The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age - The Walrus
My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating.
the end point for the working artist is to create an object for sale. Once the art object enters the market, art’s intrinsic value is emptied out, compacted by the market’s logic of ranking, until there’s only relational worth, no interior worth. Two novelists I know publish essays one week apart; in a grim coincidence, each writer recounts their own version of the same traumatic life event. Which essay is better, a friend asks. I explain they’re different; different life circumstances likely shaped separate approaches. Yes, she says, but which one is better?
we are inundated with cold, beautiful stats, some publicized by trade publications or broadcast by authors themselves on all socials. How many publishers bid? How big is the print run? How many stops on the tour? How many reviews on Goodreads? How many mentions on Bookstagram, BookTok? How many bloggers on the blog tour? How exponential is the growth in follower count? Preorders? How many printings? How many languages in translation? How many views on the unboxing? How many mentions on most-anticipated lists?
A starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, but I wasn’t in “Picks of the Week.” A mention from Entertainment Weekly, but last on a click-through list.
There must exist professions that are free from capture, but I’m hard pressed to find them. Even non-remote jobs, where work cannot pursue the worker home, are dogged by digital tracking: a farmer says Instagram Story views directly correlate to farm subscriptions, a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers.
What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.
And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.
In a nightmarish dispatch in Esquire on how hard it is for authors to find readers, Kate Dwyer argues that all authors must function like influencers now, which means a fire sale on your “private” life. As internet theorist Kyle Chayka puts it to Dwyer: “Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture.”
what happens to artists is happening to all of us. As data collection technology hollows out our inner worlds, all of us experience the working artist’s plight: our lot is to numericize and monetize the most private and personal parts of our experience.
We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth.
When we scroll, what are we looking for?
While other fast fashion brands wait for high-end houses to produce designs they can replicate cheaply, Shein has completely eclipsed the runway, using AI to trawl social media for cues on what to produce next. Shein’s site operates like a casino game, using “dark patterns”—a countdown clock puts a timer on an offer, pop-ups say there’s only one item left in stock, and the scroll of outfits never ends—so you buy now, ask if you want it later.
Shein’s model is dystopic: countless reports detail how it puts its workers in obscene poverty in order to sell a reprieve to consumers who are also moneyless—a saturated plush world lasting as long as the seams in one of their dresses. Yet the day to day of Shein’s target shopper is so bleak, we strain our moral character to cosplay a life of plenty.
(Unsplash)
Technology
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?
BY THEA LIM
Updated 17:52, Sep. 20, 2024 | Published 6:30, Sep. 17, 2024
W
HEN I WAS TWELVE, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating.
Y
EARS AGO, I worked in the backroom of a Tower Records. Every few hours, my face-pierced, gunk-haired co-workers would line up by my workstation, waiting to clock in or out. When we typed in our staff number at 8:59 p.m., we were off time, returned to ourselves, free like smoke.
There are no words to describe the opposite sensations of being at-our-job and being not-at-our-job even if we know the feeling of crossing that threshold by heart. But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”
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Not-job, or whatever name you prefer—“quitting time,” “off duty,” “downtime”—is where we restore ourselves from a mere jelly, precisely by using our internal meter to determine the criteria for success or failure. Find the best route home—not the one that optimizes cost per minute but the one that offers time enough to hear an album from start to finish. Plant a window garden, and if the plants are half dead, try again. My brother-in-law found a toy loom in his neighbour’s garbage, and nightly he weaves tiny technicolour rugs. We do these activities for the sake of doing them, and their value can’t be arrived at through an outside, top-down measure. It would be nonsensical to treat them as comparable and rank them from one to five. We can assess them only by privately and carefully attending to what they contain and, on our own, concluding their merit.
And so artmaking—the cultural industries—occupies the middle of an uneasy Venn diagram. First, the value of an artwork is internal—how well does it fulfill the vision that inspired it? Second, a piece of art is its own end. Third, a piece of art is, by definition, rare, one of a kind, nonfungible.
Yet the end point for the working artist is to create an object for sale. Once the art object enters the market, art’s intrinsic value is emptied out, compacted by the market’s logic of ranking, until there’s only relational worth, no interior worth. Two novelists I know publish essays one week apart; in a grim coincidence, each writer recounts their own version of the same traumatic life event. Which essay is better, a friend asks. I explain they’re different; different life circumstances likely shaped separate approaches. Yes, she says, but which one is better?
I
GREW UP a Catholic, a faithful, an anachronism to my friends. I carried my faith until my twenties, when it finally broke. Once I couldn’t gain comfort from religion anymore, I got it from writing. Sitting and building stories, side by side with millions of other storytellers who have endeavoured since the dawn of existence to forge meaning even as reality proves endlessly senseless, is the nearest thing to what it felt like back when I was a believer.
I spent my thirties writing a novel and paying the bills as low-paid part-time faculty at three different colleges. I could’ve studied law or learned to code. Instead, I manufactured sentences. Looking back, it baffles me that I had the wherewithal to commit to a project with no guaranteed financial value, as if I was under an enchantment. Working on that novel was like visiting a little town every day for four years, a place so dear and sweet. Then I sold it.
As the publication date advanced, I was awash with extrinsic measures. Only twenty years ago, there was no public, complete data on book sales. U