Big Tech is Like Multi-Level Marketing

Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos founded Amway in 1959 on the premise that anyone with enough ambition and the right social network could build a business by selling cleaning products to friends and neighbors. The products were real; the business opportunity was considerably more complicated. Amway is the founding institution of multi-level marketing (MLM), an industry that by the 2020s had enrolled an estimated 120 million people worldwide. The business model compensates them not just for selling products but for recruiting others who will also sell products, and for collecting a percentage of everything their recruits sell, and everything their recruits’ recruits sell, in a chain extending downward through a downline. The mathematics of this structure are simple, but tend not to appear in recruitment materials. If each participant recruits three others, and each of those recruits three more, then a chain seven levels deep involves over 2,000 people all of whom must sell product to…