The Commoditization of Everything
My friend never expected to go viral. She never even set out to be an influencer. When she first created her TikTok account, it wasn’t to monetize her life, build a personal brand, or ride the algorithmic wave of the internet. It was something far more genuine, almost naive. She was a woman in her 50s, navigating a divorce after 24 years of marriage, and she thought her story might help others like her—people standing at the edge of a new, terrifying, but potentially liberating chapter. Her videos were intimate, honest, and unpolished. She laughed about the absurdities of mid-life reinvention, but there were also tears. Real, heavy tears, as she spoke about the loneliness, the fear, and the grief of letting go of the life she thought she would have forever.
What started with a handful of followers quickly grew to 25,000 in a matter of months. People—mostly women, but some men too—found solace in her vulnerability. Her message of surviving and thriving after such a monumental shift resonated deeply with a community that often feels overlooked. For a brief moment, it seemed like the perfect use of social media: to connect, to heal, and to share something real.
Then, the nightmare arrived.
A client alerted her that her TikTok videos had been repurposed on YouTube. A nameless creator—someone who knew how to play the dark game of the algorithm—had taken clips of her most vulnerable moments and plastered them across the platform with headlines that twisted her words and intentions. “53-Year-Old Woman Destroys 24-Year Marriage Because She Was Bored,” one title read. Another: “She Divorced Her Husband of 24 Years Because She Just Felt Like It.” Her tears, moments she had shared in the hopes of helping others, were now being exploited for outrage, for clicks, for engagement.
The YouTube video exploded, but not in the way her TikToks had. This time, the comments were full of anger and judgment. Strangers blamed her for the failure of her marriage, accusing her of selfishness, of cruelty. They dug into her personal life, revealing her real name, tracking down her personal details, and mocking her pain. A faceless creator had taken her story—something profoundly personal and raw—and twisted it into a spectacle of shame. Her honesty had been commoditized, turned into just another product to fuel the social media outrage machine.
Exploiting the lives of others used to be reserved for Hollywood stars, professional athletes, and politicians. The National Enquirer could only feature so many stories, so even when gossip became a national pastime, there was a limit to the spectacle. Now, with an estimated 50 million creators across platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, everyone is fair game. Whether you’re sharing deeply personal moments or just living your life online, someone is waiting to repurpose that for their own gain, to turn your pain or joy into their profit.
What happened to my friend is happening everywhere, on every level, as our lives—our stories, our emotions, our identities—are increasingly seen as commodities. In the world of social media, influencers are the new face of this commoditization. Their fame isn’t built on talent or innovation, but on the manipulation of visibility—what the algorithm rewards is not necessarily what is meaningful or creative, but what can generate clicks and keep people scrolling. In many cases, influencers don’t create at all; they steal—repurposing the ideas, jokes, and struggles of others for their own gain. And the reward? Attention, sponsorships, brand deals, all built on content that isn’t their own. Like my friend’s story, repurposed for drama, the originality and purpose behind the content is lost, replaced by sensationalism and spectacle.
But it isn’t just social media that’s falling prey to this commoditization. Private equity, too, is in the business of extracting value, of reducing the complex and human into something that can be monetized. Over the past decade, private equity firms have quietly taken over massive sectors of the economy, most notably healthcare. What was once a system designed to provide care, to prioritize patients, has been turned into a machine for profit. Hospitals, nursing homes, and urgent care centers are bought, repackaged, and streamlined, not to make them better, but to make them more profitable. Patient care becomes secondary to efficiency and revenue targets.
And now, professional service firms are next. Law firms, accounting firms, architectural firms, consulting firms—many of these are expected to be owned by private equity within the next decade. What happens when the mission of these firms is no longer to serve their clients but to meet quarterly earnings? What happens to the trust between professionals and their clients when that relationship is reduced to a transaction, where every interaction is a means to an end, and that end is profit?
Private equity firms strip away the heart of a company in much the same way influencers strip the meaning from original content. They gut the purpose, the mission, the values, and leave only the shell—a hollow structure that serves no purpose but to drive revenue. The culture, the relationships, the care, all become expendable.
This commoditization, this shift toward turning everything into something that can be bought, sold, and traded, is not just shaping industries, it is reshaping the very fabric of our lives. In healthcare, patients become numbers on a balance sheet. In social media, pain and joy become tools to drive engagement. In law firms and consulting firms, clients become nothing more than a revenue stream to be maximized.
There are exceptions, of course. Patagonia’s Tin Shed Ventures, Satori Capital, Generation Investment, and KKR’s Global Impact Fund are private equity firms that aim to align profit with purpose, to invest in businesses not just for their financial returns but for their ability to make a positive impact. But these firms are rare. Most of the time, private equity—and the influencers who dominate social media—are not interested in creation or contribution. They are interested in extraction. They take what is valuable, what is human, and reduce it to something that can be monetized.
As more and more of our lives—our work, our stories, our identities—are turned into products to be bought and sold, we risk losing the things that make those lives meaningful. Not everything should be commoditized. Some things—our care for one another, our trust in the professionals we rely on, our stories—are too precious to be reduced to a transaction.
But if we continue down this path, if we allow the logic of the algorithm and the demands of the marketplace to dictate what is valuable, we will find ourselves living in a world where nothing is sacred, where everything is up for sale, and where we are all just another product, waiting to be repurposed for someone else’s gain.
In this case, adapting doesn’t mean giving in to these trends; it means defending what truly matters. We must prepare to fight for the things we value—not what makes money, but what makes life meaningful. The call to adapt or die in this context is not about yielding to commoditization, but about standing up against it, preserving what is human in a world increasingly driven by profit and efficiency.