Big Tech is Like the Beauty Industry

The beauty industry does not merely sell products. It works by making people believe they have flaws they were not previously considered flaws, by creating status competition around those flaws, by ensuring that the standards people are supposed to meet remain unstable, and then sells temporary relief from the insecurity it has helped create. The customer is never meant to arrive, because that would end the business model.

The same logic governs much of the digital economy. Platforms do not simply sell access to information, communication, or entertainment. They produce social comparison at industrial scale, amplify the feeling of falling behind or being left out, and then sell ads, subscriptions, and self-optimization tools as the remedy.

Thorstein Veblen identified all of this, even though he was writing in 1899 rather than in the age of Instagram. The point of status goods is not that they are useful or pleasurable. It is that they are visible evidence of social rank. The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”, which entered American English in the early twentieth century, names the same dynamic more plainly. Consumption becomes competitive because social standing is comparative, which means there is never “enough”. This competition is profitable because the goalposts move as soon as people approach them.

The beauty industry is a particularly efficient machine for converting status anxiety into revenue because it treats the human body as a perpetually unfinished project. Skin can always be smoother, hair shinier, teeth whiter, age less visible, and weight lower. What matters is not whether any particular intervention works as advertised. What matters is the manufactured belief that our peers are taking action, so we must too. This is why beauty advertising oscillates between aspiration and warning: you want to be admired, but you fear that you will also be judged.

Women have always borne the brunt of this manufactured insecurity. The modern beauty industry developed alongside labor markets and marriage markets in which women’s economic security and social standing were tied more closely to appearance than men’s. As legal barriers to women’s advancement weakened, appearance standards became a more intense disciplinary mechanism, not a less important one. A market built around telling women that their bodies require continuous corrective spending fits very comfortably inside a misogynist social order.

Big tech has given this machinery telemetry, automation, and scale. The platform feed is a Jones machine. It puts other people’s vacations, kitchens, bodies, weddings, and workout routines in front of us not as occasional local gossip but as a continuous global stream. The result is not just envy: it is the normalization of comparison as a default mental state. Am I fit enough, rich enough, busy enough, stylish enough, politically informed enough, raising my children well enough, or aging well enough? A system that can keep those questions humming in the background can monetize them indefinitely.

The comparison does not have to be truthful to be effective. Beauty advertising has always relied on lighting, retouching, and selective casting. Social platforms inherit all of that and add filters, algorithmic selection, and engagement optimization. The most attention-grabbing images are not the most representative ones. They are the ones most likely to intensify feeling s admiration, desire, resentment, or shame. The platform does not need users to believe that everyone else is happier, younger, or richer than us. It only needs users to feel, for a few seconds at a time and many times a day, that they are falling behind.

Influencer culture is itself manufactured. The beauty industry has long depended on the blurring of intimacy and commerce. Advice from a beautician and endorsements by actresses all worked because they borrowed the authority of friendship or expertise while remaining commercial speech. Influencers do the same thing with better metrics. They present consumption as personality and sponsorship as authenticity.

This is also where misogyny returns in a more explicit form. Women are subjected to the harshest forms of visual ranking online, and platforms profit from that ranking regardless of what they say in public about empowerment or self-expression. Image-heavy systems reliably reward content that conforms to existing beauty norms while presenting itself as spontaneous self-presentation. The labor required to produce that appearance is substantial and usually hidden. The result is an economy in which women are pushed to become both product and salesperson, while the platform captures a share of every transaction.

The beauty industry also helps explain why the language of choice is inadequate. No one is forced to buy a serum or post a filtered selfie, but choices made in response to organized social pressure are not free in any meaningful social sense. A teenager deciding whether to participate in appearance-based competition on a platform is making an individual decision inside a system designed to make non-participation costly, just like a programmer deciding to maintain a LinkedIn presence full of visible hustle and polished enthusiasm. The compulsion is social before it is economic, and economic because it is social.

What the beauty analogy adds to our understanding of big tech is not just that platforms sell ads—every industry does that. It is that platforms are in the business of manufacturing dissatisfaction and organizing it into recurring revenue. Their entire business model is that you are not quite enough yet, but perhaps one more purchase will fix that. A business model built on that premise has no interest in ever letting us feel finished.

See the whole series

Packard1957

Vance Packard: The Hidden Persuaders. McKay, 1957.

Peiss2011

Kathy Peiss: Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, 978-0812221404.

Veblen1899

Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class. Macmillan, 1899.

Wu2016

Tim Wu: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Random House, 2016, 978-0385352024.