced paper tickets with smartcards and now they can tell where people get on and off. So, question: how is that worth $1.6 billion? People say it’s the government being incompetent, and ok. But this is happening all over. All the transit networks are getting smartcards, the grocery stores are taking your name, the airports are getting face recognition cameras. Those cameras, they don’t work when people try to avoid them. Like, they can be fooled by glasses. We KNOW they’re ineffective as anti-terrorism devices, but we still keep installing them. All of this stuff—the smartcards, the ID systems, the “anti-congestion” car-tracking tech—all of it is terrible at what it’s officially supposed to do. It’s only good for tracking the rest of us, the 99.9% who just use the smartcard or whatever and let ourselves be tracked because it’s easier. I’m not a privacy nut, and I don’t care that much if these organizations want to know where I go and what I buy. But what bothers me is how HARD they’re all working for that data, how much money they’re spending, and how they never admit that’s what they want. It means that information must be really valuable for some reason, and I just wonder to who and why.”
“You went to school,” Lee said. “I mean, at some point. And it didn’t suit you very well. They wanted to teach you things you didn’t care about. Dates and math and trivia about dead presidents. They didn’t teach persuasion. Your ability to persuade is the single most important determinant of your quality of life, and they didn’t cover that at all.”
“You seem unconvinced.” “It doesn’t look like a school.” “Actually, it looks very much like a school. You may think otherwise because your experience has been limited to government-run child farms.” She leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “To me, those don’t look very much like schools.”
“On the pier, under her floppy hat, she used words to make people smile and come closer and give her two dollars and not care about losing. Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled peoples’ brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.”
“Charlotte popped open the glove box and applied big sunglasses. They made her look elegant and sexy, not like a nun at all.”
“The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.”
“So that was why you shouldn’t talk about yourself, and why the older students were so aloof and inscrutable: to avoid being identified. To guard against persuasion, you had to hide who you were.”
“It was a history lesson about how people had once believed in literal magic, in wizards and witches and spells. They wouldn’t tell strangers their true name, in case the stranger was a sorcerer, because once a sorcerer knew you, he could put you under his power. You had to guard that information. And if you saw someone who looked like a sorcerer, you would avert your eyes and cover your ears before they could compel you. The was where words like charmed came from, and spellbound and fascinated and bewitched and enraptured and compelled. 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 a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words were the same. People still got fascinated and charmed, spellbound and amazed, they forgot themselves, and were carried away. They just didn’t think there was anything magical about that anymore.”
“You can’t stop me. Your word voodoo, it doesn’t work on me. Right? So how do you think you’re going to—” Eliot produced a pistol. He didn’t seem to pull it from anywhere. He just suddenly had it. Wil’s eyes stung. “See?” Eliot put away the gun. “There are all kinds of persuasion.”
“I’m just offering you an inside look at what Yeats himself has called, quote, the greatest attack vector since print, end quote.” “Fine,” he said. “The organization is changing, Eliot. It’s not newspapers and TV anymore. That stuff is old school. Obsolete. And you older guys, if you don’t watch out, you’ll be obsolete with it. You don’t want to be obsolete, do you?” “No.” “No. So let me help you out.” The kid panted awhile. “The key to the Web is it’s interactive. That’s the difference. Online, someone visits your site, you can have a little poll there. It says, ‘Hey, what do you think about the tax cuts?’ And people click and segment themselves. First advantage right there. You’re not proselytizing, speaking into the void. You’re getting data back. But here’s the really clever part. 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 what you want. What will piss you off. What will engage your attention and reinforce your beliefs, make you trust the site. And if you said you were against tax cuts, we’ll show you stories of Republicans blocking social programs or whatever. It works every which way. Your site is made of mirrors, reflecting everyone’s thoughts back at them. That’s pretty great, right?” “It’s great.” “And we haven’t even started talking about keywords. This is just the beginning. Third major advantage: People who use a site like this tend to ramp up their dependence on it. Suddenly all those other news sources, the ones that aren’t framing every story in terms of the user’s core beliefs, they start to seem confusing and strange. They start to seem biased, actually, which is kind of funny. So now you’ve got a user who not only trusts you, you’re his major source of information on what’s happening in the world. Boom, you own that guy. You can tell him whatever you like and no one’s contradicting you.”
“Imagine a hundred million people clicking polls and typing in their favorite TV shows and products and political leanings, day after day. It’s the biggest data profile ever. And it’s voluntary. That’s the funny part. People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are.”
“She thought, Is he praying? Because that was what it looked like. He couldn’t be, because the idea of a religious poet was even more ridiculous than a vain one. Belief in God was a mental weakness, revealing a need for a sense of belonging and higher purpose: desires poets were supposed to master. They were potential avenues of attack.”
“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.”
“A panic state is not helpful to good decision making.”
“I have nothing and no one but you, and you’re useless. That’s not a personal commentary. It’s a statement of fact.”
“Words aren’t just sounds or shapes. They’re meaning. That’s what language is: a protocol for transferring meaning.”
“As if you know anything about love! What do you think it is? Brain activity? Neurochemicals?” “I suspect it’s a kind of persuasion .”
“Australians were very practical, Emily had found. They did things quickly and purposefully and to the absolute minimum standard required.”
“And there’s, I don’t know, something about a room full of corpses that makes me think about whether I want to go in there.”
“That’s what’s happening if you’re getting all your news from one place. If you stop listening to someone the second you hear a word or phrase you’ve been taught belongs to the enemy, like “environment” or “job creators,” that’s what you’re doing. 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.”
“For a week everyone freaks out, we need more security, we need scanners, we ned to take people’s photograph when they enter a government building. Then a month later everyone’s calmed down and yet we still get these incredibly intrusive new processes and technologies, which would have made zero difference to the incident that inspired them. This isn’t an accident; this happens because to people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below. They need to watch us. They need to monitor what we’re thinking. It’s the only thing between them and a guillotine.”
“Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they exerted upon the landscape. This was what survived them. A hundred billion lives had passed without leaving a mark since the Egyptians had raised their pyramids, changing the world not figuratively but literally.”
“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.”