The Hustlers Fueling Cryptocurrency’s Marketing Machine

Erin Griffith
wired.com

It took only a few months for Sally, an executive assistant living in British Columbia, to become Crypto Sally, a Lambo-touting altcoin influencer who makes a living on YouTube videos. She got interested in cryptocurrencies last summer as the buzz around initial coin offerings, or ICOs, surged. She bought some ether—at the top of the market, she admits—and spent her free time researching how to trade lesser-known cryptocurrencies called altcoins, eventually making enough money to quit her job.

For someone with no tech or finance background, it was a lot to figure out on her own, so Sally (who asked that her last name not be disclosed) created a 34-page beginner’s guide to crypto investing and shared it online. “My goal was just to get some basic info out to people that I wish I would have had when I started,” she says. In January, she created a Twitter account to promote her guide, and in March she posted her first YouTube interview with the CEO of a blockchain company. Her following quickly grew to nearly 18,000 subscribers on YouTube and 14,000 followers on Twitter.

That’s small potatoes compared to, say, beauty or gaming influencers boasting tens of millions of followers. But in the burgeoning world of crypto, it’s enough to make her a star. “I’m like a nobody in traditional marketing terms, but because this space is so new and it’s so crazy right now, there aren’t a lot of crypto influencers yet, and especially female ones,” she says. As her influence grew, requests flooded in—often 10 a week—from up-and-coming coin companies offering to pay her to promote their ICOs or post a “review” of their coins.

When we speak, Sally is fighting off a cold she picked up at Consensys, the 8,500-person conference in New York City, her first crypto event. She also attended an awards banquet that honored crypto influencers as “most impersonated,” “best coin analysis” and “best crypto musician.” It feels weird to be considered a crypto influencer, she says, “because it’s just something I started doing for fun.” She believes cryptocurrencies have staying power, but she isn’t as sure about the market for influencers like herself. “I don’t plan on this being a lifetime career. It could end a month from now, I don’t really know,” she says. For now, she has signed a contract with an agency to produce one to three videos per week featuring the firm’s clients.

Opportunities for new influencers like Crypto Sally are growing as the easy money for crypto projects evaporates. The ICO market—where hyped-up projects raise millions of dollars overnight through fund-raising campaigns—is now crowded with thousands of similar-sounding projects competing for attention and investment. Scams and pump-and-dump schemes have turned off many potential investors. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that nearly 20 percent of 1,450 projects were obvious frauds. Increased scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission has cast a gloom over US-based “utility token” projects that don’t register their tokens as securities. Meanwhile, a sustained drop in the prices of major cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether has left crypto investors with less capital to risk on new tokens. Making matters worse, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Bing have banned crypto-related ads. Projects have to get more creative about spreading the word.

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What Do CBS’s“60 Minutes”, Dr. Oz, The “Digital Divide” in Public Schools, and 5G Cell Towers Have in Common? More Than You May Think.

B.N. Frank
Activist Post

For a year or so, tech employees have been expressing remorse for being paid to deliberately create software that affects our dopamine levels and other neurotransmitters.  2017 CBS 60 Minutes segment, “Brain Hacking” provides testimony.  Other articles and TV segments have followed.  The most compelling statement seems to be from Nest Founder, Tony Faddell.

“I Wake Up In Cold Sweats Thinking, What Did We Bring To The World?”

Holy crap.

As we are all already aware, for the last 2 decades, technology has been marketed to children and public school systems.  Regardless, this whole time, tech inventors have been limiting their own kids’ use of it and sending them to private low-tech schools.

It’s not going to be easy to turn this around for everyone else’s children especially with tech companies still marketing products to kids and public schools.

On a side note, no “safe” level of cell phone or wireless (WiFi) radiation has yet to be scientifically determined for children or pregnant women.  And manuals for cell phones and other wireless devices include warnings regarding RF exposure.  Many are also trying to have WiFi replaced with wired Internet in schools for these reasons.

These devices are also known to sometimes catch fire and explode.  Ay carumba.

2017 article, “The Rich Get Smart, The Poor Get Technology: The New Digital Divide in School Choice” provides research indicating that increased use of computers in the classroom and for homework has led to a decline in education levels.  It also seems to be contributing to kids becoming addicted to technology or “Screenagers.”

On February 9, 2018 Dr. Oz featured a segment on his show called “The Rise of 5G Cell Towers.” His introduction includes a description of why U.S. elected officials and telecom companies are promoting this “Race for 5G.”  Elected officials are actually writing and passing new state and federal laws so that millions of 4G and 5G small cell towers can be installed everywhere including in front of homes.  This is so we can “binge-watch, surf, and post” at faster speeds without our screens freezing up or being disconnected.  Hooray?!

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How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist

Tristan Harris

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.

I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as Google’s Design Ethicist caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked.

When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want you to show you where it might do the opposite.

Where does technology exploit our minds’ weaknesses?

I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.

And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.

I want to show you how they do it.

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LISTEN: Creepy AI Telemarketer Sounds Human, Denies Being a Robot

Activist Post

Time Magazine is investigating a healthcare telemarketing firm who has been using an amazingly realistic robot caller which seems to operate on advanced and a bit creepy artificial intelligence.

The Florida firm Premier Health Plans Inc. is responsible for "employee" Samantha West heard in the exchanges below.  After cleverly filibustering, she repeatedly insists she's a real person and not a robot.

Listen to the newest recording below:

With this level of advancement in customer service technology, how many more jobs can we expect to become automated out of existence?

Unplug Yourself: How Advertising and Entertainment Shapes Your Subconscious

 

Sott.net

Andre Evans

They say the subconscious is more powerful than the conscious. Usually, people are more influenced by their innate subconscious desires or intent than a rational and planned decision. This aspect of human nature is heavily influenced by your daily activity.

How Corporations Influence Your Subconscious

In western society, the subconscious mind of the individual is often subject to a number of heavy influences, through entertainment mediums especially. Television, movies, and music create a profound subconscious effect on the human mind that influences and dictates the choices that they will make to at least some degree.

If you see a certain car advertisement, whether or not you rationally decide your stance on it, you are being pre-programmed to at least accept or acknowledge any claims made by the advertisement itself.

Likewise, the choice of television shows and dramatic elements appearing on TV have a psychological influence on those who watch them. According to statistics, by age 18 the average American youth will have seen over 200,000 simulated acts of violence. The glorification of drug and alcohol use predisposes an individual to rationally accept and sometimes consent to these actions.

The human self image is psychologically manipulated. When you compare yourself to a famous individual or a person who is depicted as 'successful', you may be setting yourself up to subconsciously feel less valuable from the comparison. This subconscious act creates people who are wildly insecure about their physical and mental image.

Romance and sex is also psychologically implanted through advertisements and drama. The use of sex appeal to sell products is obvious. Similarly, dramatic scenes of love and romantic feelings often prey on the human desire to feel loved, and will program an individual to act or react to those situations in certain ways. Displays of sexual suggestiveness and simulated depictions of sexual relations in media all contribute to influencing increased sexual activity in young people. Not only that, but they also lead to unhealthy obsession with sex into later years, generally resulting in pornography usage.

Its not just television and movies either. With internet advertising, viral videos depicting most of these things in horrific detail, and video games, a horde of negative media pervades over society. This power of subconscious influence guides and decides the goals, desires, and opinions of each individual.

A blurring of reality with fiction occurs in this scenario, where the individual is influenced to orient themselves in alignment with these false goals and aspirations that are implanted into them through these mediums. In extreme cases, their ability to distinguish reality from fiction is impaired, and culminates in some explosive form. If you add drugs to the entire equation (legal or illegal), you may end up with self destruction. 

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Sex in society: too much raunch, too young

 Too much: a scene from the TV series Sherlock, left, 

and an explicit pose from Lady Gaga

"So what is there to complain about? It is the availability – indeed, the marketing – of such raunchy videos to the young and impressionable that disturbs me. Something has shifted in our culture to bring sub-teens within the orbit of suggestive sexual activity. T-shirts with cheeky, even lewd slogans – jokes that only adults can understand – are designed and sold to the under-10s. Children can hunt on a multitude of television channels for something that looks vaguely adult and vaguely transgressive. Can it be good for them? I for one would not be prepared to take the risk." 

