Our Great Mediocrity — 1

This piece, planned as the first of several installments, will touch on the following:

• Revenge for a 300-year-old defeat
• The dog bowl
• Hustling middlemen
• A life without a life

My girlfriend and I, in the minutes — and the hours those minutes turned into, and the days those hours built, and finally the one-week whole those days amounted to — in which we tried to grasp and find a way out of our quarter-century slice of the 300-year-long financial bottleneck our country has been living in and inflicting on its members (barring the occasional artificial relief), watched many an idea pass through our minds; and our minds showed our minds, one by one, why most of those ideas couldn't be carried out, why they shouldn't be, why they had never been carried out until now, and finally — coming back around to the start of the loop, repeating the cycle but from a slightly different angle — why they still couldn't be.

How could we — and here "we" refers both to me and my girlfriend specifically, and, through "we" [me and my girlfriend], to Turkish society at large — a body of people with little interest in anything outside their professional occupation, and unable to deepen even that interest when they have it, possibly get this bottleneck the country finds itself in off our backs before it strangles us? The solution was obvious. We urgently needed to make money.

Why did we urgently need to make money? We already had jobs, but who would be hurt by some extra income? How were we going to make this urgent money? We started thinking.

• Above all, our most important principle was that this thing shouldn't eat into our real working hours. That is, it had to be something that didn't require more than 30–60 minutes a day.
• It had to require no investment capital.
• It had to be something we could do easily at home or at the office.

The Amazon affiliate program came to mind first. To summarize it briefly: you share the link to a product on Amazon. If a user clicks that link and buys anything on the site within 24 hours, Amazon pays you a commission. A nice system. So where were we going to share which links?

After a bit of research, we saw that some people take the descriptions of certain bestselling products, have ChatGPT turn them into coherent text, feed that text back into an AI to have it read aloud, and finally upload the result as a video to YouTube along with a few suitable photos — putting the product's Amazon sales link in the video description.

Nice idea in theory. Finding the text is easy. The photos are even easier. Having them narrated isn't hard either. Editing the video isn't an insurmountable task. But these features weren't enough for us. This was work that would eat up a long stretch of time with no guaranteed return.

Digging deeper into our research, we discovered a whole tribe that has made a home for itself in the internet realm and found its way around the labor of preparing videos by taking product-showcase videos from TikTok, stripping off the watermarks, writing their own captions over them, and trying to make money that way. Well now, we thought, so the people of this land have found a way to converge labor toward zero... Must be our ethical scruples that kept us from even considering doing this ourselves.

After running into many other strange episodes in the depths of the internet realm, we discovered an oddity strange enough to have inducted us into the ranks of these odd folk ourselves. We said, "What if we left comments with links under other people's ready-made YouTube videos?!" Compared to that, printing a QR code on a t-shirt and walking around in it seemed the more dignified option to me. We noted that one down too...

So, did we stop there? Of course not. I thought I'd found a loophole in the system and discovered a somewhat costly but arguably sensible way of pulling in traffic that could turn into a reasonable investment. Thankfully, this ill-gotten scheme dissolved into nothing before turning into action, remaining a mere exercise in mental gymnastics.

And finally we quietly closed this chapter, saying, "let our trash be missing from the internet's garbage heap," before we lost any more respect for ourselves.

I mean, really — did we think this shabby a hustle was beneath us? Are we some kind of street-corner middlemen, hawking for a cut?

By the end of it we'd realized that if we wanted to do this without losing our self-respect, we'd have to do it with an existing audience of followers/viewers already in hand. [There are, for instance, plenty of book-content channels on YouTube. I genuinely don't understand why they don't just drop an Amazon link.] Another way of doing this without losing our self-respect is to add it to something we're already doing and already love, and treat it as a long-term, expectation-free way of picking up some pocket money. Say, opening a blog about books and slipping in an Amazon link? Why not? But the crucial thing here is opening a blog for the sake of the blog, not a blog for the sake of money. Because the moment a blog is opened for money, the work inevitably curdles into hustling, into ChatGPT, into internet garbage... We didn't want that, couldn't bring ourselves to want it. In other words, rather than being among those people I mentioned at the start of this piece — people with little interest outside their professional occupation, unable to deepen even that interest when they have it — we wanted to be among, or become, those who do something purely for its own sake, taking pleasure in it and respecting the work itself. I want to go deeper into this in later pieces. For now, let's keep going with our past ventures.

Having come this far, we grasped once again that we had no existing audience in hand; that any future audience was, without the slightest hurry, lounging around without us in the shade of some far-off tomorrow; and that we, meanwhile, urgently needed money — and so we raised a hand: Real production! Our first venture had ended before it began, but the new one showed promise.

And thus does mankind discover labor...

Indeed, our research into Amazon laid a few pieces of data from the forgotten corners of our memory before us, blended them with our new knowledge, and produced an option: Production.

We made our first concession on principle. Labor without capital is called wage-slaving, and we would not be wage-slaves. So we resigned ourselves to spending a bit of money in order to produce something. The plan was this: buy a portable plastic-melting-and-molding machine from China and manufacture buttons!

We started researching. We'd get hold of the machine for around $1,000–$1,500 and manufacture buttons in a corner of the house. Then we'd sell them to workshops. A perfect plan. It didn't take us long to realize this idea wasn't going to fly either, because even a plastic button — which we'd assumed was simple — turned out to have plenty of hidden details. And the sum total of our own knowledge about buttons was that a thread goes through them.

