Trinkets

 I want to share a number.

In the new world prediction game, one of the more difficult tasks is distinguishing among trends that started before 2020 and will continue afterwards; fads brought on by the day-to-day living conditions of the pandemic which will fade with time, and truly revolutionary changes, caused by those conditions, which will reshape the new world in a noticeable way.

This task is made all the harder when the content is something I know little or nothing about.  In this case, it is the world of online influencers and real-time online shopping through any number of platforms I have never heard of.

So let's just keep it simple, and then we can all go home and think about what it could mean.  "It" is 560 million.

Apparently, you can go online and watch an influencer advertise a product.  Then you can buy that product, right at that moment, perhaps at a discount available only at that moment.  There's much more to it than that, of course, but we're keeping it simple.  It's called a bunch of things, including "e-commerce live-streaming."

The interesting part of all this is that number above.  560 million is the number of Chinese who watched shopping live-streams in March of this year.  That was during the lockdown, so most weren't busy doing something else, but still.

The Google says there are 1.39 billion Chinese.  In march, over half a billion of them were watching influencers sell them stuff.  That is more than one in three.

I'm no expert, but that's a big number.  By far the biggest number of watchers ever in China.  One in three.  And given the popularity of influencers - only those with really magnetic personalities make it big, meaning that everyone is... magnetized - and the delightful efficiency of online shopping, it's hard to believe that those 560 million Chinese will give it up any time soon.  Nor will the millions in other countries who have gotten hooked while quarantining and don't see a need to give it up.

So I think that, in the new world, we will not only order online, but a huge portion of the economy will be controlled by vivacious young people selling us trinkets.  We will talk about them, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, argue about which are the best, much as we do now about movies or sports.  One question is, of course, which section of the commercial economy will contract and perhaps even disappear under the onslaught?