"free" markets
products of our society
A few months ago, we had a baby (you were right about how great having a kid is, thank you for telling me). Because of having a baby, we bought a new car. And it’s been a weirdly eye-opening experience; we’ve been amazed discovering the many lil things that make the car enjoyable to drive.
The things aren’t fancy or difficult, but they indicate that whoever made the car …has been in a car before. Like, in our old car, we would put something on the dashboard under the windshield, and as soon as we turned ~0.01° in any direction, the thing would ZOOOP slide right off. In our NEW car: the dashboard material is sticky. Nothing slides. It’s incredible! My life has improved bc someone at Ford considered the experience of riding in a car.
This has been amazing and jarring bc, in recent years, most (almost all?) of my experiences as a ~consumer~ have been petty nightmares. Especially in tech/social media. For example, in a recent update, Instagram put the “Shop” tab where the “Likes” tab had been, so every user’s chemically-trained finger tapped on it and then the user found themselves accidentally shopping, a little confused how they got there.
Instagram pulls like kinda thing w regularity. This time the tweak was so flagrant that people consciously noticed, and were enraged. There were petitions. Nothing changed.
This isn’t just Insta (see: Terry Nguyen on this). These tiny frictions -- little pieces of a platform’s structure oriented away from a user’s actual experience1, and toward monetization -- are everywhere. Which, of course. “Business,” sure. More often than not, the frictions are so subtle we don’t see them; we just are gently guided into spending attention and money, as designed. We feel something prodding us along, a gravitational pull where we end up with rainbow toothbrushes and mandatory criss-cross slippers. We feel that we are not totally in control of ourselves.
* * *
My brilliant team did an episode a few months ago on the antitrust case against facebook. The federal govt says facebook used its power and money to quash competition — namely by buying competitors, namely Instagram and WhatsApp.
This episode provided a way to understand why my social media user experience sucks. In the episode, Jacob says:
A dominant firm buying up competitors so it doesn't have to outcompete them — that, ultimately, reduces choice for consumers. And consumer choice — they call it consumer welfare in the law — that is what modern antitrust law is supposed to protect.
Antitrust scholar Lina Khan notes that when fb started out, it competed with MySpace and others…
…and it was really trying to make Facebook good for users, right? It was trying to improve privacy protections. It was trying to improve quality. It was really trying to innovate.
To get users to use it, fb had to create something users enjoyed using. It had to try.
But then it got big and bought up anything that was a threat, anything good. Once it eliminated-bought the viable competition, it lost that discipline. This wasn’t on purpose; it just didn’t have to bother about being any good anymore. Khan cites their reneging on privacy commitments, but there are many examples2.
Because so much of the experience of using the internet is filtered through these giant companies … maybe one reason the internet feels so bad now is bc consumer welfare has been circumvented, bc the quality of that experience is irrelevant. We don’t have any real choices. (See also: Tim Wu on exactly this.)
I dunno if this necessarily means I think we must Break Em Up. But it feels comforting to have a reasonable unifying theory.
* * *
So then my brilliant colleagues did ANOTHER episode (as they do) about how the business model for printer companies has become selling printers for supercheap, and then selling superexpensiveink, forever.
Which is of course reminiscent of everything. It’s everywhere: software and bicycles and razors and toothbrushes and clothes and dog food and ProTools, my transcription service, anything Adobe. My former colleagues at Barron’s were working on this cover story, “How Subscriptions Are Remaking Corporate America,” and in their research realized that the shoeshine guy on 6th Ave at 46th was offering customers a monthly membership. To some extent, tangible goods are also: you’re expected to replace ur $500 iphone every few years. The “legendary” lifetime guarantee on Bean Boots became a one-year return policy in 2018. I know I’m saying They Don’t Make Em Like They Used To, and yes I have aged very quickly in the past year, but also: maybe software ate the world and is digesting us on a monthly basis for the rest of time, and maybe we aren’t enjoying it.
An increasingly popular business model is to introduce more friction in the consumer experience. To lock us in. No, that’s great, i love it, sign me up.
* * *
Ever since that antitrust episode, I only see stifled consumer choice. The ways we’re funneled into machines as a potential sale, a product’s destination, a pageviewer, a daily active user, some data.
Here are more Things That Make Me Feel Like a Commodity:
Blitzscaling: customers are very Costly to Acquire, so startups use their VC moneys to buy a network effect and get going. Which means we/users keep getting herded onto some new app bc it most recently purchased our participation. It’s like oh great now i gotta be responsible for this app. I derive little enjoyment from racing to reserve my name on the new thing and then figuring out how to optimize it. A user might feel “genuinely insulted at how janky” a new app is. But we know there’s a gold rush, and we have to rush. It doesn’t matter that I really don’t feel like it3.