Another problem was the quality of the plastic. Could a button be made from 100% recycled plastic? That was the plan at first, but then we realized — our professional expertise came in handy for the first time here — that this business has its own chemistry, and reaching the required hardness with cheap plastic looked difficult. Raw plastic, meanwhile, is made from petroleum. And a liter of diesel had climbed to 40 lira. Another problem was the low potential return per unit. If I manufactured 1,000 buttons one by one, how much would I actually earn? 10 lira? 50?

And thus does mankind discover cost analysis...

Of course, while researching this whole plastic-production process, the only source of information I could find was medium-height, sun-baked, diminutive guys filming videos in their filthy home garages. That's when I started thinking again: What, are we going to cut ourselves a suit from the unskilled, shoddy manufacturing of third-world countries? Are we going to set third-world development up as our horizon? Long story short, our second venture, too, ended before it began.

We didn't give up. Like a broken, pathological lover circling back again and again to knock on an ex's door, we found ourselves catching our breath at Amazon once more. Because we weren't the unskilled manufacturers of a third-world country. We changed tactics. Trade! We were now merchants, and we decided to take as our model not third-world countries but the very soil where capitalism was born, and to become capital ourselves.

Yes, we would trade — but trade, in its simplest sense, consists of two things: buying and selling. What were we going to buy? And, consequently, what were we going to sell? What were our options?

• Sell our existing stock: no such stock exists. —if only the button business had worked out, maaaybe...—
• Sell without stock: risky, unnecessary
• Build stock and sell it

We steeled ourselves, cast our principles aside, and set out to discover China. We'd have things manufactured there and sell them on Amazon. What would we have made? The most fantastical product I'd ever seen was the dog-drinking-bowl. Why not? On second thought, no — let's stick to electronics... A shaver? Headphones? A lint-remover gadget? Between the market, the capital, the time required, the risks, finding the best manufacturer, shipping... etc., we gave up on this too. Because we hadn't yet sold our souls. We were still bound by at least one principle: we already have a job, and we're looking for a side one. And the jobs in question here were, in themselves, full-blown jobs...

Also, I can say I never really found people who sell — or manage to keep selling — the same product forever. People generally start with drop-shipping and then aim to have their own manufacturing done in China. But a portion of those who try this get weeded out at the drop-shipping stage already; there's no consistency to it. The other portion is perpetually chasing the next product. What's the newest thing with potential? How much on Amazon? How much would it cost from China? How much could I sell it for? — with questions like these, they keep hopping from product to product. What they're doing is contract manufacturing, and their sales strategy is scraping by day to day. Sure, it beats melting plastic bottles and stamping out buttons in a spare room, but in my eyes this too turned into a low-grade business. Were we going to count out kuruş by kuruş? Were we going to sell strange products whose usefulness to anyone was unclear? And what about our declared war on consumer culture? After selling these strange products, with what face was I supposed to pick up my Byung-Chul Han books from my shelf again?

And thus does mankind discover added value...

This is the thing that had been circling in my mind from the very start of the process: added value. Scraping a product description off Amazon, stamping out buttons in a spare room, having dog bowls manufactured in China... Even if our vision-deficient leader was, without a doubt, farming commissions Indian-style from garbage YouTube videos, should our next goal really be trying to undercut a competitor selling something for $18 by offering it for $17.50? Can that be the whole matter? Can that be the sole goal? What manner of lack of vision is this, brother? Don't we have anything better to do?

This was the sticking point from the very beginning of the process. Vision. Whose lack of vision was this? The man manufacturing dog bowls? No. This lack of vision was mine — I who, after days of searching, had realized I had no talent to sell in the first place. Outside my professional occupation I genuinely had nothing in hand. Neither my under-developed hobbies nor the other things I loved could be turned into cash. This mediocrity (and right there — the word from the title of this piece is heard for the first time...) had nearly reduced me to hustling on YouTube... So where exactly was the problem?

Say I manufacture buttons in my living room and sell them on the domestic market. What have I contributed to anyone? I'm just trying to grow the slice I take from the country's existing pie. Melt as many bottles and stamp out as many buttons as you like — what have you contributed to anyone? I never thought I'd be contributing the slightest thing to the country, because in a zero-sum game, what does it matter whether my own pocket fills up or not? I'm not, here, declaring my love for the Turkish nation with tears in my eyes. I'm not a man devoted to the nation, never have been, and there's no need to be. I'm trying to talk about something else here. When I say "the country," I'm trying to ask what added value we, as a society, are going to produce. Because I don't want to live in a society that has built its economy and its vision around manufacturing plastic and selling buttons with dirty hands in a garage... In the end, I suppose, I'm thinking about myself. Mine is an eminently pragmatic approach. I'll try to go deeper into this in later pieces as best I can.

After all this, the conclusions I arrived at were these:

• There is no work without labor
• Real production only happens in work a person gives themselves to
• Lacking any deepened interest outside one's professional occupation is a grave form of mediocrity

Thinking through these conclusions, something else became visible to me. In fact, the whole country was in this same condition. This mediocrity was a smell that had settled over all of us, and we fit right into it. We are a country where half the working population earns minimum wage, where most of the rest chase after a civil-service post, and where anyone with a bit of money chases cheap land. And the most innovative idea that occurs to those who notice this state of affairs and want to escape the bottleneck is: manufacture dog-drinking-bowls in China and sell them to Europe.

I hope to pick up from this point in the next piece. See you then.

January 6, 2024