That so much money concentrates at the top that capitalists can’t find useful outlets for it, and that capitalism produces huge amounts of junk we don’t need or want, was reinforced for me upon reading a New York Times article on what apparently has become a war against Instagram bots.
You can’t make this up, can you? So much capital is thrown into marketing that huge sums of money are thrown at Internet “influencers” who apparently are “influencers” because they have large numbers of followers on Instagram. The problem here, from the marketers’ perspective, is that large numbers of those followers are fake. They’re bots created to inflate the size of followings.
Although I couldn’t read this business-section article without laughing at the absurdity of this, it did also nicely illustrate the tremendous amount of waste in capitalist production. You’ve got to have a lot of capital lying around to afford spending on buying posts on Instagram. There is good money in this, it seems, for those who succeed at positioning themselves as “brands” as opposed to, say, human beings.
In one example, the Times article quoted an “influencer” who “said that she charged about $1,200 for a branded post. She added that she knew people with two million followers who charge $40,000 per post.”
With a straight face, the Times article casually referred to companies that exist to “connect brands with influencers” and discussed other companies that exist to ferret out Instagram accounts with high numbers of bots among their followers. The article said: “The interest in such firms reflects how easy it is to fake popularity on platforms like Instagram, where bots seem to run unchecked even on accounts where people have not paid for them.”
Apparently, Instagram’s response to this “problem” is to reduce access to its data. That prompted this reaction from another “influencer” in the article: “It will be unfair until Instagram really just cleans out the bots and the lurkers.”
Altogether now: Awwwwww.
Your intrepid blogger does his best to maintain his revolutionary optimism, but reading articles like this does sometimes make me despair for the future. I know such people are a small slice of overall humanity, but, still, there are large numbers of such people who hopelessly swallow capitalist ideology. What if the vast sums of money thrown around in marketing campaigns instead went to more useful functions, such as affordable housing, clean water, environmental cleanups and repairs to our crumbling infrastructure, to point out only a few needs. The investment needed to modernize and maintain school facilities is estimated to be at least $270 billion, a fraction of what is spent on marketing.
We are talking about huge sums of money here: Estimates of the money spent on marketing in the United States per year range from $460 billion to $1.07 trillion. (The former estimate is from the book Marketing by Charles W. Lamb, Joseph F. Hair Jr., and Carl McDaniel and the latter estimate is from the Metrics 2.0: Business & Market Intelligence web site.)
Such numbers provide an expensive hint that too much stuff that don’t fill a need is produced. The size of the marketing and advertising industries wouldn’t be so gigantic otherwise. Production under capitalism is for private profit, not to meet human needs. To achieve those profits, vast efforts must be made to induce spending.
The latest Internet scandal, the harvesting of data from 50 million Facebook users by the secretive company Cambridge Analytica, can be seen in this light. The immediate scandal is that Cambridge Analytica, a company created by extreme Right hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and former Trump consigliere Steve Bannon, sought to manipulate elections in furtherance of their fascistic ideology. But there are plenty of multi-national corporations who would dearly love to get their hands on such troves of data. Whose to say some haven’t already? We don’t know.
Perhaps enough of these episodes will induce some naïve technology fetishists to re-examine their thinking. Why should corporate spying be more tolerated than government spying? An ex-son-in-law of a friend, prompted by being asked what he does for a living, actually saw himself as providing a necessary service when he explained how he works for a technology company to tailor advertising to the profile of a user, complaining that non-tailored advertising “would be a waste” — for the recipient of the advertising!
Those who work to create a better world sure have a lot of work to do.
Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet, and photographer. He has been involved in various activist organizations, including Trade Justice New York Metro, National People’s Campaign, and New York Workers Against Fascism, among others. He has authored the books "It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment," which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future and "What Do We Need Bosses For: Toward Economic Democracy," which analyzes past and present efforts to establish systems of economic democracy on a national or society-wide basis. He authored the book "It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment," which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future.
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