This is a fun one I wrote last summer about the ineffable magnetism of “sales influencers” and other Gen Zers who seem, magically, to defy their economic generational curse via the social media artifice.
When I wrote it, I had just finished reading Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Leigh Claire La Berge’s Fake Work, and I think you can feel their fingerprints on this piece.
I love being lied to by beautiful, rich women on the internet, but not just any influencer will do. My preferred shared hallucination is the business influencer, over whose sprawling colonies the digital sun never sets. Recently, I’ve taken to watching a woman who I’m pretty sure is a scammer; one of those “coaches coaching coaches” types who sells a course about sales in an ouroboros of grift that fascinates me.1
She often delivers her sales sermons while cocooned in her car’s crimson leather interior, taut forehead gleaming in the Miami midmorning sun, tanned boobs hoisted chin-level by the scuba suit-like material of an athleisure corset. She almost always appears to be coming from or going to the gym, but while adorned with about $20,000 worth of jewelry. In every video, she proffers pearls of wisdom about “closing” or “objections.” I sit entranced, typically on the foot of my unmade bed or slumped over midafternoon at my desk, mouth agape, as I patiently receive her Instructions For Business. She is, I learned from one video, freshly 24.
The other day during one of my binges, I noticed a random assortment of friends from a variety of past life stages follow her. Do they share my sheepish anthropological interest, or are they more earnestly collecting tips for selling sales? I’m afraid to ask. Her videos telegraph access to vast, allegedly self-made riches with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. In one recent transmission, she invites the viewer (that’s me; it’s always me) to join her on a trip to purchase a sparkly pink Rolls-Royce. In another, she assures the viewer that it’s never been easier to create generational wealth; that 19-year-olds without degrees are making six figures quickly. Each video feels like a dispatch from an alternate reality.
There’s something magnetic, almost primal, about the personality type shameless enough to sell snake oil to strangers on the internet for $3,000. It’s darkly gratifying to witness this naked inevitability of the market: such a fraudulent offering in a stunningly confident package. She is not an aberration of American late capitalism; she is its pure, yassified id. In a particularly self-aware selfie caption, she refers to herself as “Gatsby”—if “he were a 23-year-old blonde girl in Brickell.” Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is, of course, the titular character of The Great Gatsby, a novel about a man whose “extraordinary optimism and power to transform his dreams into reality make him ‘great’” despite the fact that his wealth derives mostly from “criminal activity.” Like Gatsby, this woman and those like her appear to generate wealth and concomitant capital-B Businesses through sheer force of will, though it’s not always immediately clear how the Wealth and the Business might be connected, if in fact they are. What is this, if not the American Dream?
She exists in stark opposition to the millions of people I read about in the news every day, working full time for low wages, still unable to afford groceries. I wonder if they’ve tried selling sales, a small voice buried deep in my Instagram-calibrated brainstem offers unhelpfully. How could money be so hard to come by when it appears to flow so freely to this young woman?
Essay continued after this message from our partner…
A little palette cleanser to get you in the mood to strategize: Domain’s Head of Financial Planning (and—fun fact—the CFP® pro who builds my plan) Adrianna Adams joined me last fall for a grab bag episode of The Money with Katie Show.
In this episode, we tackled six money questions, each of which seemed to capture that sweet spot between “straightforward personal finance best practices” and “decisions that impact the quality of your life in a big way.”
If you yearn for a little throwback (pour one out; #LongLiveTMWKS), listen to Adrianna and me chew on:
The outdated personal finance “numbers” we need to move on from. (E.g., the 30% housing rule, a 20% savings rate, or the 4% safe withdrawal rate.)
How a serious health diagnosis should change your financial plan. (Macabre, but very much tips the standard “best practices” on their head.)
What graduate students should do to manage their money strategically, prior to earning a consistent income.
When to consider changing your career to earn more if you know you’re being underpaid, but otherwise like your job. (This one ended up producing a spontaneously vulnerable answer on my part.)
How to straddle two rungs of the class ladder after inheriting money from a family member, while working and socializing within a low-income field.
How to come to terms with and fully own the choices you’ve made, even if they’ve produced a more volatile career path than you may have intended or hoped for.
↗️ And if you’re interested in working with Adrianna’s team of Rich Girl Nation-dedicated CFP® professionals, you can earn up to a $2,500 investment bonus when you sign on before the end of the month.
