It’s time for a little lesson in business structure.
Starting in the 1950s, businesses were increasingly organised in a direct hierarchical structure. Partly at fault for this was the proliferation of long range instant communications like the Teletype - suddenly, it was a lot easier to coordinate a huge enterprise with tons of branch offices and departments. The highest order of management has been and still is the C-suite in most American and Australian companies. The CEO, or managing director, has the job of making sure that the entire company is reasonably unified and all working towards the same goal. In most arrangements, the CEO also exercises an almost feudal amount of absolute power over everyone under him, provided there is no overseeing board of directors.
The CEO’s job in most public companies is simple—provide the shareholders with the most value. This is accomplished through oversight of workers, hiring and firing, making purchasing and procurement decisions, changes to the product stack and marketing, but most importantly, the CEO has the power to delegate all of these tasks—but they are responsible for and can be held accountable for all of the business’ decisions. It is, contrary to the public perception of the big business CEO, not a trivial task and requires management experience. It must be said that the actual product or purpose of the organisation is a second-order priority here. If a company produces bad products, that's usually bad for them, but it doesn't meaningfully change the CEO's job description.
The position is desirable to the worker not only because it usually comes with high pay and benefits, but also because it provides a great degree of autonomy and control over workers in the company. It is thus not only a badge of honour and competence, but of power. Tara Swart of MIT Management has suggested that individuals with psychopathic traits tend to thrive in chaotic environments like the daily dealings of a large corporations and are aware that others do not. Plain and simple, the CEO position lets one wield nearly unstoppable power over employees, which is in itself antidemocratic.
And this is where I feel I should draw a line–I'm not suggesting that capitalism or hierarchy in itself is antidemocratic, or that democracy is inherently hindering capitalism, but I'm also not saying to ignore the parallels between the two. This is, in part, what business and management education seeks to solve–it's to strike a balance between leading a corporation and to provide a reasonably democratic workplace in which every worker is genuinely interested in improving the corporation they work for. The Chief Executive Officer is a highly esoteric position that wouldn't be lusted after as much if the pay was that of the common employee.
And yet, lusting after the position is what most workers do.
I'm going to have to say a bunch of harsh things here and while I'll do my best to soften the blow there's no way around that as the facts here are just, prima fascia, unpleasant to consider.
What prompted my thoughts on the subject to be written down and presented like this was a short video that appeared when I was idly scrolling Instagram, by an account called @khloe_creates. Khloe creates, going off the description alone, lanyards, keychains, customised cups and other low-effort chinesium imprints. One wonders when she'll will pivot to tasteless lamps with Bluetooth speakers and easily yellowed iPhone cases, but on its face, this is nothing special. Dropshipping businesses that clog up global shipping are a dime a dozen especially on social media, but Khloe Creates has a unique selling point. It is run and operated by Khloe, and that's remarkable because she is 13 years old.
Trying to litigate if what she's doing is allowed in her home state of Australia is beyond me, and also doesn't interest me, so surely someone else can do that if they care. What I care to discuss is why she is doing this. Not because I don't think she should be allowed to–on the contrary, power to her - but I'm going to provide a hypothesis as to why a 13-year old is doing business on the global market.
Considering her bread and butter is creating provocative and unfortunately not satirical content that's meant to highlight her age, it's clear to see that she's inspired by social media at the core. I've previously touched on the dropshipping plague, and to someone not interested or informed about the numerous impacts dropshipping enterprises have on both culture and the environment, the benefits are clear–it's low rent, reasonably profitable and the consequences for failure are so small that it doesn't make sense not to try one's hand at it, if you're lacking morals. Slap a Shopify page together, google the trends for whatever ABS plastic garbage is flying off the shelves this week, done.
But something about Khloe Creates really... compels me. Gets under my skin. She pitches herself as a "full time student who's also a CEO". One of those is simple, most middle schoolers are full-time students, and don't have any say in the matter either. Of course, the knee-jerk reaction is that she's 13 and thus can't be a CEO, but I think what's bothering me is a much more deeper and sinister issue.
It's not that she wants to be rich, it's not that she thinks hard work and perserverance will be rewarded. Without any evidence to back that claim up, I'm comfortable saying that most children her age do want that. A life of ritz, glamour, more money than you can conceive of that age, no worries, every day is christmas and easter and passover and you're gonna eat so much candy you puke. It's the platonic ideal of what grown-ups can do. They can't, of course, but that doesn't matter at that age. At 13, you have the entire world figured out anyways.
No, what weirds me out about Khloe is that her focus isn't necessarily on the reward aspect of CEO-dom - it's her attitude about it. It's not about play, it's not about creative expression, it's about the experience of the corporation. She's the Chief Executive Officer–pay no mind to the fact that she's the only employee–because that's what makes her special. Self-expression through labour, through the perceived status of the job title. Something completely removed from the experience of being a child.
I'm not a big enough tool to accuse her of throwing her childhood away. Frankly, I don't care about that, and let's not leave it merely implied: Being under constant stress and being forced to maximise arbitrary sales metrics is, as cynical as it sounds, unfortunately pretty good preparation for the relentless restlessness modern corporate life, especially in the C-suite of not-megacorps, provides.
I have to wonder what compels her. Is it power? She certainly doesn't have any, no matter how many C-level positions she assigns to herself, so clearly it must be either money or fame. I'm not convinced money is the primary motivator either, unless she's making some truly obscene amount that far exceeds her 5000 Instagram followers, so the only thing that remains is fame. But... she's probably not getting that either. Every organic comment of hers is making fun, criticising, calling out the grim cowardice of submitting to the neoliberal torment nexus at an age when most children learn how to calculate the slope of a linear function. The art she sells isn't even particularly good, even for her age–and when there is a comment encouraging her pathological girlbossery, it's from faceless accounts with no posts, no followers and no pretense of being a real person.
If she's happy, that's great. I'm not interested in shitting on the thing that she enjoys, but I don't. It makes me feel ill, it makes me like I'm staring into a wormhole to the future.
A vertically integrated, paperclip maximising, joyless future devoid of creativity.