STOP THE COMMENTS!!!!! On brands commenting down below and meditating on work and life balances. by Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick
Showing up in the comments, as a person or a brand, is an opportunity to express politics, humor, services: it’s all a means to steal attention, walking into someone else’s wedding, wearing a white dress with a blue checkmark. For many videos, this behavior places a great burden on regular people, whose non-influencer, personal social media becomes a public forum for commercialization. Conversation dissolves into B2B marketing: the comments section is an expression of the panopticon, that brands are truly always watching, that your phone really is listening all the time. Ads follow you, right into your comments, leeching out the fun for profit… You are not a person: you are potential ad space.
If a brand commented on my website I would delete it. It still makes work for me but at least I could get rid of the garbage.
See also: Performing yourself on social media
Investing commercial products with personal meaning, building identity through brands
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A glitch in the matrix of online shopping; Or: why I reverse-image-search before buying anything by Caitlin Dewey
As furniture and home goods sales have moved online, retail experts told me, more and more stores have sought a piece of the action. But instead of sourcing or creating their own products, many large retailers have relied on overlapping networks of manufacturers, distributors and third-party sellers — creating a baffling (and frankly, shady) shopping environment where many sites sell identical or near-identical items under different names and at wildly different prices.
As a consumer, it’s often difficult to tell whether you’re shopping with the retailer you typed into the address bar … or another, semi-anonymous third-party seller. The brand name rarely clarifies matters, since brands have lost all meaning in the age of Amazon: Is “Evelyn & Zoe” a Walmart line, sourced by professional buyers in Arkansas? Or are “Evelyn & Zoe” the kids of some anonymous drop-shipper reselling lamps sourced from Alibaba?
See also: Carcinization of the built and visual environment
The Homogeneity of Millenial Design
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Could we really pay off each others’ debt? by Joshua P. Hill
“The “new GoFundMe” is how Business Insider describes one of TikTok’s latest trends, where millions of people are watching thousands of videos in an effort to pay off people’s debt.”
One of the hardest things in organizing towards a better future is acknowledging that just because something is good doesn’t mean it’s enough.
See also:
“Audience commodity”
A society subservient to the market
Reflecting on 2020, looking ahead to 2021:
