It was March 2018, Cambridge Analytica SZN; when even [REDACTED] was texting me to say how how upset at Facebook he was. And there was some big phone call, the public kind with lots of important people on it, perhaps an earnings call timed immediately after the New York Times headlines appeared. And there was Cheryl Sandberg, the smiling book cover of Lean In social progress, talking meekly, like the sweet, gentle romantic partner who you have nevertheless discovered has been cheating on you. Meekly, but also resolutely, if those things can be combined, in her justification of Facebook’s existence. Not that Facebook was under threat of ceasing to exist, far from it; but still, suddenly and all at once, all the heads at society’s table turned to Mark Zuckerberg’s fun project and inquired, “wait, we definitely should have asked this earlier, but why exactly are you here?”
One of her answers: to place on pedestals little grandmas in cluttered extra rooms in fully paid for houses knitting sweaters; or two best buds in a messy pad in Anaheim with a random talent for designing bedside lamps; and every other tiny business that depends on Facebook’s scale and targeting to find customers for their products. Specifically, “niche” products, the kind that maybe a lot of people like when a lot is, the number of rows in an Excel document that is too large for your four year old laptop to manage without crashing; but not when a lot is, something that you could depend on your Uber driver to converse with you about. Products that maybe only one person in 100,000 would bother to pull off the shelf at Wal-Mart, but for which Facebook can use its personality profiles to find customers anywhere in the world. Apparently, says Sandberg, a lot of businesses have launched since Facebook’s founding that would never have made sense when you had to sell a lot of something in each small geographic area.
I remember this answer, because Ben Thompson mentioned it once on his podcast, which I listened to at the time so I could feel important when talking to myself. And Ben Thompson held this answer up, like a zag on his zig of agreement with the body politic that Facebook fucked up big, because he felt these businesses are not only good for the grandmas and bedside lamp bros; they are important, for the main economic story. That when, “automation happens,” as I’m pretty sure he put it, and the mutually reinforcing triumvirate of TV advertising, mainstream (think Gillette) consumer products, and cable companies comes crashing down, these little companies will be what replaces them. In other words, the sellers of niche products on Instagram will pull weight comparable to Comcast and Procter and Gamble. In yet other words, become the entire economy.
I want to believe it. Of course I want to believe it. Of course I want to believe in a long-tail (foreshadowing!) hypothesis for home goods, apparel, and anything else that can be infused with the power to make a consumer feel singularly seen and expressed, like a 3D-printed car (more foreshadowing!) Of course I want my coasters and bedside lamp and salt pig to be pajama chic, and therefore enjoyed by me, and a few thousand other like souls. Of course I want Instagram targeting to be so good that every time a person scrolls, they see a product that makes them say “I MUST have that,” because it resonates with them in a way the few others share.
Because if that happens, there would have to be a lot more people finding steady work coming up with unique ideas and making stuff than the number of people who design furniture at Restoration Hardware and clothes at Uniqlo today. And maybe those people could never be millionaires, but be able to pay rent in a nice place, save a little, and stay in a hotel for a few nights a year. Maybe there could be a big enough market for niche creators to replace the shrinking market for bookkeepers and receptionists, or cab drivers if you swing that way. I think they would be happier than when they were bookkeepers and cab drivers.
So I started with music, and then I slide into clothing and apparel. Where, early creeping makes it seem like all the sad little Nigels who dream of making dresses one day should be getting excited. There are lots of “reports” and “analyses” from McKinsey and random economics analysts and our friends the opaque but important and credible-seeming market research firm IBISWORLD saying how demand for personalized styles is surging, because, I guess, people my age want to feel an “authentic” connection with what they buy. How there are now over 20,000 direct-to-consumer brands – a self-explanatory term that typically connotes clothing companies transacting over Shopify and marketing on Instagram – most of which you’ve probably never heard of, about half of which sell over 200 distinct products, and the top 500 of which have raised over $3 billion in VC cash.
But nowhere along this rainbow road of intellectual reinforcement do I see any revenue figures; nothing ot tell me how much money is brought in by Nike and Gap vs, I dunno, whatever cool thing I last saw on IG before I deleted it. And what those numbers were five and ten years ago. I also haven’t found any evidence of diversification of styles, which would imply a greater absolute number of design creatives, even working within large companies. And I’m suspicious every time VC financing is used to hype an industry; in my last job, VC figures were how we tried to make things like graphene manufacturing seem like local growth industries to state legislators in places like Wyoming.
So have I been ensorcelled by a false dream of an internet that promotes social equity? There are certainly more listens going to small musicians, and the body ink explosion could reveal and undercurrent of yearning to buy stuff that’s different from what everyone else is buying. But are people really more likely to resupply their wardrobes on Instagram instead of running to Target? Are they really going to start to see clothing more as a way of expressing what’s unique about themselves, and less as a way of signalling that they are similar to the people they want to be similar to?
I don’t know yet. The work continues.