Verbal Intimacy in the Corporate Age
A couple of years ago, I got a package of cleaning supplies with a handwritten message, Thankful for you, Shir!, followed by a printed “Love, Grove.” My eyes lingered on the round, slanted script, its human inconsistencies, and I wondered who it belonged to, whether they enjoyed or resented this part of their job, whether they ever imagined the recipients of their scribbled thanks, or imagined being imagined by them. I wondered this to avoid wondering why, when I first saw the note, I’d been briefly, helplessly, moved—only for it to register, later, as so cringeworthy.
Around that time, I was caught off guard by a similar message. This one wasn’t handwritten but felt personal partly because it was tucked into my fertility test kit. I’d twice failed to take the test, and was nervous about failing again when I saw, beneath lancets and gauze, a pastel orange card with cream-colored letters. “You got this,” it said, “and we got you.” The words had such a reassuring, steadying effect, I managed to collect my sample within minutes. Later that evening, I recoiled at the sight of the card. “You got this, and we got you” rang hollow now that I no longer needed cheering. It was as if the slogan itself had pricked some fleshy part of me, slightly off center—as if it were designed, like the test, to draw something out. I was disturbed, then, to have been soothed.
Over the following months, I started noticing many more messages of this kind. “You’re cute, wanna hang?” my new magnetic hooks asked in pink bubble letters. “A visit from you?” a company emailed after I’d browsed their website, “we’re blushing.” My dental floss was “packed with love,” as was my inbox, with subject lines like “just a friendly reminder… you’re uhhhhhmazing.” The rhetoric was sticky-sweet, pseudo-intimate, gushing with praise and adoration—even, more and more, “love.” It seemed to attempt a connection between the company and me, if not assume we already had one. The messages from Grove and Modern Fertility weren’t unique, I realized; they were everywhere. They also seemed like the opposite of ads as I’d known them—a kind of negative image of what I grew up seeing—a near-perfect antithesis.
In the last episode of John Berger’s 1972 docu-series, Ways of Seeing, the British art critic interrogates what ads communicate to us and how we internalize their messages. “Publicity plays upon fear,” he says, “often the fear of not being desirable.” It implies you’re lacking in some basic way—that whoever you are, you’re inevitably, fundamentally, “inadequate.” This is the publicity I recognize: the kind I’ve been surrounded by for most of my life. The kind that convinces us, on a subconscious level, that our personal worth hinges on possessions. This kind of publicity “proposes to each of us that we change ourselves or our lives,” Berger says, “by buying something more.” It persuades us that “this more will make us in some way richer,” he continues, “even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.” Ads show us “people who have apparently been transformed” by their purchases, “and are, as a result, enviable.” Hypothetically, then, we aren’t beyond hope. We, too, could be transformed. We, too, could become enviable. “Not only will our home be different,” ads insinuate, “but all our relationships will become radiant” thanks to our new possessions, Berger says. Of course, he also says, “we can only achieve such radiance if we have money.” Of course, not everyone does. But ads console us, all of us, “with the promise of a dream.”
One such dream Berger calls “the dream of later tonight.” As he describes the fantasy, ads flash on the screen: a man looked at, adoringly, by two women; a dinner table shot of laughing faces; a person’s finger inside another’s mouth. “You are part of the good life they smile at,” Berger says, “they are part of the good life you smile at. Everyone is surrounded by what brings pleasure, but it is you who would bring the greatest pleasure of all.” You, that is, post-transformation. You, once you no longer are as you are. “And next morning,” Berger concludes the dream-narrative, “you will still feel the same about it.” You will remain changed—for a while. Ads remind us of this improbable future possibility and at the same time of our current, actual shortcomings. This you, they say—the one watching, absorbing the message—is still inadequate.
These days, publicity often seems to be doing the opposite. It’s increasingly body-positive and affirming. It thinks we’re “cute” and asks to “hang.” It’s “packed with love,” like the floss I’d ordered from California, before it slides between our teeth. The more intimately companies address us, the more complete the role reversal. It’s we who’ve become brand-like, and they who need our favor. They always did, of course, only now they admit it. But if this is so—if I’m not only adequate, but “uhhhhhmazing”—what can ads sell me? What new “dream” keeps me shopping?
This shift in approach seemed already in full swing by the time I noticed it. I wondered what set it in motion—how it might be responding to or reflecting societal changes. Did it embody the new ethos it appeared to? A real divergence from the one Berger critiqued? Or was it something less dramatic, but more subversive?