Algo fiddling: Social media platforms tweak their algorithms and ads constantly so, for #content producers, u can never get your footing of what will work, except you can always rely on this one law: if you participate in whatever new product they are pushing (like reels), they’ll push your content. Do a Reel, get on the explore tab, get views/followers. Content creators who depend on views for their livelihoods have to race to cooperate. The audiences you build are never yours.
Referral codes, the MLMs of the elite class: years ago it was your high school acquaintance suddenly asking if you were all set with your jewelry needs. For early adopters, it’s $40 off when they refer a friend/follower. Which leaves us (ok, me for sure) constantly on guard for how our friends/acquaintances are profiting off of us, which absolutely must be deleterious to our sense of connection. Is this a ~scarcity mentality,~ millennials hustling to make their rent, or is it the platforms teaching us all to monetize everything?
Is Everyone Dropshipping? A line from this article struck me -- that a lot of the junk that crowds ur Amazon search results is dropshipped “from AliExpress, to fund someone’s Tim Ferris-esque four-day workweek." Yeah, that. I am the mark paying the markup because some guy has the time and basement-space. (a lil related: in the common usage, does a “customer journey” really end at purchase? Not, like, when the product has been used up? or used at all?)
The hungry hungry content machine: ~5 years ago, people were constantly talking about how you can post anything on linked in and it would go linkedin-viral because linkedin was so desperate for content. If you added a lot of page breaks it did even better. I thought of this when I read Can’s great post, everything is content: “content” is produced in huge volume not because it needed to be created, but to … exist. To be on the platforms, to feed the machine. There’s no curation, no promise of quality. Because the consuming, not the consumer, is the point.
Have you ever thought about how many times you’ve read the same caption on instagram? “Reunited and it feels so good.” Why does everyone have to say exactly that? There’s an equivalent on every platform; each fosters its own language, speech patterns and half-meme-half-structure-that-indicates-it’s-a-joke. I don’t know why putting a filter on a low-res picture of flatironed-haired sorority sisters has meant u have to quote a song by Peaches & Herb that u may even not know is a song. But, for most, our content is that mindless robotic word-soup, a reactive response to platform structure.
It contributes to this persistent feeling my friend Clare recently articulated: the internet is a full fridge with nothing in it to eat. Your fingers type command+T+“tw”+return and twitter opens as effortlessly as blinking. You scroll but it’s oppressively boring, you’re so bored. The articles are longer versions of their headlines; everyone’s opinion is fungible. Your fingers type command+T+“tw”+return and twitter opens as effortlessly as blinking, the same dumb empty feed in a new tab. The feed is the same. There’s nothing to eat.
* * *
To some extent, sure, this is just existing, experiencing the world. There has always been boring content; advertising has always been annoying. And these may not be your exact problems (I’ve learned from writing this that I use instagram too much, yikes). But I’m pretty sure this isn’t just me on ig, and I’m pretty sure the consequences go beyond my accidentally ownership of a rainbow toothbrush (do not recommend, btw). It’s the orientation of the technologies we use everyday that are ~insultingly janky~, the startups we’re herded onto, our subscription razors, our printers that shut down should we dare to use off-brand ink. Combined with our phone addictions (esp in a year when connection to the outside world has been mostly digital), I feel pretty sure the degree of invasion is greater, the constancy of exposure to the structural wishes/demands of our digital overlords.
I’ve been thinking about the cumulative social effect. It’s been almost a decade since that long, painful year in which stock analysts could only talk about how facebook would ~monetize.~ Personally, I think a decade of having my face pressed against the glass of a digital showroom has resulted in me having more stuff, and I think I value my stuff more than I used to. But also I think I’m more frustrated and bristle-y. And I suspect at least part of it is having to resist, every day, buying the Jenni Kayne shoes Instagram insists I want4. I do close the ads or, if feeling feisty, block the advertiser, but there’s always another, which I will likely hate just as much.
Anybody who uses the offerings of the big tech companies is constantly fighting that gravitational pull. Those tiny frictions embedded throughout our digital lives, almost-imperceptibly diverting our efforts5, over years and years, creates an ambient frustration that I think builds up like arterial plaque. I think all that buildup, with no identifiable cause and no identifiable fix, accounts for some of our culture’s ambient internet rage. We passively float along in our relationships with these platforms, almost powerless. We can participate, or we can log off.
(which — we can’t, obviously. if u dont believe me, ask a millennial or younger. we basically all have to be on the ~4 platforms to Promote Our Brands, to Connect with Industry Leaders, to Build an Audience, to Go Viral, to Become Famous — to earn money to be able to live. Or to be in your community: as Kelly Evans wrote, anything with other people is organized on facebook. Before, without fb, you didn’t know when ur friends’ masquerade-ball-on-a-boat was; in the life-phase Kelly wrote about, no fb means ur not gonna get a secondhand Stokke Tripp Trapp or participate in your neighborhood 4th of July parade.)
For me at least, it feels like our participation in the economy as consumers is more by force than choice. Using these platforms feels at best dutiful and at worst coerced, demoralizing, literally depressing. And we know there is actually fkall we can do about it.
