Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detec… - Max Barry

“White coke?”
“It’s a trial product.”
“Wow, sounds cool. What does it taste like?”
“Coke,” 6 says.
“Well, yeah,” I say, “but how is it different to, say, Classic Coke?”
“It’s in a different can,” 6 says.
I wait, but 6 just looks at me. “What, that’s it?”
“No,” she says. “It will also cost twice as much.” She pours herself a Pepsi. “We’re after a more upmarket niche.”
“You really expect people to pay double for a white can?” I ask, astounded. “When it tastes exactly the same?”
6 aims a chiseled frown at me. “I didn’t say it tastes exactly the same. I said it is exactly the same.”

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.

Marketing (or mktg, which is what you write when you’re taking lecture notes at two hundred words per minute) is the biggest industry in the world, and it’s invisible. It’s the planet’s largest religion, but the billions who worship it don’t know it. It’s vast, insidious and completely corrupt.
Marketing is like LA. It’s like a gorgeous, brainless model in LA. A gorgeous, brainless model on cocaine having sex drinking Perrier in LA. That’s the best way I know how to describe it.