The Top 5: From Amazon influencers to the triumph of supervillains
Welcome to the latest edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy these articles, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“Working Black Friday in the Rich Part of Town” (Electric Lit)
Because Emily Mester looks at the contours of consumerism through the lens of her former seasonal retail job.
I sold things I didn’t own. I sold things I didn’t like. I sold things to people who were already buying them. It felt right, somehow, to compliment the customer’s impulses. To confirm them. It felt like the store’s final act of magic, to transform want into need. This is really a must-have, I’d say as I scanned the barcode. We can’t seem to keep it in stock…I sometimes sold people to themselves, an act we also call a compliment when it’s done for free. I rang up a tall, skinny, slightly awkward-looking teenager and asked her, wide-eyed, if she was a model. Ulta employees do not work on commission. I worked on something else.
“The Enclosure of the Human Psyche” (Substack)
Because LM Sacasas tells us his advice for our current cultural moment: “My claim is that structurally similar processes are unfolding with the aim of enclosing the human psyche and transforming it into a resource to be managed and extracted.”
“Bad Influence” (The Verge)
Because Mia Sato chronicles the Amazon influencer industry and a major lawsuit between Sydney Nicole Gifford and Alyssa Sheil, two influencers with the same audiences on social media.
Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer industry has become, there are relatively few norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do exist are poorly enforced…Social platforms driven by trends, memes, and viral sound bites accelerate…homogeneity.
“The Supervillain Is the Hero Now” (NYT)
Because AO Scott invites us to examine a trend in pop culture: the triumph of the “heel” or supervillain.
In these movies, the characters aren’t so much evil as bullied, belittled and misunderstood. What might have seemed like their essential flaws — the Joker’s nihilism, Cruella’s ambition, Elphaba’s defiance — turn out to be virtues, or at least understandable responses to unfair circumstances. Their stories, built on familiar source material, invite us to believe that we’ve been looking at the world, or at least those imagined worlds, all wrong.
“Rejecting The Machine” (Substack)
Because Freya India interviews Paul Kingsnorth about the “Machine” aka our digital culture. We often read both of their Substacks, so we were delighted to see that they sat down together for a conversation.
The NYT piece is really intriguing to me, for two reasons:
1. Reading Reddit usernames and references in the New York Times is offputting; it probably has something to do with the interview between Freya and Paul.
2. I'd be curious to find out the relationship between men's attraction to Donald Trump (politically, probably) and their attraction to Scott's idea of rooting for the Supervillain. I'm going to be thinking about this!