Vanguard Inc.: How Humanity’s Cannon Fodder Became Its Favorite Marketing Slogan

VANGUARD, n. – from the Old French avant-garde, literally “those who get shot at first so the rest of the army can Instagram the moment.” The word has marched far beyond its medieval battlefield origins and now parades through stock markets, art galleries, revolutionary cells, and corporate PowerPoints with the same smug confidence it once reserved for cavalry charges. In 2024, if you aren’t claiming vanguard status in at least one field, you might as well admit you still read terms-of-service agreements.

Ask a financier in Singapore and she’ll tell you Vanguard is the $8-trillion index-fund colossus quietly vacuuming up everyone’s retirement dreams through low fees and even lower expectations. Ask a curator in Berlin and he’ll sigh that the only true avant-garde left is the queue outside Berghain, where the bouncers curate harder than MoMA. From the lithium mines of Chile’s Atacama to the algorithmic trading floors of Zug, the term has become a global Rorschach test: progress to some, marketing garnish to others, and an early-warning system for collateral damage to everyone else.

Consider the geopolitical vanguard du jour: Ukraine’s drone swarms rewriting trench warfare in real time while European defense ministers tweet motivational posters. Or China’s Belt-and-Road advance teams pitching shiny ports in countries whose previous infrastructure high-water mark was a functioning pay toilet. Each vanguard promises modernity; each leaves behind the same faint smell of sovereign debt and diesel exhaust.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, self-proclaimed “innovation vanguards” are busy disrupting everything except their own stock-based compensation. They announce AGI next quarter, climate-solution mirrors the quarter after that, and—between funding rounds—quietly pivot to AI-driven dog-walking apps. Their code may be open-source, but the hubris is proprietary.

The environmental vanguard is arguably more sincere, if equally doomed. Tuvaluan diplomats now speak at COP summits while standing knee-deep in seawater, a live-action trailer for the planet’s next season. Scandinavian teenagers sail zero-carbon yachts across the Atlantic to lambaste world leaders, then fly home business class on someone else’s carbon budget because symbolism has mileage limits too.

Art has not escaped the semantic land grab. Moscow’s embattled underground theatre troupes perform Beckett in bomb shelters, earning the label “avant-garde” from critics who used to apply it to overpriced banana tape. In Tehran, graffiti crews risk nine lashes per stencil, proving that the cutting edge still draws blood when the canvas is a theocracy. Ironically, the safer the gallery district, the duller the art; give an artist health insurance and watch the revolution become a residency.

Even sports now flirts with vanguard rhetoric. FIFA—an organization that could teach Machiavelli a master class—announces the 2030 World Cup will sprawl across three continents to “pioneer new frontiers of fan engagement.” Translation: more frequent-flyer miles, more sovereign-wealth lubricant, more cannon fodder for the construction cranes. The beautiful game, now with extra carbon offsets!

And yet, for all the cynicism, vanguards still matter. History’s least fashionable truth is that someone always has to step into the fire first, whether to test a new vaccine, a new protest tactic, or a new economic theory about infinite growth on a finite rock. The rest of us watch from the rear, critiquing the choreography while quietly grateful we’re not in the opening act.

So here’s to the vanguard, the shock troops of whatever tomorrow pretends to become. May their sacrifices be brief, their hashtags trend, and their pension plans indexed. And should we find ourselves suddenly thrust to the front, let us remember the medieval wisdom baked into the word itself: being ahead of the curve is indistinguishable from being ahead of the bullets—until history decides which was which.