And now, back to the essay:
She exists in a parallel digital economy, an artifice of enterprise where fake experts sell fake products to real people for real money. Before the dawn of the internet, one might have had to stalk the streets of Brooklyn and ask passersby one by one if they had any confidence in them to hold onto a pocketwatch until tomorrow. No longer! Modernity has granted access to a limitless supply of desperate suckers (and a few voyeurs, like yours truly) armed with Afterpay and an internet connection. Then again, to distinguish this particular arena of commerce as “fake” would imply the rest of our economic system—that which produces volcanic hoaxes like Enron and mortgage-backed securities and an entire class of products called “financial derivatives,” swapped like trading cards among highly paid professionals, and where management consulting firms construct simulacrums of humanitarian aid organizations for foreign governments, a sort of McKinseyian “Final Solution”—is somehow “real.”
In both economies, there’s a proportional relationship between the length of your tether to reality and the amount of money you can make. Most people exist somewhere in the middle of the distribution with normal jobs and normal incomes, coordinates where you’re unlikely to encounter pink Rolls-Royces. But the looser your relationship with the truth or your material and intellectual limits, the more likely you are to find yourself free-floating to the long tail where phenomena like venture capitalists and virality live, each equally likely to reward deluded audacity with vast sums of cash.
There, suspended in the primordial ether where the laws of economic gravity cease to exist, you’ll find the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried and Jake Paul. In Capitalist Realism, the late Mark Fisher argues that cataloging all of the system’s worst offenses—poverty, suffering, an endless barrage of Marvel movies—only serves to reinforce its legitimacy, its “realness.” The only way to undermine it, then, is to pull back the curtain and reveal the ways in which it is “inconsistent or untenable,” to demonstrate how its “‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort.” In other words, a recognition that flips on the overheads and shines fluorescent light on the scaffolding of the Matrix, revealing that its internal operating logic isn’t “real” at all.
That the most “real” jobs—cooking food, wrangling kindergarteners, bandaging wounds—are often those paid relatively low sums is less a reflection of economic efficiency and more a confirmation of this very distortion. Sometimes I can’t be sure my digital pen pal’s persona isn’t an elaborate piece of performance art, a theatrical ode to the great thrill of acquiring commodities and services or a commentary on the absurdity of modern resource allocation and “value creation.” Then again, her vocation makes perfect sense when you consider the incentives of a modern economy which line the path of least resistance like apple trees, offering forbidden fruit to anyone who notices that even the “real” paths have a distinctly surreal quality to them, and this one looks shorter, anyway. It shouldn’t be possible to make money from nothing—but the curious thing, of course, is that, like Gatsby, in a seemingly defiant insistence that her reality is otherwise, she has made it so.
Gen Z economic writer Kyla Scanlon frequently shares dispatches from far-flung college campuses all over America where young people confide their apprehensions about the job market or “the economy” writ large. To them, the system they’re entering is as self-evidently a scam as these Coaches Coaching Coaches2 empires are to me. Still, it seems none of us are strong enough to look away, let alone opt out. Those born between 1997 and 2012 report believing it takes an annual salary of $587,800 to be “financially successful,” more than three times the threshold that millennials reported.
To hear my favorite Sales Diva tell it, this salary is achievable with “just two closes per day.” It’s this glimpse into her world—one in which the rules of making money are simple, obvious, and vaguely erotic—that draws me to her like a moth to a ring light, where for a moment I metaphorically rest my head on her Pilates Body and allow the rest of the Monopoly game board to fall away. Instead of concerning myself with the consequences of the carried interest exemption or Medicaid cuts or my own late quarterly tax payments, I focus on her singular, ponytailed game piece, intrepidly dispensing cheat codes for unlimited $200 withdrawals. I much prefer this iteration of the game to the one we’re actually playing, in which every year yet more wealth is soaked upward, where it saturates the war chests of those currently disassembling our country and selling it for parts. To her more ambitious followers, she’s selling sales. To me, she’s selling a world where the economy is less complicated and capitalism more fun, and sometimes, even though I know she’s lying, I’m buying—because, for a few moments, it still feels nice to believe.
Thanks for reading.
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I once heard the tendency to become intrigued by things you find distasteful described as “oppositional curiosity.” It’s always nice to receive a new diagnosis.
“Coaches Coaching Coaches” is a phrase I’m borrowing from my friend Kate Kennedy, whose commentary on this subject is some of my favorite.
This is giving me the existential, midlife crisis I was hoping to avoid. Have I been scammed my whole life as an elder millennial into thinking that life was supposed to be going to college, getting a degree, entering the job market during the early 2000s recession, and making garbage money while still paying off student loans? Maybe I need to sell sales! (This is half sarcastic, half serious)
“Ouroboros of grift” is genius phrase and such an apt description of so much of what we (I?) see on social media these days