Capitalism in the Digital Era of Language Models
Companies are constantly trying to be at the vanguard of digital marketing and, every day, a new business strategy is launched. The endurance of Capitalism relies on our belief that our financial endeavors will be successful if we put in the hours and learn to utilize all these digital tools, which are constantly changing and multiplying.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the darling tool of digital marketing for the past few years, until it was, since 2019, proverbially replaced by BERT, a Google language model which relies less on keywords and terms by interpreting more context. But by the time a tool is democratized (meaning, made widely accessible), it in essence ceases to be effective. The capitalist market, just like google searches, needs the competition for limited top spots.
This race to show up on the top of the 1st google page of a search is interesting, because you either need to insert yourself into a searchable trend, or manufacture one. Either way, it’s not a reliable scientific process where the input guarantees the result, though the myth of capitalist meritocracy relies on the belief it is. In reality, the success of a business venture is a gamble that requires plenty of initial investment before (and if) there are any returns.
In poker, a player needs to start by putting money into the game. Once they do, there is careful calculation of the odds of winning, and how to handle these odds depending on the opponent and the player’s equity. Just because there is calculation, it doesn’t mean it’s not a gamble, and the same goes for digital marketing and the success of a capitalist endeavor. The more money the endeavor has to start with, the more likely the calculations are to eventually turn a profit, and also for luck to strike.
It’s hard to accept that we are trying to make a living within a global market that’s a Casino. Instead, it’s easy to subscribe to business gurus and generic finance tips that don’t address the fundamental question of how to achieve an authentic and fulfilling existence in this world. When we believe there is a formula, and success is all personal merit, we are more likely to continue trying to reproduce what we have seen work for others, and that’s within the category of following trends.
Google how to be relevant on Google
The BERT model is the thing that predicts the end of your sentence on Gmail. If you type “How ”, a ‘tab’ will fill in “are you?”, and “I hope t”, tab, “his email finds you well”, etc. The results of this auto-complete text function are not only predictable and unoriginal, they are also not always factual.
Google searches, which use this model, interpret context and also predict and generate content based on massive data sets. To rank high on a search with this method, we need to be a predictable followup to a key term or question asked on Google. What we end up with is a large amount of content and business endeavors which ride the wave of trending searches – all of them competing for a top spot. Here you will find lots of clickbait, and overall unoriginal products and takes that follow a digital marketing formula for subjects that have already proven to be popular.
An example of this can be seen in the tip from the “Amazing Money Marketer” Sherri Norris, on how to make 90k selling notebooks through Amazon KDP. In this reel, Sherri shows how a black notebook sold 6 thousand units for about 15 dollars, and with “simple math” we can see the person made (6000x15) 90k. Then she goes on to explain how to create a PDF on Canva, upload it to Amazon KDP, and reap the rewards.
Her calculation doesn’t account for Amazon’s sizable cut of the profits for printing, shipping, and handling. Above all, it doesn’t account for the fact that without a considerable initial marketing investment, you will just not sell a single copy, buried under a hyper saturated market for notebooks on Amazon. This was pointed out by people in the comments, who tried and failed, and the solution pitched to them was “you have to alter your SEO strategy”, or “Do some research on the internet on how to market KDP low content books”.
There are several accounts describing themselves as helping “ordinary people make money” online or from home, many with the same legal disclaimer. These passive income gurus are scattered across the internet, only the highest profile ones facing legal consequences.
For trend following endeavors that follow this logic, this means there is no exact science for standing out from the crowd or remaining relevant in the long run. Most importantly, this logic doesn’t address the reality that to make money, we need to already have time and money. In Sherri Norris’ own words, from her fine-print disclaimer on her “website”:
“As stipulated by law, we can not and do not make any guarantees about your ability to get results or earn any money with our courses, events, affiliate program or free video trainings. The average person who buys any “how to” information gets little to no results.” (emphasis added.)
The Stanley Quencher trend
In Brazil, the country of Croatia is only googled in the context of football games. Optimizing a search for content about an earthquake in that region would entail restructuring it as clickbait – Or, to somehow manufacture demand for the subject of earthquakes in the Balkans. When it comes to products, being the only one of its kind is an advantage only when enough people know of and search for it. There is no surer way to be at the top of a google search than to have tons of people googling something only you provide. The question is how to get people to do that.
The Stanley Quencher craze is an extreme example of how to manufacture demand for a product only one company provides. Though the concept of vacuum flasks is not exclusive to Stanley, they managed to boost the public’s desire for a version of it only they provide. The result is a google topic breakout (or a massive increase in term searches) from November 2023 to today for a product launched in 2016.
Some have attributed this phenomenon to a collaboration with the site The Buy Guide (TBG), which, according to its founders, was created in opposition to the Instagram influencer trend. The three white stay-at-home mothers turned their online gift shopping hobby into a successful business venture, because they were “tired of seeing photogenic, perfect people selling everyday products on Instagram.” These women sort of led the way of this particular style of influencing, which rejects the ultra curated influential social media personalities in favor of stylish and well researched product-centric posts.
TBG’s collaboration with Stanley sparked a trend that some say got out of control. There is violence and crime in stores when new colors are launched in the US, social media is flooded with avid collectors, and Stanley cups are already popping up in Brazilian beaches and bars. Neither Stanley nor TBG followed a “how to” marketing guide to achieve sales like these. They were both groundbreaking in their respective fields of products and services, but that alone doesn’t explain their success. They were also at the forefront of a new marketing strategy.
Stanley cites itself as the inventor of the steel vacuum bottle in 1913, but the concept of the vacuum flask was developed by James Dewar in Scotland a couple of decades earlier. It wasn’t until 2020 that Stanley’s new president, Terence Reilly, clearly implemented the marketing strategy from his time at Crocs – utilizing “tastemakers” to ramp up demand for a unique brand aesthetic. Nowadays, tastemakers can be found on TikTok, which is why he gave a TikToker a new car. This business culture is described by one employee as “visionary opportunism”, where an opportunity to trend is found in uncharted territories.
Visionary opportunism requires money. An entrepreneur needs to already have money to invest in testing marketing strategies that no one has tried before. For people without the money for this initial investment, “How to’s” and SEO, in the words of the Amazing Money Marketer, “gets little to no results”. These tools are a type of folklore that pass down capitalist customs to the next generation. But, as we’ve seen in the futile attempts to criminalize insider trading, the global market is not only more of a gamble than a science, it is a rigged gamble. Should these tales and customs continue to be preserved?
The success of a business, just like the stability of the global market, is not based on the reliability of language models and the predictability of consumer demand. It’s based on initial capital, gambling calculations, and a whole lot of luck. The fact that, as a system, Capitalism is still described as the only one that works, where financial success is based on merit alone, seems like a desperate attempt to imagine order within the complete chaos and uncertainty of our modern world.
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
Mirna is a Brazilian writer, site editor at Gods and Radicals and founder of Plataforma9. She is the author of the book Anarcho-transcreation and producer of several other titles under the P9 press.