Pizzaburgers

“Everybody hates this idea, so it must be great.”

A pizzaburger: a fat, juicy beef patty with lettuce, onion and tomatoes, sandwiched between two crudely photoshopped pizzas.

I encountered the work of political communications strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio through The Persuaders, an important book about how people change one another’s minds that Anand Giridharadas published in 2022.

Shenker-Osorio helps politicians and movements develop “messages,” but unlike the tradition concept of messaging as a way of bypassing the audience’s critical faculties, Shenker-Osorio wants to engage them.

That is, rather than tricking you into supporting an issue by, say, linking it with motherhood and apple pie, Shenker-Osorio wants to actually convince you that a given issue deserves your support.

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Pluralistic: Conservatives are fringe outliers – and leftists could learn from them (16 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Google makes millions on paid abortion disinformation (15 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: How Amazon transformed the EU into a planned economy (14 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Saving the news from Big Tech with end-to-end social media (13 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Podcasting "Ideas Lying Around" (12 June 2023)


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The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve Has a Business Model

It is difficult to get a public procurement officer to understand something, when a vendor’s salary depends on his not understanding it.

A jail cell, seen through the bars. Bundles of US $100 bills are piled up on the floor of the cell.
Flying Logos/CC BY-SA 4.0 (modified)

In the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve,” oppressive technologies are first imposed on people who don’t get to complain — prisoners, migrants, children, mental patients, benefits recipients — in order to normalize these tools and sand down their rough edges. Once the technology has been rendered a little more acceptable, it crawls up the privilege gradient, bit by bit, until even the most socially powerful among us are using it.

In other words: 20 years ago, if you ate dinner under a CCTV’s unblinking eye, you were probably dining in a supermax prison. Today, you’re likely just someone who bought some luxury surveillance, like a “home automation” system from Google, Apple, Amazon or Facebook.

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Pluralistic: Links, dumped (10 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Capitalists hate capitalism (09 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: To save the news, repeal the app tax (07 June 2023)


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