After ordering the home fertility test, I was invited to join the Modern Fertility Community, the company’s online forum for people with ovaries. I got access to mental wellness and ovulation tracking “meet-ups,” reminders to get “matched up” with a “fertility buddy,” and invitations to join online events, and learn how to access the “livestream feature of our community.” What I paid for, I was beginning to understand, wasn’t just the test, but admission into this digital hub. Getting such unlimited access to a “community” was somewhat unusual, though, after a one-time purchase. More often, this complimentary benefit is contingent on a paid subscription.
In her introduction to The Forever Transaction, corporate consultant and speaker Robbie Kellman Baxter describes her new electric toothbrush. “When I saw that the Oral-B Pro 6000 has Bluetooth and is ‘smart,’” she admits, “I was hooked.” The company’s mobile app “tracks where, how much, and how hard” Baxter brushes her teeth, while she supplies information about its brush heads and the “challenges” that bother her. The app also includes a camera feature to “allow communication with ‘experts’ at Oral B,” who may reach Baxter, with her permission, via both the app and email. Given “the way they’re delivering” on her “desired outcome,” Baxter writes, she’s become “a member of the Oral B family.” Oral B, in turn, has become part of what she calls the “Membership Economy.” The title of Baxter’s first book, this term refers to the “massive trend” toward subscription models, where companies encourage regular, recurring orders over irregular, singular ones. In describing the benefits of this model, Baxter switches between the customer and company’s perspectives so often, they begin to merge and seem, for her at least, interchangeable.
The Membership Economy “means moving from an ownership model to one of access,” Baxter writes, and “from an anonymous transaction to a known relationship.” It’s built around “forever transactions”—the recurring payments that facilitate our subscriptions, providing automatic, predictable, possibly indefinite streams of income for companies. When they “treat customers like members,” Baxter suggests, customers, in turn, “trust that the organization will continue to evolve products and services to deliver on that forever promise.” This is a “win-win” situation, according to her. “You [the customer] get the same great experience,” she quotes from her first book, “without having to enter your payment information ever again.” Without having to be reminded, unless you asked to be, that you were paying, while at the same time being reminded, for no particular reason, that you were “uhhhhhhmazing.”
Growing up in the nineties and aughts, I got used to a measure of distance in consumer-provider communications, one that now seemed to be dissolving, as was the distinction—even more curiously—between purchases. Years before forever transactions entered my vocabulary, I began sensing that my own, isolated ones resisted completion—that the conclusion of one commercial exchange was the inception of the next. “Check out” seemed reverse-engineered to a kind of “check in”—the beginning of active communication—a precursor, perhaps, to the “known relationship” Baxter recommended. My transactions served as pretexts for “friendly reminders” which, while meaningless in and of themselves, seemed to implicate me in these “relationships.” If I got something “extra” from a company—however unsolicited—I felt I owed something back. And so, when it came to my attention, I was hardly ever done paying.
The writer and former marketing consultant Anne Janzer is of the opposite conviction. Forever transactions not only save time, she thinks, they save emotional resources. “The psychological benefits of subscriptions are powerful,” she writes in Subscription Marketing, whose most recent edition includes a foreword by Baxter. “Subscriptions ease the pain of deciding. They alleviate the burdens of ownership and maintenance.” Offering complementary “communities,” they also alleviate, I think—perhaps no less importantly—the burdens of loneliness.
In this new model, an organization must prioritize the “well-being of the customer,” Baxter writes, and “the health of the long-term relationship.” Once they succeed at doing so, a company can expect “the holy grail,” which is to say, “loyal, recurring customers often buying automatically, indefinitely.” I had to do a doubletake to register that customers are described as recurring, in the quote above—not payments. Whether or not the choice was intentional, the underlying message was clear and familiar, one I’d seen often enough to internalize. When buyers are confused with their purchases, they may well “recur” in a sentence, and I wouldn’t know it. They may be treated, grammatically, as inanimate phenomena: recurring like dreams, like errors, like patterns.
“Publicity and oil paintings,” Berger says in Ways of Seeing, comparing the series’ two foci, “share many of the same ideals, all of them related to the principle that you are what you have.” The difference between them is this: while paintings portray the wealth already acquired by their subjects/owners, publicity “appeals to a way of life we aspire to, or think we aspire to, but have not yet achieved.”
Marketing has changed, of course, since the release of Berger’s docu-series—as has the market. But the principle that you are what you have continues to operate, if more covertly, today. I read it in Grove’s handwritten thankful for you, which preferred not to get specific, not to mention a transaction, forever or otherwise. By using “you” as a stand-in for “your order”—or “business,” or even “support”—Grove collapsed me with my money. It confirmed that I still was what I had/bought: there was no need to distinguish us at all.
