This post is a follow up on yesterday's post. It is another one about how people engage in fakery to get what they want. I have done many other posts on this and links to them are provided below.
See ‘Coffee must be dropped at different height than wine’: The Berlin team making books look well-read: An idea to make books look a bit more used, once jokingly proposed by one Myles na gCopaleen, has been made real in German capital by Derek Scally of The Irish Times. Excerpts:
"In a Berlin bar’s back room, Cabinet Magazine, a literary quarterly, assembled a crack team of white-coated literary experts to make your unread books look well-read – at moderate prices.
For €5 you could get an “essential” handling package including a “professional” spine-break for your book, “two commonplace page markers, 2 scholastic dog-ears; 4 underlined passages; 1 arbitrary yet discerning piece of marginalia; and 1 contextually appropriate piece of marginalia”.
The premier package added “mauling the edges” of the book with a drill and sand paper, thanks to the “vice-chiefs of abrasion (light, heavy)” as well as “one stain using cheap wine, coffee etc”, hand-applied by a “fluid dynamics specialist”."
"Among the 40 books handled on Sunday evening were an unread volume gifted to a woman by her mother a year ago – three days before the mother’s next visit. (she paid money to make it look like the book was read so her mother would not give her a hard time or make her feel guilty).
Another visitor wanted their new copy of the 1,000-page Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin to look as well-read as the lost copy it was replacing."
Related posts:
In Poorer Countries, Obesity Can Signal Financial Security (2023)
Fake Books Are a Real Trend (and people pay money for them) (2023)
You can hire someone to do the job interview for you (2022)
How to Spot Fake Reviews and Shady Ratings on Amazon (2022)
Making Money Off of Fake ATM Receipts (2021)
People are hiring out their faces to become deepfake-style marketing clones (2021)
Why would men bring fake cell phones to bars? (2021)
Are sellers paying Amazon customers to delete negative reviews? (2021)
Fake Reviews and Inflated Ratings Are Still a Problem for Amazon (2021)
The Myth of Authenticity Or The Story Behind Products (2010)
Fake Authenticity (2011)
Students: Make a mistake on purpose, its good for you! (2007)
A fake job reference can be just a few clicks away (2015)
Fake Economist Fools Portugal (2013)
Slave Redemption in Sudan (2007) (Fake slaves are sold to those who buy slaves and then give them their freedom)
Can A Product Work Just Because It's Expensive? (2008) (fake medicine)
If It Pays To Have Friends, Can You Pay To Have Friends? (2013) (you can hire fake boyfriends)
Study: Half of American Doctors Give Patients Placebos Without Telling Them (2008)
Saudis grapple with fake street sweepers (2017)
Rent a White Guy: Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing (2010) (by Mitch Moxley in The Atlantic Monthly, excerpts below)
Can adding a phantom third story to their homes help families find a wife for their son? (2018)
Why do employers pay extra money to people who study a bunch of subjects in college that they don’t actually need you to know? Signaling (2018)
Mexicans buy fake cellphones to hand over in muggings (2019)
Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Virtue, Thorstein Veblen (and Adam Smith, too!) (2007)
How does a company selling used luxury goods spot fakes? (signalling and conspicuous consumption) (2019).
Why do stores sometimes pay people to be fake shoppers? (2019)
What if companies can't afford real models for their ads? Use AI generated fake pictures (2020)
Excerpts from "Rent a White Guy"
"Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.
“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”
I was.
And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
Six of us met at the Beijing airport, where Jake briefed us on the details. We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to my friend Ernie, who, in his late 30s, was the oldest of our group. His business cards had already been made."
"For the next few days, we sat in the office swatting flies and reading magazines, purportedly high-level employees of a U.S. company that, I later discovered, didn’t really exist."
