Fast Fashion Casino

Michelle Santiago Cortés on Temu and Flip as two sides of the same poker table.

I’m still thinking about the enshittification of the internet, a term Cory Doctorow coined to describe the de-evolution of the for-profit platforms of the internet: First, the platforms are “good to their users, then they abuse their users to make things better to their business customers; finally they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value themselves.” The symptoms are relentless content farming and along with that, shopping has become the one reliably satisfying thing we can do online. 

Shopping is a hungry swirl of reward-seeking behaviors: We see, we like or need, then we buy, we enjoy (maybe), and then we repeat (indefinitely). It doesn’t even matter if we run out of money. In fact, The Washington Post reported that buy-now-pay-later services are to Gen Z what consumer credit was to millennials and Gen X and that most of the adults using them are considered to be “financially fragile.” 

There is something totally carnivalesque and casino-like about this new turn in online shopping experiences. It’s all about producing as much excess—in the form of profit or full closets or stacked makeup collections—for as little money as possible. The big-flashing lights that make the bulk of online shopping so appealing is door-to-door shipping at criminally-low prices. According to Adobe’s Digital Price Index, “the cheapest pricing tier grew its share of sales significantly across categories,” from 2019 to February 2023. It’s a race to the bottom, because people are buying more, but they want to spend less. This is why Shein and Temu have been able to shape online shopping as we know it: In their native China, retailers like these beat out competitors in what Reuters calls a “value-for-money battle” that shaped the local e-commerce market into what it is. The state of the Western economies made this an easy export—where it compounded issues of overconsumption among consumers.

This is an era of Shopping as Entertainment—shopping not out of need, but to scratch an itch, to feel like you did something, to kill time. In the case of Temu, the marketplace’s homepage is a “chaotic display of products, resembling a general discovery feed with a search bar at the very top,” writes Terry Nguyen. The chaos comes from the various timers counting down the availability window for deals, the discount wheel you’re prompted to spin upon first loading the page, and the literal games you can play in order to beef up the deals.

Vanessa Russell, a Canada-based teacher, played Temu’s Fishland game every day for three months hoping to win a free vacuuming robot and soap dispenser. “Once a day you can compete with someone else around the world to see who can get more fish food and I can only speak for myself, but I get pretty competitive and hate when I lose!” she told me over email. Instead, she settled for “a giant pack of false lashes and a security camera. Worth over $70 so I'm still happy!” In addition to games, Temu relies on chain promotions, limited-time offers, free goods and, in some cases, cash rewards to help shoppers feel like winners no matter what they buy. “I don’t necessarily trust it,” Russell adds, “The items are cheap and they’re also cheaply made. I’m excited to get my free prizes, though, so I’ll also see how they turn out!”

When you’re on the internet, shopping is everywhere—its colorful designs and flashing displays beckoning you to detour from your scroll and into the check-out page. It’s the casino in the hotel lobby. The FYP that leads to a marketplace.

TikTok Shop has been working hard to lure users from their FYP by bright orange shopping cart icons on creator posts that lead to—you guessed it—an in-app marketplace where these now-customers will find shoppable items, live streams, and posts. TikTok Shop launched stateside this fall with an aggressive plan: To get things started TikTok is foregoing commission in order to offer discounts for key items à la Amazon. (Step one of enshittification: “the platforms are good to their users.”) But as many have already said, TikTok Shop might carry coveted brands like Revolve and Benefit Cosmetics, but it’s cluttered by preposterously cheap items from a lot of random third-party sellers Temu, Wish, and Shein shoppers might find all too familiar. 

Then there is Flip, a “social shopping app” based on a scrollable feed of video content. Its goal is to provide a “feel good shopping experience for people with serious standards with an even more serious obsession with shopping.” Users earn credits they can redeem for cash, discounts, and free products in exchange for time spent on the app, content posted and overall engagement. Tiffany Chu is a New York-based product manager and she joined Flip on the recommendation of a friend, who is an investor. The part about credits is compellingly real: “I've made about $60 in credits and I have used my rewards!” she wrote to me via email. “I used it to redeem some products I already use and love, as well as some new products I'm excited to try.” I’m partially convinced, maybe a video-based scroll specifically dedicated to shopping can give you the best of both worlds–separately. Most of the chatter I’ve seen on social media calls Flip the app that pays you to doom scroll. “I def get some doom scroll-y vibes,” Chu admits, “sometimes if I get too immersed in the app it can almost feel like I’m scrolling through a modern-day infomercial.” 

These platforms are designed to bring the user to the slots, the check-out page, the confirm-purchase screen—the thinking and feeling happens after the fact. Almost three years ago, I interviewed researcher and cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll for The Cut about mythologizing algorithms. Dow Schüll wrote a book about the “intimate relationship between the experience of gambling addiction and casino industry design tactics,” which include “algorithmic-computational techniques.” And when I interviewed her she told me about what electronic gamblers call the machine zone, where “every swipe, every date, every pull of the handle changes who you are in some way and further compels you and engages you.” And so the FYP braids into an in-app marketplace. Or the entertainment-first scroll feed becomes a commercial experience in itself. And so enshittification runs its course and in the end, the house always wins.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• An It Follows sequel, They Follow, is announced (Vulture)

• A Barbarian video game is in the works (Variety)

• HBO execs used fake accounts to troll TV critics (Rolling Stone)

• A summary of the TikTok restaurant critic pulling the curtain on Atlanta restaurants and their many “rules” (Complex)

• Inside the ‘Real Housewives’ Reckoning That’s Rocking Bravo (Vanity Fair)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Why films struggle with computer-generated flames (Vulture)

• A fun website of “Internet Artifacts” featuring the First SPAM Email 

• My favorite blogger/lingerie historian–of Lingerie Addict fame–reveals that, no, Kim Kardashian did not invent the Nipple Bra (Twitter)

• A conversation about consolidated Big Publishing (The Baffler)

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