In Barbara Loden’s film Wanda, the titular character, played by Loden, finds herself on a road trip with a near stranger. She’s just gotten a divorce, rescinded custody of her children, and been robbed. Mr. Dennis, a man she’s been following since the two met in a bar, is driving the car. He won’t tell her where they’re going. “No questions when you’re with me,” he reprimands, “no questions.” At some point, they pull off the highway and park at the sandy edge of a field. Mr. Dennis, liquor bottle in hand, takes a walk around while Wanda sits on the car hood, snacking. In a rare gesture of kindness, he approaches, takes off his jacket, and puts it over her shoulders. “It’s so calm,” Nathalie Léger writes of this moment in Suite for Barbara Loden, her genre-bending study of the film, “they can put aside suspicion and caution, abandon themselves.” But Mr. Dennis cuts the moment short:
“Hey,” he says, hovering over Wanda, grabbing her hair, “let me see. Why don’t you do something about your hair? Looks terrible.”
“What can I do?” she responds.
“Let me see,” he says again, gruffly tilting her head toward him.
“I lost all my rollers,” she offers.
“Why don’t you cover it up?”
“Cover it up? What I’ll cover it up with?” She asks, now off frame.
“Why don’t you get a hat and put it over it?”
“A hat?”
“Yeah,” he says, “a nice hat. Put it on your head.”
“Well… cause I, um…,” she squints at the setting sun behind him, frowning, “I don’t have anything to get a hat with.”
“Wh- why?” Mr. Dennis sounds surprised, confused.
“I don’t have anything. Never did have anything. Never will have anything.”
“You’re stupid,” he shoots back.
“I’m stupid?” she echoes, less in protest than tentative confirmation.
“You don’t want anything? You won’t have anything. You don’t have anything, you’re nothing.”
For Mr. Dennis, it seems, being and having are synonymous, so much so that without things, one ceases to exist.
“You may as well be dead,” he tells Wanda. “You’re not even a citizen of the United States.”
Without belongings, or the wish to have them, Wanda doesn’t belong here, according to Mr. Dennis. She seems to accept her predicament, which is to say, to infringe, from his perspective, on her origin, her birthright, the American Dream: everything he believes in, everything ads taught him.
“I guess I’m dead then,” Wanda responds.
“What do you mean?” he sounds bewildered. “Is that what you want to be? Dead?”
Wanda says nothing. Without money, she can’t change herself or her life “by buying something more,” as ads suggest we all do. She also can’t be made “poorer,” as Berger points out, by having spent any. In other words, she can’t be made richer because she can’t be made poorer. She’s stuck—inconceivably to Mr. Dennis—as who she is. Just as she is.
After a long silence, he asks again. “Why don’t you get a hat?”
What he can’t let go of, I think, isn’t really the hat, but the image of a hat-wearing-Wanda—the idea that she should be transformed by it. That a hat would bring her back to life, restored and unharmed, like a magician’s trick. That she could be made to fit in.
I keep thinking back to this scene—how clearly it embodies the principle Berger critiques—how timely it still feels despite having come out in the early 70s, the year before Ways of Seeing.
By now, both Wanda and Ways of Seeing are over half a century old. But if to have is still to be (as I think it is) and if I don’t have very much, why am I no longer “inadequate”? How has “uhhhhhmazing” come to define my new default?
Perhaps people are less susceptible, these days, to old advertising tactics—more likely to recognize them as a capitalist prescription, or one of its side effects. Perhaps ads have adapted to recent cultural shifts, and now reflect or even influence our evolving societal values. But what exactly are these values? Can they fully account for the one-eighty advertising seems to have taken—from insinuating intrinsic deficiency to mirroring, even promoting, a sense of intrinsic worth?
The Membership Economy, Baxter writes, requires “moving from one-way—or even two-way—communication to a full community.” These days, when we subscribe to a product or service, we often also subscribe, whether knowingly or not, to these “full communities.” We buy access not only to things, or to customer service, but to people who bought what we did. “We each [herself and Janzer] recognize the importance of effective communication,” Baxter writes in her forward to Subscription Marketing, “not only to drive the moment of transaction, but also to deepen engagement among subscribers.” In this way, companies also deepen their customers’ sense of community, and even, perhaps—as on Substack, a growing newsletter platform—interdependence. Companies become “communities,” not only organizations that offer them. Some have gone as far as to become “families.” Which is to say they, too, have been transformed by our purchases.
