Music producer and online educator Rick Beato posted a video last month about AI slop flooding his corner of YouTube, about channels impersonating musicians and real critics, saying things that anyone with actual ears would never say (a bass guitar pronounced not as the instrument but as the fish). These channels rack up views that don’t come from people watching, flooding the algorithms with bogus nonsense. Bots doing the liking, bots doing the sharing, and the numbers climbing regardless of who’s actually on the other end. Beato was annoyed, and rightly so. Besides the fact that the imposter videos were bad AI-copies, what caught my attention even more was the nature of it. Because we’ve seen this before, just not like that on YouTube and just not only last week.
On a Platform
My second car, bought in 1993, was a Citroën. Every car since has been one too. It’s a heritage brand, offering affordable luxury, with a habit of doing things differently before anyone asked them to; headlights that turn with the steering wheel, suspension that reads the road instead of just absorbing whatever it throws up, aerodynamics nobody else bothered looking into at the time. The DS and the 2CV are proof, to me, that a manufacturer can be creative, genuine, and personal, and still sell cars.
Right now, I have an issue with mine that simply refuses to disappear. Nothing dramatic, just persistent. Solving it means moving through a chain: garage, dealer, importer, manufacturer. Twenty, thirty years ago that chain had names on every link. The garage owner knew me. The receptionist knew me. And so did the mechanic. I was a customer with a history and a relationship. When something needed fixing, I reached out to a person, and a person took care of things. It felt like cooperation. Today, I seem to be reduced to a vehicle identification number with an error code. And fixing something means first getting tagged in a system.
Here’s roughly how that happened. Local garage Dereumaux couldn’t keep up and folded. City dealership Driessen took the space. Nefkens was the bigger local rival right next door with several workshops and showrooms across the region. And all of that business, eventually, ended up owned by Emil Frey, a Swiss automotive group operating across Europe. Citroën itself became part of PSA, then Stellantis, sharing a “platform”, their word, with Peugeot, luxury brand DS, and now Opel too. A platform: a useful word, an efficient word, and a revealing one.
Local garage competes with dealership. Dealership sits inside a holding. Holdings merge. Merged holdings reach beyond borders to compete with other giants. Somewhere during that evolution, the person who used to answer the phone stopped being able to solve the problem, and not for a lack of caring or trying. The decision that matters just isn’t made at their desk anymore.
I still have my little tech issue and it seems that nobody past the garage is close enough to fix it. Meanwhile, in offices higher up, success is increasingly expressed in dashboards, KPIs, revenue, and profit. The farther decisions travel from the customer, the easier it becomes to optimise the number instead of the experience.
Same Story, Different Shelf
None of this, however, is unique to the automotive industry. The same pattern appears everywhere.
A few years ago, Amazon moved into textile printing; it invested, patented, started competing in areas where specialised companies had already been active for decades. Textile merch on demand; with their efficient e-commerce and fulfilment platform, and money to spend on acquisitions, Amazon could drive progress in domestic manufacturing. Growth, investment, shareholder value, the usual vocabulary of business development. Money doesn’t find its way back into the communities that used to run these businesses, though. Feedback doesn’t travel upward either, unless enough people complain at once so it would register as a data point instead of a nuisance. It’s all part of a highly efficient system. And so, competing with Amazon no longer means competing with another printer. It means competing with one of the world’s largest logistics and technology platforms.
Which brings us back to the Beato clip, one industry over. Sociologists already have names for parts of the occurrence. The Walmart Effect: what happens to a place once a large enough disruptive force moves in and the local version of things can’t compete on price or reach, whatever the quality difference actually is. McDonaldisation: the gradual replacement of distinctive human experiences with a version optimised for efficiency, predictability, and scale. The impersonation channels Beato found, and the bots inflating their numbers: that’s McDonaldisation applied to attention instead of food.
I’d add another term: Sheinification.
Not as a criticism of one company, but as a description of a mechanism. A flood of ultra-cheap fast-fashion moving around the planet with nobody responsible for where it eventually lands. It ends up, among other places, in Mitumba markets, the secondhand-clothing graveyards where only a fraction of what arrives is even wearable and the rest just sits there, imported faster than it can ever be sorted. Same textile industry as the Amazon example, further down the supply chain. And I’m using the example twice deliberately, because it happened twice.
What actually connects all of it is not just the size of it, but the mechanism behind it. Plenty of things get big and stay decent. The problem arises when the feedback loop breaks. A person telling another person, and information travelling back to where decisions are made. A relationship that actually changes behavior, getting replaced by a proxy. A benchmark. An aggregate number. A score.
Nobody at the top wakes up choosing indifference; they’ve been handed a number instead of a relationship, and the number is what the whole system responds to. Call it the Hamburger Index: value collapsed into a single monetary comparison, blind to everything that doesn’t fit the metric. Craft, context, connection, trust; everything that does not fit the measurement becomes invisible.
Beato’s audience can tell him apart from a copy, the aggregate numbers can’t. The platform keeps handing both the same reach and leaves the sorting to whoever’s watching. The car owner is the one holding the open ticket, not the boardroom that decided a platform was more efficient than a person. And somewhere past Mitumba, someone is sorting through what got dumped rather than sold, because the system that produced it isn’t the system that has to live with it. The system keeps the number while the customer keeps the difference.
Except
Two things about this don’t fit as neatly as the rest. Niche markets often survive because they were never competing for the same customer in the first place. Their value comes from specialisation, not scale. Luxury survives differently. It does not compete in hamburger territory; it operates through aspiration, symbolism, scarcity, and identity. Interestingly, those who benefit most from the luxury layer are often connected to the commoditised layer underneath it. The exemption tends to belong to those who are already high enough up to afford it. And, paradoxically, those that aspire to transcend hamburger territory will defend it, even if they suffer from it.
There’s an old Dutch line that fits here: “beter goed gejat, dan slecht bedacht”. Translated: better well stolen than poorly invented. It captures something important: innovation has always involved copying, adapting, improving, and building further. Someone succeeds, others copy or improve on it, the market grows. Growth attracts competition, and competition goes one of two ways: the pie gets bigger for everyone, or someone starts eating someone else’s slice instead of baking a new one. Niche is where nobody’s competing for the same piece. Hamburger territory is where the cannibalism happens.
This isn’t an argument for breaking it all down and going backward, though. The ‘garage-owner-knows-your-name’-economy also had its downsides. Less consumer protection, more local monopolies, and knowledge that sometimes only worked in one direction. Anyone who’s dealt with a small-town business that knew you were dependent on them knows proximity doesn’t automatically equal kindness.
The alternative, however, is not that we have to choose between corporate scale and nostalgic localism. It’s closer to what a lot of European places still seem to value: a cultural backbone that never fully let go of local scale even as things grew around it, and that dampened a fair amount of what usually comes with growth elsewhere. Not because the past was better, but because some things are worth protecting. The creative, genuine, and personal character of the brands we know, combined with the efficiency and tools available to us today.
Instead of an anonymous platform for the masses, a sophisticated approach to the individual. Instead of an abundance of fake copies, a valuable expression of a relationship. From slop to craft, from platform to person.
From corporate, back to cooperate.
Photo credits: Textile Mountain: The Hidden Burden of our Fashion Waste; Rick Beato’s “Everything Music” Channel.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-corporate-back-cooperate-roland-biemans-2yxbe
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