In our dramatically changed commercial environment, most consumers’ strategy for coping with this underlying befuddlement is simply to stick with “name brands”—i.e., things made by large, well-established companies, and/or widely touted in compellingly slick advertising (which costs so much that it’s effectively unavailable to upstart new competitors).  Either way, we’ve devolved into an economy whose mainstream enables only giants to participate.

For all the rest of us, it may seem like our only chance of finding success in an independent small business venture these days is if we’re lucky enough to be a teenage girl with a particular knack for telling other teenage girls what clothes to buy, and by so doing, deriving an income as an online “influencer.”

Especially in the United States, this is a far cry from our traditional expectations.  Our founding fathers espoused a glowing ideal of a society where people derived their status from a combination of natural ability and hard work, and we still like to pride ourselves on carrying forward the rugged self-reliance of its frontiersmen.  

As a result, we may experience no small amount of anxiety, stress, and even bitterness when we contemplate our (perceived) personal failure to become anything more than hirelings in vast virtualized enterprises of often buffoonishly limited competence.