On Substack, a paid newsletter subscription often includes a chat feature for direct communication with its writer. Sometimes, it includes monthly Zoom meetups and other events where fellow paid subscribers can get to know one another, form independent connections, and maybe even become each other’s paid subscribers. “Substack’s subscription network encompasses more than 3 million paid subscriptions,” I read on the platform’s website. “We believe that together we can build a new economic engine for culture.” The phrase “a new economic engine” appears three times on the About page. But what is this new engine? What does it run on?
“Everywhere you look,” Baxter writes, “organizations are prioritizing lifetime customer value over new customer acquisition.” This may not be an exaggeration. According to the 2021 subscription economy index published by Zuora, a software company catering to this very market, the subscription economy has grown 437% since 2012. In what is “now the mainstream economy,” as Janzer claims, a company’s target customers are often those it already has. Any inadequacy we might feel, then, isn’t an asset to the business, but a liability. If we’re already consumers, already transformed into our “richer” selves, to make us feel lacking is to make us look elsewhere. With this model, our dissatisfaction with ourselves no longer guarantees revenue. Instead of something to rely on, it becomes something to remedy.
Enter “uhhhhhmazing.” According to the new operating logic, there should be no contradiction between being what we have (and having little) on the one hand, and being “uhhhhhmazing” on the other. Just as “inadequate” applied to us indiscriminately, if differently, so would “uhhhhhmazing.” Both labels are loose-fitting, keeping us reductively defined. In this way, they aren’t opposites—or even all that different. “Uhhhhhmazing” isn’t perfect; it isn’t even amazing.
And so, ads tempt us with another transformation: not from inadequacy to allure, but from detachment to connection. That we’re all “uhhhhhhmazing” doesn’t mean we can’t be better off; it means, rather, that we would be better off together. This, I think, is the new “dream” on offer: self-betterment in the form of an “I” turned into a “we,” a promise many have found appealing, perhaps especially since Covid, in an increasingly isolated, polarized societal climate. The improved self isn’t just an extension of the self, but goes beyond it: a kind of meta-self, scary as it sounds.
If we were once made to feel inadequate so we’d make random purchases, we’re now made to feel “uhhhhhmazing” so we’d keep making the same ones. But the “new economic engine,” I think, runs much like the old: on fear. If we’d been driven, in the past, primarily by personal, micro anxieties—fears of being unenviable, unappealing—we’re now driven, it seems, by their broader, social varieties. We fear exclusion. We fear being cancelled. The more “communities” we have, the less likely we are to find ourselves completely ostracized.
Paid subscribers to the same Substack newsletters—those who have a chance, over the chats and Zoom, to get to know each other—are likely to have something of a common language, similar interests and values, if not all the above. They’re likely to feel, from the comfort of their respective spaces, at ease “with” one another and within the larger community. They’re likely to feel stimulated, enriched, perhaps even seen. They’re likely to feel a sense of companionship and camaraderie. And so, they’re likely to stay.
Glamor—the state of being envied, as Berger defines it—“works through the eye and the mirror.” So, I think, does belonging. On self-selecting Substack “communities,” our desired identities are affirmed by our financial commitments: presented, through screen and camera, to other members, then reflected by them back to us.
In the current climate, my long-term financial ties—my “known relationships,” as Baxter calls them, with companies—are reflective not only of my values, but more specifically and consistently, it seems, of who I am. Both in the cultural imagination and my own subconscious, my money is conflated with my person, making all financial choices more fateful, more weighty—judged, within my mind, by an imagined critical observer. Companies, too, seem to be under similar pressures, not only because subscriptions can always be cancelled, but because companies, too, can be cancelled as a whole.
The more I self-identified with my spending, I noticed, the more I bought out-of-my budget: paying, in a sense, for the right to see myself as a conscientious consumer. Grove was appealing for this reason, promising to be plastic neutral by 2025, selling compostable trash bags, bamboo tissue paper, and reusable kitchen towels. I ordered these items all while—or because—I drove a conventional, polluting car. As my subscriptions mirrored me, I began depending on them for a quick, corrective sense of self. I got the stuff by paying, and then, it got me back.
Perhaps this was, in part, what disturbed me about “you got this, and we got you.” The slogan sounded at once vacant and resonant: “got you” as in, you’re done. As in, game over. But you aren’t “dead,” to take the game metaphor further, the way Mr. Dennis means in Wanda. When you lose a round, you’re reborn. You get another chance. The implication of “got you” in this sense isn’t that you should resign in acceptance, but rather that you should p(l)ay another round—that you should continue until you forget you’ve been p(l)aying—until you forget you could exit the game.
