DSG Consumer Partners sent out an ominous letter last week to all its stakeholders. Deepak Shahdadpuri, the founder and managing director of the venture capital firm, enjoys enormous respect in the Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem. With a portfolio comprising companies like Epigamia, Raw Pressery, OYO, MSwipe, and Chai Point, DSGCP dabbles a lot in the consumer space and is supposed to be in the know of consumer sentiment.

For much of the world, donating blood is purely an act of solidarity; a civic duty that the healthy perform to aid others in need. The idea of being paid for such an action would be considered bizarre. But in the United States, it is big business. Indeed, in today’s wretched economy, where around 130 million Americans admit an inability to pay for basic needs like food, housing or healthcare, buying and selling blood is of the few booming industries America has left. 

LIKE MANY AMERICAN couples of modest but comfort­able means, Susie Mc­Kinnon and her husband, Eric Green, discovered the joys of cruise vacations in middle age. Their home in a quiet suburb of Olympia, Washington, is filled with souvenirs and trinkets from their travels. There’s a plastic lizard in the master bathroom with the words “Cayman Islands” painted on it. From Curaçao there’s a framed patchwork collage made of oilcloth hanging in the entrance hall. 

It all started in 2015. Kristal Graham, 39, had moved to the area ten years earlier to work on a ranch, but when her brother died, she turned to Amazon to sell off his books. She soon found herself sucked into the world of Amazon Marketplace, the company’s platform for third-party sellers that now represents the majority of goods sold on the site. Though she had exhausted her supply of books, she found she could buy all manner of goods (razors, K-Y Jelly, first-aid kits) from other retailers and sell those on Amazon for a profit, too.

The term metamodernism was coined in 1975 by Mas’ud Zavarzade, a writer and researcher, to describe an emerging cultural trend in American literature. Since then, the term has become popular and is frequently discussed in every corner of the Internet. If you are active on Twitter, blogging, using filters and stickers to edit photos before posting them online, creating memes, you may be applying metamodernist principles without realising it.