Is loyalty a virtue?
About this episode
The episode explores the concept of loyalty and its transformation in the context of modern marketing and interpersonal relationships.
It is surely one of the more perverse achievements of modern marketing to have taken words that have a certain moral valence — which is to say, words that connote intimacy or an interpersonal bond — and use them to describe purely commercial or easily exploitable forms of behaviour, thereby stripping those words of what made them valuable in the first place. Consider what the word “share” meant before the advent of social media platforms: it encompassed such activities as partaking in a common meal, defusing interpersonal conflict by making a small sacrifice, and having a confiding, perhaps even intimate, conversation with another person. After the introduction of the “Share” button and its use as a way of measuring user “engagement”, the personal aspect that made the word appealing is lost within the sterility of forwarding a bit of content to somebody else. The same goes for the word “friend”. In the modern era, the template for the misuse of morally laden words for commercial purposes was established by the decision of marketing agencies in the 1940s to adopt the term “loyalty” as a way of describing the kind of customer behaviour they wanted to cultivate — namely , an…
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