Creating your own forever transaction, Baxter advises companies, is “about orchestrating the moment when customers remove their ‘consumer hats’ and don ‘member hats,’ commit to your organization for the long term, and stop considering alternatives.” The emphasis is in the original; forever transactions depend on this last, key point. Consumers must forget the world outside the game, beyond the rims of their hats. But what Baxter seems to suggest, I think, is even more insidious. “Member hats” aren’t only more comfortable than “consumer” ones, we gather, but so comfortable, we may not feel them at all. To take this metaphor, too, a little further, let’s imagine these hats are real. Let’s say they’re Yankees baseball caps. At once, the caps signal an affinity to a larger group, and keep their wearers somewhat hidden—made more similar to one another, less identifiable as themselves. They guard against exposure and recognition. Had Wanda been able to afford one—perhaps not a Yankees cap, necessarily, but nothing fancy, either—she may have been spared the tyranny of Mr. Dennis’s speech, his displeasure at her hair, supposedly, but really, at her way of being. She may have become acceptable in his eyes; she may have been accepted by him. All this to say, caps make belonging more apparent, while keeping distinctive features mostly concealed. To take the metaphor even further, let’s imagine “member hats” aren’t real. Let’s imagine they’re “phantom hats”—the lingering sensation of “a tightly worn accessory,” as Kathryn Schulz explains, “after it had been removed.” If we can feel the hats’ absence, but not their presence, then they’ve become, in a sense, extensions of our bodies.
In the preface to the most recent edition of Subscription Marketing, Anne Janzer writes, “As the author of this book, I feel like I’m involved in a subscription relationship with it. Every two or three years, I renew my investment by bringing it up to date. The book before you is the third edition.” She then asks: “Why do I keep renewing this book? Like any loyal subscriber, I re-up my subscription because of the value of the experience.” The implication seems to be that not to re-up could devalue the experience of writing, or the book itself. I see what she means—“the shelf life of a book,” I recently read, “is somewhere between milk and yogurt”—but there’s something to be said about the value of finitude, about finality as a constraint, a source of meaning in and of itself. Janzer’s argument might then be made in reverse: to not repeat an experience is to value it for what it was. This may be besides the point, though, when it comes to subscriptions. They’re less often about experience, I think, than about routine: its convenient, predictable opposite.
In a 2022 article published in The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, University of Graz researchers describe the relationship between consumers’ behavior and their attachment styles. Those with secure attachments to brands, the research found, were more prone to adopting what they call SOS—subscription-based online services. This finding, while unsurprising, seems to lend itself to an ironic read: it’s the “secure” attachments that lead, more often, to “SOS.” Are we pleading through forever transactions—which bind us at least temporarily—to be rescued? And from what?
Recently, I became a paid subscriber to one newsletter I really do value reading. I have plenty of other subscriptions, too—biannual floss, triannual noodles, bi-monthly vitamin Bs—because they’re the financially sensible choice, but also because I’m not immune to their appeal. Beyond convenience, cost-efficiency, and, at times, community, the forever transactions I still sometimes resent offer concrete proof of commitment—the same kind Janzer had to her book—to my own projects. My 4-minute noodles aren’t nutritionally or otherwise valuable in themselves, but they allow me to protect what is (time.) While certainly not all, some of my subscriptions—and perhaps some of yours, if you have any—are an indirect record of efforts toward something, attempts to tap into that unlikely future potential, that unlikely, better self. The one who could maybe belong.
The self we’re financially and emotionally invested in, I think—the one that reflects us both internally and externally—is the self-in-community. We glimpse it through the eye and the mirror, the screen and camera, the most recent bank statement, if we look at it, and the one yet to come. But where belonging is bought, it’s only temporarily secured. We must keep paying to keep our seats. Like the radiant, glamorous worlds of ’70s ads, our digital “communities” are exclusive, ticketed spaces. They, too, are somewhat illusionary. But the autopay is real.
At the end of Ways of Seeing, Berger asks: “What is really the connection between these publicity images and our own lives? Between their promises and our own needs? Why, eventually, are these publicity images so bleak?” To answer these questions, he turns back to oil paintings. What surrounded them, he says, are the “gold frames that symbolized the wealth of the owner within and around them. What surrounds the publicity image,” on the other hand, “is us as we are. Our cities are papered with dreams that invite us to enter them, but they exclude us as we now are.”
What surrounds the closed “communities” of Substack, for example, is the content we can scour freely at the margins, usually alone as we stare at the screen—our transformed selves supposedly right at our fingertips, like the full members of these “communities,” and yet, still out of reach. Because if we can’t afford their fees, these “communities” exclude us, too—“uhhhhhmazing” as we may be.
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