Ordering books referenced by JUNKBUSTERS

Junkbusters no longer participates in Amazon.com's affiliate program because of objections to its privacy policy.

Clicking on a book title to an online bookseller with a better-than-average privacy policy, but sadly, your privacy is probably better protected if you borrow the book from a library or purchase it in a physical store.

Some of our favorite quotes

From Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964), Chapter 23:
Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion.
From Vance Packard's The Naked Society, (1964), which may leave contemporary readers with a nostalgic yearning for the comparatively mild intrusions of privacy of the mid-twentieth century.
Aldous Huxley commented that the classic cry of Patrick Henry that he wanted either liberty or death now sounds melodramatic. Instead today, Huxley contended, we are more apt to demand, ``Give me television and hamburgers but don't bother me with the responsibilities of liberty.'' (p.13)
From Ian Hislop, editor of the English satirical magazine Private Eye, in an essay on the death of Lady Diana, the Princess of Wales (Granta, 60, Winter 1997, p.34)
Here were people tut-tutting about invasions of privacy on the one hand, and on the other demanding that the royal family line up and weep for the TV cameras.
From James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), An Aristocrat and a Democrat in The American Democrat, 1838:
No rights can be dearer... than exemptions from unseasonable invasions on [one's] time by the coarse-minded and ignorant.
From Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) in The Hero as King, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841:
A man always is to be himself the judge of how much of his mind he will show to other men; even to those he would have work along with him. There are impertinent inquiries made: your rule is: to leave the inquirer uninformed on that matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed; but precisely as dark as he was!
Calvin Coolidge, the President who declared that ``the business of America is business,'' accepted his position in the Massachusetts Senate saying:
Statutes must appeal to more than material welfare. Wages won't satisfy, be they never so large. Nor houses; nor lands; nor coupons, though they fall as thick as the leaves of autumn. Man has a spiritual nature... recognise the immortal worth and dignity of man.
(Quoted in Lend Me Your Ears by William Safire, page 56)
Attributed to Mick Jagger, rock star:
It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.
(If you have a credible date and source for this statement, please tell us.)
From The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of Machine by Lewis Mumford (1970, pp. 185-86):
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. One may without exaggeration now speak of technological compulsiveness...
This situation was well characterized by the mathematician John von Neumann: ``Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.'' ...
There is a simple way of establishing the downright absurdity--or more accurately the menacing irrationality---of accepting such technological compulsiveness; and that is to carry von Neumann's dictum to its logical conclusion: If man has the power to exterminate all life on earth, he will.
This doctrine is still prevalent; it has recently been expressed by Andy Grove for example. Simon Ramo, who was the R in TRW, wrote in Century of Mismatch ``We must now plan on sharing the earth with machines. ... ...we want what the machines can furnish, and so we must compromise. We must alter the rules of society so that we and they can be compatible.'' (New York: David McKay, 1970, p.12) In a thoughtful rebuttal titled Controlling Technology, (IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 13(1), Spring 1994) Norman Balabanian wrote that ``As late as 1933, the motto of the Chicago World's Fair, emblazoned over the main entrance, was: Science Finds - Industry Applies - Man Conforms.''
In The Unbound Prometheus :Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (1969) David Landes wrote:
This world, which has never before been ready to accept universally any of the universal faiths offered for its salvation, is apparently prepared to embrace the religion of science and technology without reservation.
A major theme of Unsafe at any speed (1965) by Ralph Nader is the auto industry's attempt to deflect attention from their defective products by blaming the driver and claiming that "education" is the solution.
To take a fairly simple example, many drivers respond to an emergency situation by a sudden application of the brakes, which can easily make the brakes lock and lead to a loss of steering control. ... There are two approaches to solving this problem: either trying to teach drivers that during emergencies they must not resort to a sudden application of the brakes, which because of their design, will lock; or trying to persuade the manufacturers to provide cars with anti-locking brakes. It is not difficult to choose the more feasible approach.
(Second edition (1972), p. 291. Both editions seem to be out of print.)
In Six Characters Looking for an Author by Luigi Pirandello adapted by David Harrower, the Father says:
This is a central point - this belief we are one person. We are not. We are many people. We're one way with somebody, an entirely different way for somebody else. Yet we go on believing, in everything we do, that we are just being ourselves, the same person we always are. It is not true! And when we are caught in a certain act, when others insist on seeing us in just one light we begin to realize how unjust it is. Our whole existence cannot be summed up because of something that took place once. She is the sadist now. She caught me in a place where she should not have known me, just as I should have been nothing to her. And now that one shameful but brief moment is all I am. My only reality.
In a book of trenchant social criticism titled Class, Paul Fussell observes of junk mail:
Addressed to ``Resident'' these [mail-order catalogs] tumble through the mail slot all year long but most profusely about three months before national holidays associated with ``gifting.'' Despite their occasional complaints about junk mail, Resident secretly likes receiving these catalogs, for they suggest that someone out there believes he has money and recognizes that he has the power to choose.
From The Simpsons episode in which long-lost son Larry Burns attempts to meet his father:
Smithers: If Mr. Burns wants to see a stranger he will look at him through a high-powered telescope.
Burns: Smithers, what's going on? How dare you interrupt my lime ricky?!
From Major Barbara (1907) by George Bernard Shaw:
Barbara: ...Do you remember how we implored the County Council to stop him from writing Bodger's Whisky in letters of fire against the sky so that the poor drink-ruined creatures of the Embankment could not wake up from their snatches of sleep without being reminded of their deadly thirst by that wicked sky sign?
From Commission by Ezra Pound:
Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.

Some of our favorite business books

Most of these books don't mention privacy, but the processes of change that they study are relevant to the shifting treatment of privacy in Corporate America.

The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore.
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. [Locke on personalization and privacy]
Nobel laureate Amartya Kumar Sen describes his work in Development As Freedom . Sen sees freedom as a benefit, a goal and an enabler of development. This is consistent with the view of privacy advocates that privacy is a fundamental liberty, and that data protection is an enabler of participation.
Uber-investor George Soros spoke from direct experience when he denounced the laissez-faire approach to societal issues in The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered.
Market fundamentalists try to disregard social values by arguing that whatever those values are, they find expression in market behavior. For instance, if people want to take care of others or protect the environment they can express their sentiments by spending money on these ends... This argument is false. (p. 196)
Soros didn't mention privacy, but his words apply exactly to some of the current public discourse on it.
In the Concept of the Corporation, the doyen of management guru Peter F. Drucker states that the goal of a company isn't to make money, it's to attract and keep customers.
The "father of direct marketing," ad executive Lester Wunderman, recounts in Being Direct: making advertising pay (1996/, p. 87) how he invented the bound-in cards now common in magazines, around 1952.
``I then tried to persuade a large magazine to sell us a bound-in reply card with our ad. The publisher resisted the idea as ``intrusive.'' Intrusive was, of course, just what I wanted.
In Selling Sin: the marketing of socially unacceptable products D. Kirk Davidson addresses a related but different question to us; we are interested in the socially unacceptable marketing of products.

Home · Next · Site Map · Legal · Privacy · Cookies · Banner Ads · Telemarketing · Mail · Spam · Opt Out