“I’m going to go on a cuckold podcast next weekend” (laughs).

I love the things I get to overhear in tech world.

This time, it’s a Zoom conversation between a woman who runs an online platform for AI-generated erotica and a potential partner for her company.

She and I discussed it briefly, after she hung up the phone and apologized for taking a call in the public working space (not that I minded). Apparently, there’s a whole world out there for folks interested in cuckolding. Podcasts, written erotica, and – in the case of the person on the other side of this Zoom call – professional coaches who specialize in helping couples achieve their cuckolding fantasies.

The only word I can come up with is… fascinating.

I’m thinking about this as a fascinating manifestation of our capitalist economy, where we’re increasingly bound together in online communities. As people discover their interest in topics like this, their cumulative demand creates entire professions that would be extremely difficult to explain to someone pre-internet. In this case, cuckold coaches.

Or maybe I’m the naive one and this profession has always existed, but not in my eyeline. I hate when smart people assume that something didn’t exist until recently just because they didn’t see it! I hear this all the time from smart people I respect, so I’m trying to do better.

Often I think of this tendendency of American capitalism as a negative. We define people more and more as individuals – less in relation to their families and communities – and create an ever-increasing color wheel of identity shades to choose from. Then, entrepreneurs sell that shade to individuals to help them feel connected to their identity.

I feel this issue when I buy goods because I fall victim to it constantly. Ever since my dirtbag days ended, I often find myself buying a piece of gear not for what it enables me to do, but because it helps me feel closer to that piece of my identity.

I usually argue this is a bad thing.

But maybe, when it reaches beyond goods and into services (e.g. cuckold coaching), it can be positive? An ever-expanding market that charges people money in exchange for helping them feel more like themselves? I’m tempted to see the good in it, yet I can’t help but wonder if there’s a sinister undertone; whether something in our media system creates the feeling that they aren’t yet feeling like themselves, thereby creating the sickness, the cure to which they then sell.

Stepping back to critique the above, is peddling goods in response to a felt lack really different from services? Are these morally distinct? If so, why? They’re both just market responses, aren’t they?

Maybe services are morally superior because their foundation is in experience. If all else fails, buying services connects humans to other humans. Many of those humans, you’d hope, have some sort of expertise we might learn and grow from, even if it’s not the service we explicitly paid for. I tend to take as axiom that connecting humans is usually good, if the alternative is not connecting them.

(Aside: objects, more so than with services, have to be traced back through the line from natural resources to final object, which often carries a lot of negative implications of exploitation… but I’m calling that out of scope here.)

But I could argue that the services are even more sinister! Because without needing to tie the cost to a physical object, you can extract money at any quantity and velocity, infinitely, potentially with even greater manipulation for the buyer to keep coming back. In other words, it’s easier to grift.

Argh, no easy answer as usual! Maybe it’s another bad question, making me buzz around the bottle.

Beyond the question of whether goods and services are morally distinct in the context of this essay, there’s a bigger question that I’m honestly a bit afraid to ask:

Is feeling more like yourself actually a good, coherent goal?

Or is the “self that you’re feeling more like” itself a product? Is it markets all the way down??? Is there some “pre-market” self that we can express?

This is the point that I usually try to pull myself back from the brink of (what I’d consider) over-philosophizing and ground myself in some human truths.

There are activities I know that I enjoy; they bring me closer to the people around me, to the world, or to myself. And there are objects I enjoy having because they feel important and meaningful to me. Whether those things would be important to my “pre-market self” (if such a thing even exists), seems irrelevant to me.

So, for now, I leave this question unanswered? Maybe you, the reader, will pick it up.

As I’ve talked about to people in my life ad nauseum, I struggle with consumerism because I know from experience that constraint breeds creativity… but that’s a post for another day.