Let me start with a piece of paper. Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card circulated among the opera houses of Italy, a schedule of charges from a claque, one of the applause brigades that worked the great houses of Europe. Approval came in grades, and the grades came at prices. Polite appreciation cost little. Insistence cost more. Down at the luxury end, for a wild ovation at any cost, the price became a sum to be arranged. A psychologist named Robert Cialdini reprinted that tariff decades later in his study of social proof, where it sits among the laboratory findings like a fossil among X-rays, the same animal at two stages of preservation.Now move forward a hundred years. A company in West Palm Beach sold the same product from a drop-down menu, five hundred followers for ten dollars, more than two hundred million of them moved before a newspaper took the operation apart in 2018. The invoice was older than the empire that first printed it.
