2.5 Conclusion

People like judgement. It feed social situation and the gossip in all of us. And labels make gossip easy. Really, really easy. So easy, in fact, that people forget the function of labels as community. They forget the network that labels helped them build, the product it helped them sell, and the friends it helped them find. In an age where quotes are judged twice-over by their ability to condense into 140 characters or less, the complications of subterranean labels is not something the average human gossip machine wants to contemplate. So the discourse communities that we construct with the labels of our lives, the brands, the signs and the incessant name calling, culminate in an anticlimactic rush of information we feel compelled to simultaneously share and downplay the importance of.

Everyone is an individual. The trick is recognizing that everyone does not begin and end with you.