Day 84: Marketing, Money, and Morality (Part 2)

It’s amazing how helpful it can be to talk to supportive friends and step outside of my head. I spent all of yesterday stewing on the ethics of marketing and advertising. I felt paralyzed, and writing that post was an agonizing exercise in both writer’s block and being stuck in endless thought loops.

In the evening, I went upstairs and talked with my housemates about what I was thinking about, and it was extremely helpful to get their thoughts. Note to self: The next time I feel stuck in my own head, don’t try to write or reason your way out of it alone; take a break and find ways to talk to others. I have a tendency to try to figure everything out all by myself, and I’d definitely like to unlearn that behavior.

The main takeaway that I had from my conversations yesterday was that it’s okay to make imperfect decisions because we live in a world of moral ambiguity.

Let’s take the example of me being vegan, for example. I choose not to eat animals and animal by-products because I don’t believe the few moments of pleasure we experience justifies the immense suffering we inflict upon billions of creatures every year. Especially when you can find so many nutritious and delicious options nowadays through a plant-based diet.

I currently live in a situation where most of my housemates eat meat, and we split the grocery bill every week. Perhaps the morally pure stance to take here is to refuse to help pay for the non-vegan items because I’d rather not contribute to the industries that abuse animals in this way. But I don’t know what that would actually accomplish besides making things harder for everybody, because they’re still going to buy the same products. In this case, I’ve accepted the moral ambiguity of living communally in a household where others don’t share my values when it comes to animal welfare.

Let’s switch back to marketing now. What would the ideal scenario for marketing my products look like? I’d love to eventually have enough of an audience where I can send out an email or a Tweet talking about what I’m working on and have lots of people try it out. And in this ideal scenario, the product would be so delightful that people would share with their friends through word of mouth. The product would basically spread on its own because people love it.

But even this scenario has some moral ambiguity. I’d be using Twitter, a platform that employs design patterns like infinite feeds and notifications in order to capture their users’ attention. I believe the attention capturing ecosystem created by these mechanisms is harmful to people’s well-being and to society as a whole, but I’d still be using it in order to spread my message. There’s moral ambiguity here as well because I’m contributing to platforms that try to capture our attention to use that power to show us advertisements.

That’s already the case in my behavior today, not just in this ideal scenario. I use services like Twitter and Facebook to share things about myself and my work. Eventually, it’d be great if enough people read Road to Ramen or subscribed to my personal newsletter so that I’d have the option to opt out of all of these platforms and have a direct relationship with my audience, but that’s not the case yet. So I use platforms like Twitter and Facebook in order to share products like Hide Feed and Intention, which are explicitly designed to help you spend less time and attention on those platforms. (The irony has not been lost on my friends.)

Affiliate marketing feels similar. I wish all creators could sustain their livelihood through direct support from their audience and find that sufficient so that the norm would be people sharing things because they love them rather than being paid to recommend them, but we’re not there. There’s certainly moral ambiguity in participating in this system and thereby supporting it, and I’m okay accepting that.

I think a large part of why I’m comfortable accepting the ambiguity here is because I truly believe that tools like Intention and Hide Feed will do a lot of good for people. It certainly helped to have my housemates tell me yesterday that they find Intention incredibly valuable and think I should propagate it more widely. In trying to share these tools, it seems that I’m faced with a choice: Would I rather be effective or morally pure? In an ideal world, I’d be able to do both, but if I had to choose, I would want more people learn about these tools even if the ecosystem through which that happens is imperfect rather than have them not find out about them at all.

What this all means: I’m going to set up partnerships and try to spread my products as much as possible because I think the benefit that people derive from using them will outweigh the harm of participating in today’s attention economy in order to help them discover them.

It’s possible that I’ll look back on this in the future and see this as a bunch of rationalization because I didn’t have the courage to take the purer path. Maybe so. I’m okay with that, too, because while I’m going to try my best, I’m not going to make perfect decisions every time. As long as I feel that I’m directionally headed in the right place, I’m willing to move forward.