Network Marketing

Network marketing is the ultimate sales pitch, for it takes human sociability and turns it directly into money. Commercial advantage and consideration are piggybacked onto our closest and most trusting relationships. The old fences between the realm of the private and public self are quietly breached to allow access into the less defended areas. Commerce and intimacy become hopelessly fudged; the former ineluctably debasing the latter. The sheepdog learns to take the fox’s cut, all the way down the line of the network.

The marketing acolytes learn the ideological primacy of commerce and in their zeal to spread the benefits of the system, are sure in the knowledge that they are doing their friend or family customer a big favour. And of course they are if one sees as a social good the reduction of all relationships to that of producer and consumer. To those who don’t, it is a fundamental prostitution of intimacy and blight upon social intercourse.