Once I started to lean towards entrepreneurial thinking, I went further into the internet resources available. I really didn’t have a clue what I was looking for and so got messy and sporadic results.
Like many people before me, I was distracted by and suckered into watching videos starring entrepreneurs (mostly white and male) who promised me I could make millions of pounds if only I just knew the right tricks or made the right connections. I’m sure that the main money-making trick of many of these so-called entrepreneurs is to sell their ‘secret insider knowledge’ to suckers like me. (Well, I’m not so much of a sucker these days, and although I have paid up for other deceptive schemes, sales-driven online ‘business mentoring’ hasn’t been among them.) ‘Affiliate marketing’ has featured heavily in the videos of the high-flying desperados. I call them desperados because they seem desperate to be rich, at the expense of ethics. Ethics-focused affiliate marketing does exist, but it’s not the norm.
So what is ‘affiliate marketing’? It refers to the marketing of other companies’ products on your website, according to agreements which pay you a percentage every time sales are generated from customers linking to the companies through your website. It sounds easier than it is. In order to attract people to your site in the first place, you have to provide outstanding and / or popular and / or very exclusive / niche content. The most common way to do this is by writing a blog, or hosting a blog with others providing the content for you.
I’m not against some modest and ethical affiliate marketing being added to a blog site on the strength of the followers that the blog has attracted, if the starting point was the artistic and ethical drive of the writer / entrepreneur to share their ideas / ethical business with the world. But building a website from scratch purely with the intention of making money from affiliate marketing; in other words, building a business which is affiliate marketing-based, seems to me so dead, so cynical, so unsustainable. The exception would be a platform that strives to change consumer behaviour, to promote only the most ethical of products across the board, to be an ethical superstore of other companies’ products. This just isn’t my bag, but I’m sure someone’s doing it.
Apart from corny entrepreneurial videos, I have also watched plenty of corny motivation videos on YouTube, although some of them have featured excerpts from motivational speeches, some by very famous people, which are very inspiring. It’s more the images that have been put with the audio that are corny -plenty of musclebound men ‘pushing’ their gym workouts, weight-training and boxing practice. I went through a phase of watching these. This is one of the better ones, which has at least made some effort to portray a balance of genders and ethnicities, (but not nearly enough so). Looking back, they were a stop-gap to keep my motivation high whilst I still didn’t have a clue what I was doing or where I was going with my new-found entrepreneurial mindset. I would like to see a whole range of motivational videos by women, for women, and by people of colour, for people of colour. I am staggered that this doesn’t seem to happen already. Or if it does, the videos are way down in the search results. When I searched YouTube today for motivational videos for women, the only ones that came up were exceptions on male-dominated motivation channels. However, that said, it was great to see Evan Carmichael’s ‘Top Ten Rules For Success’ by Maya Angelou.
Unless someone gets there before me, and I hope they will, one day, with all my ethical entrepreneurial profit (if that isn’t an oxymoron), I will make sure that there are more diverse motivation videos on YouTube, to motivate people from all backgrounds and of all identities, brought to them by people like them…
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The internet has allowed me to learn about the entrepreneurial activity of people from all over the world, from all backgrounds, although there is still a privileged white male dominance amongst entrepreneurs -certainly a white dominance. I have been staggered and warmed by the creativity of human beings in my virtual searches and have even been tempted at times by the neoliberal ideology that with a completely free market, the competition drive would solve the whole world’s environmental and social justice issues. This is bullshit, of course. Capitalism is predicated on perpetual growth on a foundation of finite resources, so deceit is at its core. Inequality of pay and inequality of labour roles are also central to the capitalist model.
So why do I want to be an entrepreneur? My starting place here is, whether we are consumers or business people, as modern human beings we are all implicated in global inequality and destruction of the environment. On a systemic level, being an ‘ethical consumer’ makes relatively little difference to the destructive nature of the capitalist model, and may even be the surest way of perpetuating the model by dissipating some of our guilt. The same can be said for ‘ethical businesses’, most of which aren’t very ethical if all the supply chains involved are taken into account. Meanwhile, global civilisation heads towards the edge of a cliff. The marketing ideology behind the destruction is the persuasion of potential customers to view consumerist ‘wants’ as ‘needs’ and inbreed in us and our children (most poisonously) a sense of entitlement to products and services which it would materially not be possible to provide to everyone on the globe.
Recently I stumbled upon the ‘ecopreneur’ concept. Ecopreneur, meaning an ethical entrepreneur who acts for social justice and the environment. In light of what I wrote above, is the concept of an ‘ecopreneur’ a con? Not totally, I think. Some ecopreneurs will at least attempt, however impossible it may seem to be, to purify their part in the web of complex interconnected supply chains that is contemporary global capitalism. I empathise and follow suit. I like the word ‘ecopreneur’. It at least signposts customers to noble aspirations. Ethical businesses and ecopreneurs may also be an important bridge to post-capitalist tomorrows. Epic tomorrows! But only if the ethics are deep, deep, deep and challenge the workings of the capitalist model itself.
I fully intend to develop products and services which are not only ‘ethical’ in the usual sense of ecopreneurs, but which aim much higher. Firstly, I intend to educate about the unsustainability of the current capitalist model, to any individuals, groups or businesses who are my customers. Secondly, my drive will be towards the relocalised cultures and economies that I believe will be essential to post- and hybrid- capitalist futures over the coming decades. In other words, I want to somehow be involved in the relocalising of supply chains and application to them of high environmental standards. Purifying and relocalising supply chains as well as customer bases, for all businesses, doesn’t just make social and environmental sense in the long-term. In the medium-term relocalisation offers resilience, buffering against the global threats of the coming decades. Thirdly, I intend to address global and local power imbalances in any services and products I develop. To use the likely global upheaval in the capitalist model this century to achieve social justice; by education and practice to help make sure that patriarchy, racism, homophobia and other prejudices have absolutely no place in relocalised post- and hybrid- capitalist futures.
Do I sound too ambitious? Unrealistic? Have you never heard the phrase, Rome didn’t crumble in a day?
!The Epic Tomorrows of Earth 