I used to have a debate about Wal-Mart with friends and coworkers all the time. I suspect you did too. It went something like this:
Them: “Wal-Mart is evil. They’re ruining small towns and commerce in this country. Their approach leads to a race to the bottom.”
Me: “Don’t blame Wal-Mart, they are merely the agent. If you’re upset about what Wal-Mart is doing to communities, your real issue should be with the people that shop at Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart is just a proxy for your anger… And btw, Wal-Mart is not only not evil for single mothers of 6 kids – they’re a savior – cheap goods may not be necessary for you, but for some, they’re essential.”
For a long time I wondered why I was the only person that took that point of view. And today, many people still think Wal-Mart is evil. To me, it’s more nuanced than that. Of late I’ve had a realization though, this same conversation is playing out again with Demand Media. And with KFC. But let’s start first with KFC.
Satan's den? Or a mirror to our humanity?
Of course you know by now that KFC just launched the Double Down chicken sandwich. And guess what I’ve heard at least 10 times in the last week? “KFC is disgusting for exploiting people…” or “KFC is bad”. Shades of Wal-Mart is evil. But digging a little deeper, the Double Down sandwich is merely a product of market research and market testing:
During the product’s test market phase last year, high consumer interest and demand drove people to travel for miles to sample the Colonel’s tasty new creation.
We’d like to think of KFC executives being evil and exploitative, but that’s giving them too much credit. They aren’t brilliant enough to have invented the Double Down on their own, they’re merely reflecting our desires. Much like Wal-Mart does. When the public slides in the other direction, you find McDonald’s marketing their salads and orange slices instead of kids’ meals fries.
Currently, we’ve swung the other way, away from salads and orange slices, right towards a chicken sandwich where the bun is the chicken. Which brings me to my new theory, or at least a supposition:
People are uncomfortable with purely demand-driven businesses, because they expose what it is that people actually want… unfiltered. Which is often scary.
People demanded this mess
Which finally brings us to the aptly named Demand Media. You hear a lot of talk these days about how Demand is bad, and you might even encounter a Demand is evil comment. I was surprised how much of the talk at SXSW this year was around Demand and content farming, including a very balanced talk by Dan Gillmor: Are Content Farms Good or Evil? Yes. They are the most visible example among a set of businesses looking to exploit Google’s search results and farm out the creation of under-served content. A common criticism is that their end-product content is often unedited and often of suspect quality. But if there’s a void for step-by-step instructions on how to throw a good bachelor party in Vegas, you can be sure that Demand will sniff that out and create a post about it (note the first Google search result, from e-how, a Demand vehicle).
Demand burst into the public’s consciousness last year with Wired’s phenomenal article on their business practices, which, whether you like them or not, are brilliant:
The process is automatic, random, and endless, a Stirling engine fueled by the world’s unceasing desire to know how to grow avocado trees from pits or how to throw an Atlanta Braves-themed birthday party. It is a database of human needs, and if you haven’t stumbled on a Demand video or article yet, you soon will. By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Demand is already one of the largest suppliers of content to YouTube, where its 170,000 videos make up more than twice the content of CBS, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, Universal Music Group, CollegeHumor, and Soulja Boy combined. Demand also posts its material to its network of 45 B-list sites — ranging from eHow and Livestrong.com to the little-known doggy-photo site TheDailyPuppy.com — that manage to pull in more traffic than ESPN, NBC Universal, and Time Warner’s online properties (excluding AOL) put together. To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.
Much like Wal-Mart did in the 90s and 00s, and KFC is doing with their Double Down, Demand is giving us exactly what we want.
So instead of blaming Demand, those of us in the content creation, Web, publishing and communications industries need to ask ourselves – where is the demand for what we’re offering? Demand is making money while local papers are going out of business, could it possibly be that people value Demand’s content over the Sun Times’? If that’s the reality, you can complain and call Demand “bad”, or you can try to figure out what it is your former readers actually want to read.
