Big Tech is Like the Beauty Industry

The beauty industry does not merely sell products. It works by making people believe they have flaws they were not previously considered flaws, by creating status competition around those flaws, by ensuring that the standards people are supposed to meet remain unstable, and then sells temporary relief from the insecurity it has helped create. The customer is never meant to arrive, because that would end the business model. The same logic governs much of the digital economy. Platforms do not simply sell access to information, communication, or entertainment. They produce social comparison at industrial scale, amplify the feeling of falling behind or being left out, and then sell ads, subscriptions, and self-optimization tools as the remedy. Thorstein Veblen identified all of this, even though he was writing in 1899 rather than in the age of Instagram. The point of status goods is not that they are useful or pleasurable. It is that they are visible evidence of social rank. The phrase…