Telegraph

Joan Bakewell

"Three million people saw your bottom!” So ran the shocked letter I received in the late 1960s after I had presented Late Night Line-Up wearing a daringly short skirt. Back then, minis were still news: Jean Shrimpton had recently caused an international storm by wearing one at the Melbourne races in Australia. Certainly, no women wore them to present BBC chat shows – no women presented chat shows in those days.

Looking at the pictures today, a miniskirt seems harmless. But some people took offence: they felt mine was too raunchy. They were alarmed, convinced that such clothing somehow put the morals of the nation at risk. It might enflame people’s lusts and prompt them to acts of sexual behaviour that, by the standards of the day, were to be deplored: sex before marriage, for example. 

Sex makes one generation fearful for the next. It has always been so. And in each generation, there are always those who consider the more risqué edges of the entertainment industry to be going too far. In 1890s Paris, onlookers took against the frills and suspenders of can-can dancers. By the 1950s, its Crazy Horse cabaret was making witty mockery of such shows, while itself leaving little to the audience’s imagination. At the same time in Britain, nudes posing in tableaux at the Windmill Theatre were still not permitted to move. 

Now I find myself caught up in concerns about the sexualisation of children today. This week, I was quoted as condemning outright Lady Gaga and other performers for seeming obsessed with appearing at their raunchiest in their pop videos and on prime-time television shows. So have I changed sides? Or has the world changed? 

It could be that I have grown old. I am now in my late 70s; I no longer belong to the generation that rejoiced in outraging its elders and struggled against the strictures of Mary Whitehouse (I thought she was wrong then, and I still do).

But in my time, I have loved the gyrations of Pan’s People, the Top of the Pops dancers whose routines were flirty rather than raunchy. Late Night Line-Up regularly championed what then seemed like avant-garde works showing life in the raw (in all senses) – films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and plays such as Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction. Has there been a significant change since then or am I an ageing spoilsport?

In 2001, I made a four-part series for BBC Two called Taboo, which looked back at how censorship had changed over my lifetime. During filming, I broke several taboos of my own: using words that would normally be bleeped out; watching a porn film in production; and being filmed casting an appraising eye over a young male with a sturdy erection. I also had the ''fun’’ of pornography explained to me by young men, including Toby Young, today a pillar of Michael Gove’s educational establishment. None of this, I argued, was harming my moral values. Sex I considered a life-enhancing activity, promoting pleasure, well-being and, if you were lucky, a lasting, loving relationship. But, most particularly, it was watched by adults who were able to judge for themselves, certainly not by children. That is what is different today. Children are the new target market.

What has changed is not the fascination with sex; that will always be part of human nature, and people will continue to find ways of gratifying it. Once, such pleasures were exercises in power, with secret indulgences often illegal. Herod served up the head of John the Baptist to have Salome dance for him. Victorian gentlemen had their cabinets of Eastern erotica. In the 1950s, you had to belong to a private club to be allowed to watch strippers at work. 

While our curiosity with sex persists, the means of access to sexual material has broadened exponentially. The media explosion brought on by the internet brings performances within the reach of anyone, children included. And today’s smartphone-savvy youth think nothing of forwarding explicit images and video clips to others’ handsets. This week, a new set of contestants entered the Celebrity Big Brother house to take part in Channel Five’s fly-on-the-wall show whose audience is mostly millions of young people. Prior to his incarceration, one housemate proudly boasted of his intent to have sex on screen – “and none of this under-the-covers ----”.

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Malls track shopper’s cell phone signals to gather marketing data

arstechnica.com

Online retailers have long gathered behavioral metrics about how customers shop, tracking their movements through e-shopping pages and using data to make targeted offers based on user profiles. Retailers in meat-space have had tried to replicate that with frequent shopper offers, store credit cards, and other ways to get shoppers to voluntarily give up data on their behavior, but these efforts have lacked the sort of data capacity provided by anonymous store browsers—at least until now. This holiday season, shopping malls in the US have started collecting data about shoppers by tracking the closest thing to “cookies” human beings carry—their cell phones.

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