Epilogue: If this depresses you, and you worry about the future of humanity, remember that the Wal-Mart revolution ushered in the slow food-Michael Pollan-Whole Foods counter-revolution. And Demand and AOL’s Seed will likely usher in a thoughtful, long-form, insightful content revolution.
Christian said:
I’m happy to read this economically correct assessment (agent, proxy, savior etc). It’s us who made their success possible.
hayblade said:
Isn’t the root of the problem though, the intentions of the corporate heads and the capitalist fueled incentives to place money over the common good. I imagine the naysayers are trying to state that the marginalization between places like Wal-Mart and homegrown “ma and pa” stores (which project a sense of culture and ultimately enrich the communities they are rooted in), is augmented, because of this heavy handed, multi-million dollar corporation having more freedoms and benefits than real people. The small stores are beat into submission and end up having to conform to the corporate lifestyle. It is the people’s responsibility to protest ideologies they do not agree with. Perhaps some can’t so eloquently articulate the reasons why, but I think it is overall an admirable sentiment.
Of course it comes down to the people, to “us”. Government is people; corporations are people (in the court’s eyes). It seems like a broken system, which motivates its people to be cut throat, and ultimately promote dehumanization in the name of wealth/power– that seems what is to blame. I believe an outlook of these consumers being the enemy of the naysayers is counter intuitive– pitting us against ourselves. If one says, “If Wal-Mart is evil, than make something better, that people will go to.” How can we, if we are instantly crushed by the corporation we set out to compete with? It is only the system with its deregulations and incentives, which makes it so.
Mike said:
In other words, its the people that’s fucked up?
Tim Meaney said:
@Mike – that’s one way to view it, I suppose. If there is a moral argument to made in any of these three cases, I’d just look at those demanding these goods and services, not those offering them.
Ravi said:
I have two things to raise, neither of which represents a definitive position for me on any of this.
First, I’m kind of suspicious of this whole tack, which I’ve heard in other contexts, that states: the problem is with the people asking for stuff –production is purely a reaction to desire/demand. I think that there is a more complex interdependence between production, consumption and desire, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that production has an impact on desire and thus on consumption.
Thorstein Veblen has some very interesting things to say about this in the Theory of the Leisure Class, as does Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle, two among many thinkers and texts on this subject, but the crux is that people can be seduced into wanting things that are not good for them by a pervasive value system that elevates conspicuous waste and consumption (useless use of materials) as signifiers of class and status.
I am not arguing that the whole world has been hypnotized by an evil conspiracy here, or that people are largely making decisions unconsciously — that would be a simplification — but I think that on some level desire can be created and amplified by forces external to its possessor, and that if you’re arguing that the solution (assuming there’s a problem) is to change what people want, then you can’t help looking at were their desire comes from, and amongst other forces I would expect to find some role in that for the producers of these commodities.
My second reaction is to your reference to revolutions, which is quite hopeful. My question is: who will lead the revolution in web content? Who might be the Jamie Olivers and Michael Pollans of web publishing? Also what makes such revolutions really successful when they are? Is the food one a good example? After all, the Double Down came after the slow food movement and all the rest of it. I often wonder what made the dolphin-free tuna and CFC-free aerosol movements so successful, especially the latter since it had to connect to such an abstract concept (the ozone hole), that had so little tangible relevance to everyday life. Was it the narrowness of their scope? Or some other factor? I don’t remember anything about the people who were the prime movers behind those revolutions (if they can be called that).
Chas. Porter said:
“People demanded this mess” is one of the funniest/saddest captions I’ve read in a long time. Great post.
Tim Meaney said:
@Ravi – smart, smart comment. I was overshooting a bit for effect, and you’ve hit an important point – just as I find it more nuanced than “Wal-Mart | Demand | KFC is bad | evil”, you’re pointing out that it’s more nuanced that “people are to blame.”
Glenn said:
In other words:
I’ve seen the enemy and it is us.
Next up: styrofoam cups — modern day convenience or Satan’s chalice?