The Extra Words
Some things look straightforward until you examine the structure underneath. These articles are the result of that examination; explorations at the intersection of technology, marketing, human behaviour, business strategy, and the patterns that connect them.
Analytical in approach. Lateral in perspective. Written for people who don't mind diving a little deeper.
When “Everything Music” creator Rick Beato posted a video about AI-based impersonation accounts, with bots flooding the metrics of engagement, and original creators losing ground to fake slop, I recognised a similarity in the patterns behind the different platforms.
Different industries, different decades, the same mechanism underneath: somewhere along the way, we’ve allowed an anonymous number to take over a personal relationship. We’ve accepted that bulk has replaced quality, and decisions are being made not on the basis of actual human feedback but on the numbers that a platform churns out.
"From Corporate back to Cooperate" follows that pattern through Citroën, Amazon, and a secondhand-clothing market, and asks what we're actually optimising for when we seem to forget the value of what we present to a customer base. Alongside McDonaldisation and the Walmart Effect, I am adding Sheinification as a term to describe how flooding a market with volume cheap enough to be disposable leaves nobody responsible for where any of it ends up.