We also know that America is 70% consumer spending. If that 70% is a demoralizing experience, i dunno, i just feel like there’s gotta be a big knockon-effect in the national mood.
paraphernalia:
My coworkers and I staged an auto-intervention for our Twitter addiction. It, uh, failed. Obviously. See above.
We also just did an episode on how interest rates and inflation have stayed so low for so long and how that’s been kind of the get-out-of-jail-free card for the government issuing bajillions of dollars. And we may have top-ticked the market, which is pretty exciting! Sorry if we caused inflation.
ALSO I must disclose that YES this episode features Bill Gross and YES i know i need to diversify my Brand Offerings but i did try very hard to think of other bond investors who were Vigilantes and then relented and apologized for being wrong. I canvassed my fellow journalist friends. I googled. I remembered my search history and incognito-googled. I’m sorry but Bill was just the right person!
Here is a wonderful paper from 1992 I found browsing JSTOR Daily: “Free Market Metaphor: The Historical Dynamics of Stamp Collecting.”
The author argues that stamp collecting and industrial capitalism emerged simultaneously in the mid-19th century, and that that shaped ~philately~ as a hobby:
“Stamp collectors were acutely self-conscious of the ways in which their activity mimicked the real world of commerce … [they] transferred to the leisure sphere the discourse that defined the meaning of industrial capitalism and used languages and images of the marketplace to legitimize both work and leisure.”
They did not know how to have fun without it being work so they made their fun into work. which allowed them to “bring to it all the honor accorded a productive activity in a work-oriented society.”
As a person writing a substack in her spare time, this, uh, resonates. i love fun!
“We’re bullish on … tchotchkes that symbolize the heyday of financiers.” (in ~2009 I bought 3 LEH duffel bags from the Housing Works on 23rd St. I kept one and my brother in law used the other two as gym bags. they did NOT hold up!!! v poor quality, do not recommend!)
Our team read The Great Gatsby for you! In celebration of it entering the public domain. I’m Ch 3, which means I got to do drunk voices, the greatest honor of my career. turns out i love doing audiobooks.
Like a terribly sad, consequential Zeno’s paradox of profits and headcount, local newspapers are being even more gutted. Everyone should care about this!!! IMHO the worse local news ecosystems get, the more people outside NYC/SF/LA feel not heard/not seen/angry! Let’s fix this! Somehow!
Brand Kismet
im super big on hand-me-downs/secondhand bb things — it’s one of my small doomed campaigns to save the earth — and imagine my delight when i went to dress my baby in an outfit that says BONDS BONDS BONDS BONDS BONDS BONDS:
In Dog News…
Demi loves snow:
See those giant molars way in the back? we call those cruise ships.
She is sitting at my knee, continuing to be a very good dog.
Like: in 2017, we needed a couch. My Instagram ads got wise to it, and I started seeing ads for couches in my feed. Great, except: when I was dead-eyed scrolling, I didn’t want to impulse-buy an Article leather couch that wouldn’t fit in my apartment. But when I was actively thinking about buying a couch, when I had the measurements in front of me and wanted to compare Article vs Floyd vs Burrow vs what was that interesting-looking couch-ad that had just floated by my thumb?, there was nowhere on Instagram where I could see who’d recently targeted me. I had to scroll and scroll and hope that the advertising gods would smile upon me and it might reappear. Why did this not exist? Surely we were aligned on me wanting to use Instagram to give someone my money??
Finally it has done this, sorta (Settings > Ads > Ad Activity)(I still have suggestions). But that was 6 years of passively consuming a useless ad-river. (We bought a Burrow, which made my eyes burn, so we bought a Floyd. We like it.) Why did it take so long? I can’t code but it seems not that hard, if the platform wanted to be actually useful to its users. Right, big if.
Obviously, ideally, if we could express our preferences / if companies cared about those preferences, we could exist on platforms free of abuse / threats. Also if i’m just riffing we would not consent implicitly to being made depressed and having our data scraped and sold and our fears manipulated but lol whatever! so obvious it should go without saying and yet
i saw this/myself in this line mid-wandavision review/debate: “[marvel fanboys] have taken culture hostage and…roped every creator and every viewer into it, and I often feel forced to play along.” yes, the tentpoles, that too, is everything monoculture? i love wandavision but…did i ever have a choice?
Have you ever bought something just to make it stop showing up in your feed? Amanda Mull wrote about “digital resignation” in 2019 -- that capitulation, the well, they have my data, it’s done, I’ll just live with it. I feel like a subset of that is when I'm tempted to buy something from an ad to make the ad go away. Rationally, I know that’s not how it works. But it’s not NOT how I ended up with so much Everlane. Targeting fatigue? (Instagram: WHY is there not a user-level where spending $X gets u an ad-free experience?)
not totally related but: u better believe i disabled autocorrect fking years ago