When Everything Becomes a Product
We Never Stopped Selling Each Other Things, We Just Got Better Tools for It
I was standing in public when I noticed a small rolling bag.
Not a suitcase. Not a travel trolley. Just a medium-sized bag with wheels attached to it.
My immediate thought was:
“Why does that thing have wheels?”
The bag was small enough to carry comfortably. The wheels seemed unnecessary. For a brief moment I wondered whether it was designed for dwarfs before laughing at my own absurdity.
When I mentioned this observation to Andi, he shrugged.
“Some people make things differently.”
His answer was sensible. It was also unsatisfying.
Because the question was never really about the bag.
The question was: Why did somebody decide that adding wheels was worth the extra cost?
I was looking at an object. What interested me was the mind behind the object.
Most people see a bag and move on. I see a bag and start wondering about the meeting that created it.
Was it an engineering decision? A marketing decision? A cost compromise?
A designer’s bad idea that somehow survived six rounds of approval?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the bag represented a much larger phenomenon.
Many of the things around us are not designed for optimal function. They are designed for optimal sale, like putting spoilers on cars that never see a track for example.
That sounds cynical, but it is simply how incentives work.
An engineer asks:
“Does this improve the product?”
A marketer asks:
“Does this improve the customer’s perception of the product?”
Those questions often overlap. Sometimes they do not,
So, the wheels may provide little practical benefit. They communicate portability. They signal travel. My instinct to question “why add something that seems unnecessary?” is probably actually closer to engineering logic or systems thinking. It just bumps into the reality that humans don’t build things purely rationally, they build things that survive markets, habits, and attention spans.
Also, let’s be real: if pure efficiency ruled the world, half the products in existence would disappear overnight and we’d all be living in extremely functional but emotionally depressing IKEA universes.
In other words, the wheels may be doing more work in the customer’s imagination than on the ground.
Another example is… imagine people got crazy over Labubus. Their marketing team did their job really well. Labubu is basically a masterclass in “irrational desire engineered on purpose.”
What makes something like that work isn’t utility at all. It’s a stack of psychological triggers:
First, controlled scarcity. Limited drops, blind boxes, unpredictable availability, your brain treats that like a slot machine. Uncertainty = dopamine.
Second, distinct identity design. Labubu doesn’t try to be “pretty” in a traditional sense. It’s a bit odd, a bit mischievous, instantly recognizable. That makes it a social signal: “I’m in this niche, I get the reference.”
Third, collectability loop. Once there are variants, chasing starts replacing owning. The goal shifts from “I like one” to “I need the set.” That’s where it becomes sticky.
Fourth, social amplification. When enough people post it, the product stops being an object and becomes a shared language. At that point, marketing isn’t pushing anymore, it’s just riding momentum.
So yeah, Andi’s “marketing over engineering” point scales up perfectly here. Labubu isn’t winning because it’s useful. It’s winning because it’s emotionally engineered to be wanted, not needed.
And the funny part? Once something hits that level, the original product barely matters anymore. It’s just a carrier for status, play, and identity.
Weird luggage observation and Labubu are actually the same phenomenon at different intensities:
One is weak signaling : “this bag has wheels”
The other is full psychological capture : “I need this blind box”
Same logic, different volume knob.
Once I started thinking about this distinction, I began noticing it everywhere.
Take social media.
The original promise of social networks was straightforward: connect people with people. For a while, they did.
In the early days of Facebook, profile pictures were usually faces. Actual human faces. People used their profiles to represent themselves.
Then something changed.
Faces became logos. Logos became brands. Brands became identities.
I was so confused when some profile pictures on my friend list became shoes. Others became handbags. Some became businesses. Others became entire personal marketing campaigns.
The transformation happened so gradually that many people barely noticed it.
The profile remained. The purpose shifted.
What was once a digital representation of a person increasingly became a digital representation of a persona.
Or worse, a product.
The irony is that this was not entirely new.
People often blame social media for turning human relationships into commercial opportunities.
Yet long before Facebook existed, many of us had already experienced the ancient version.
An old classmate suddenly calls after ten years of silence.
Not because they miss you. Because they sell insurance ( Hello Susan :) )
A distant cousin reaches out.
Not because they want to reconnect. Because they joined a multi-level marketing scheme. ( This one is you, Karen >.< )
The internet did not invent the habit of seeing people as potential customers.
Human beings have been mixing commerce and relationships for centuries.
What changed was scale.
In the past, social and commercial interactions occupied different spaces. So, yeah, this “everything is a potential customer” thing didn’t start with the internet. The internet just put it on steroids and made it constant.
Old-world version looked like:
Insurance friend calls you at dinner, cousin suddenly becomes a “business opportunity” at weddings, door-to-door salespeople turning neighborhoods into mini markets, MLMs before MLMs had a name everyone hated.
So the pattern is ancient: relationships and commerce have always overlapped. Humans have never kept a perfectly clean boundary between “social” and “economic.” Even in pre-modern societies, favors, kinship, trade, and status were tangled together.
What changed now is scale and frequency.
Before:
it was occasional
it required physical presence or direct contact
there were natural limits (time, geography, embarrassment)
Now?
it’s ambient (always on)
it’s algorithmic (optimized, targeted, persistent)
it’s socially normalized (everyone has “something to promote”)
Today they occupy the same feed. The same screen. The same conversation.
A friend recommends a product.
An influencer shares a personal story.
A company posts like a friend.
A friend behaves like a company.
The boundaries become difficult to see.
That is why modern life often feels strangely transactional even when nobody intends it to be.
The problem is not that people have become less human.
The problem is that attention has become measurable.
Once attention became measurable, it became valuable.
Once it became valuable, it became monetizable.
And once it became monetizable, every person, platform, and organization had an incentive to compete for it.
The result is a world where social interaction and market interaction increasingly resemble one another.
The friend is also an audience.
→ The audience is also a customer.
→ The customer is also a source of data.
→ The data becomes a product.
And the cycle continues.
The difference isn’t the existence of “customer thinking,” it’s that we’ve moved from episodic sales pressure to continuous identity-level monetization.
But there’s a subtle twist too: not everyone doing “networking” or “selling” is purely transactional. A lot of people are just trying to survive in systems where attention = income. So even the cousin selling insurance might be:
annoying
socially tone-deaf
and also just trying not to be broke
Human motives are rarely clean. So yeah, old problem, but now it’s just louder, faster, and harder to escape without becoming paranoid about every interaction.
None of this means human connection has disappeared.
People still fall in love.
Make friends.
Support each other.
Share grief.
Build communities.
The human element remains stubbornly alive.
But it now exists inside systems designed to capture, measure, and convert attention.
Perhaps that is why I found myself staring at a bag with unnecessary wheels.
The bag was never just a bag.
It was a reminder that modern life is filled with objects, platforms, and relationships that operate on two levels simultaneously.
One level is practical.
The other is symbolic.
One solves problems.
The other sells possibilities.
And sometimes the most interesting question is not whether something works.
It is why somebody wanted us to think it works.
Yeh. And how does this cultural process influence how we treat strangers who could be friends? I've been looking for work and it feels alienating. Seems like another aspect of the same process. There's also a strategy called post-fordism that seems to link with the topic at hand.