Becoming Facebook

Attitudes to material acquisition have varied greatly down the ages. Frank Trentmann, in his ambitious history of the subject from medieval times to the present, carefully puts the case for and against. Karl Marx, notably, viewed consumerism as morally derelict and in some ways sinful. The consumer society he decried was made flesh in London department stores such as Harrods, where beef from Argentina, sherry from Portugal and other products of the global trade explosion of the 1870s offered unprecedented levels of “commodity fetishism”.

Trentmann, a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, eschews moral judgments. But in the book’s second half he appears to question the value of fair trade and other 20th century, quasi-Christian consumer movements. Affluent consumers in the west are made to feel virtuous by buying Oxfam coffee and tea. (“Those so inclined can be buried in a fair trade bamboo coffin made in Bangladesh,” he adds.) At any rate, citizen-consumers in the west have the luxury of ethical consumption, while others do not. Consumerism (from the Latin consumere, “use up”) has an overtone of waste. A century after Marx, the Italian writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini divined a “fascist” element in consumerism.

You can even create some quick, canned copy and do a series of targeted Instagram DMs to try to recruit freelance designers you love and follow. If you don’t have the funds to do the above, you can download helpful apps like Canva and Planoly . These platforms provide out-of-the-box, sharp templates and color combos for IG Stories, grid posts, presentations, and more. They quite literally put a digital designer at your fingertips. In chapters of sparkling prose and sympathetic insight, Ronald traces Nast’s life from his birth in New York in 1873 (and his life-long reaction against the wastrel ways of his profligate father) to his early start in the magazine world ...

But the closer you are to fully owning your customer, the better. If you have a platform-based business, like an Etsy shop or a Depop page, it might feel like there’s no point leaving the nest. You’ve grown on those platforms and because of those platforms, and they’ve provided a safe environment for you to experiment and evolve. That being said, if you want to expand your business, an ownedand-operated Shopify or Squarespace site might be part of your toolkit.

And you will enjoy the piles of books I’ve got for myself in my latest Book Token Splurge, lots of interest there. This is the first novel in a two-part series detailing the creation of an international cosmetics empire. It is set in Hollywood beginning in the late ’80s or ’90s and continues into the present. Ostensibly, it’s an insider’s look at how big business rolls, but it is also a sprawling melodrama featuring characters readers will love to hate. Babur had transitioned between two completely different places, writing his version of his story.

It is probably because Babur of 'The Empire' unlike the boy-king of Ferghana in Rutherford's book, has no character development; he doesn't shine. He blamed Europeans for every wrong committed in the New World, paying elaborate homage to the natives’ way of life, their ethics, religions and customs. He believed nature had been in perfect balance with the red man until the rum-besotted traders had desecrated the natural paradise. Simpson arrived in Canada in 1820 when the casualty lists from the war between the HBC and the NWC over customers and territory were growing ever longer. In consequence of the breathing of so many people in so small a room, for such a length of time, the walls had become quite damp, and ere the guests departed, moisture was trickling down in many places.

The Dionysian character of the ruling class agitated the ruled and from there spurred the desire to be free in their own land and the people started protesting. The protests failed at first but at the end, the British had to finally leave. The partial treatment to the people of the captured colonies led to the rise of Jingoism in the Natives and ultimately led to rebellion which finally led to decline and fall of the Empire, as it got impossible to govern the colonies and it was an expensive affair. Trade still formed a part of the company’s operations through 1833.

She doesn’t add a great deal to these works, with Andrew Carnegie the exception of well-chosen quotations from a trove of letters Nast wrote late in his life to his second wife, which are touching and revealing about, for example, the sting he felt from business setbacks ... Breeziness is arguably a legitimate stylistic choice for a book about slick magazines. But the abundance of clichés in Condé Nast isn’t defensible ... Some sentences are case studies in what can happen when metaphors collide. Becoming Facebook shares how Facebook navigated in meeting these challenges, but always persisted on in its world disrupting mission of making the world more connected and open. By adopting and staying focused on such a bold mission, the book insists, Facebook has been able to achieve technological marvels like sharing, collecting and categorizing over a billion posts per day.