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The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
When 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.
Years 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.”
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?
Igrew 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. Until the introduction of BookScan in the late ’90s, you just had to take an agent’s word for it. “The track record of an author was a contestable variable that was known to some, surmised by others, and always subject to exaggeration in the interests of inflating value,” says John B. Thompson in Merchants of Culture, his ethnography of contemporary publishing.
This is hard to imagine, now that 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? I was glued to my numbers like a day trader.
I wanted to write my publicist to ask: Should I be worried my stats aren’t higher? The question blared constantly in my head: Did gambling years I could’ve been earning towards a house pay off? But I never did. I was too embarrassed. I had trained in the religion of art, and to pay mind to the reception of my work was to be a non-believer. During my fine arts degree, we heard again and again that the only gauge for art is your own measure, and when I started teaching writing, I’d preach the same thing. Ignore whatever publications or promotions friends gain; you’re on your own journey. It’s a purportedly anti-capitalist idea, but it repackages the artist’s concern for economic security as petty ego. My feelings—caring at all—broke code. Shame sublimated everything.
And when the reception started to roll in, I’d hear good news, but gratitude lasted moments before I wanted more. 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. Nothing was enough. Why? What had defined my adult existence was my ability to find worth within, to build to an internal schematic, which is what artists do. Now I was a stranger to myself. I tried to fix it with box breathing videos, podcasts, reading about Anna Karenina. My partner and I were trying for another baby, but cycles kept passing, my womb couldn’t grab the egg. A kind nurse at the walk-in said: Sometimes your body is saying the time’s not right. Mine was a bad place.
A few weeks after my book release, my friends and I and our little kids took a weekend vacation. They surprised me with a three-tiered cake matching my book cover, cradled on laps, from Toronto, through a five-hour traffic jam. In all the photos from that trip, I’m staring at my phone. I can hardly remember that summer.
My scale of worth had torn off, like a roof in a hurricane, replaced with an external one. An external scale is a relative scale; so of course, nothing’s enough. There is no top.
Then I was shortlisted for a major prize. It took me on a world tour, listed me alongside authors who are certifiable geniuses. I thought my endless accounting could stop, this had to be enough for me, I could get back to who I was. But I couldn’t. In London, I bought my two-year-old a bath toy, a little boat with a Beefeater. Today at bath time, the boat still gives me a sickly feeling, like it’s from the scene of a trauma. My centre was gone.
One of at-job’s defining qualities is how efficiently output is converted into a number. In 1994, Philip Agre described this as the “capture model,” or “the deliberate reorganization of industrial work activities to allow computers to track them in real time.” Gregory Sholette, the author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, describes how workers in a Pennsylvania factory spent their break covering a wall of the plant with “newspaper clippings, snapshots, spent soda cans, industrial debris, trashed food containers and similar bits and pieces.” They called it “Swampwall.” It reminds me of the sculpture on a high shelf in the back of a diner where I worked, composed of unusually shaped potatoes. Its form changed with each new tuber contributed by the cook on prep shift.
Such spontaneous projects are signs of life: physical evidence of the liberating fact that not all time at work can be measured or processed into productivity. Swampwall was inutile: a means to itself. It was allowed to flourish until the company was bought out by a global corporation, at which point the massive collaborative mural was “expunged.”
Thirty years after Agre coined the capture model, workforce management technology can track every moment at work as a production target. Amazon’s Units Per Hour score, Uber’s and Lyft’s (constantly shrivelling) base fares, and Domino’s Pizza Tracker have made it possible to time all time, even in the break room or toilet stall. These are extreme examples, but they’re echoed across the work world, with the datafication of parts of performance that used to be too baggy or obscure to crunch and so were ours to keep. “Wellness” apps provided as health benefits by corporate management that track fob swipes for office workers; case management software that counts advice by the piece for legal workers; shares, hover rate, and time on site that measure media workers; leaderboards for tech employees, ranking who worked longest.
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. Even religious guidance can be quantified by view counts for online church services, Yelp for spirituality. One priest told the Guardian, “you have this thing about how many followers have you . . . it hits at your gut, at your heart.”
But we know all this. 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.
Twenty years ago, anti-capitalist activists campaigned against ads posted in public bathroom stalls: too invasive, there needs to be a limit to capital’s reach. Now, ads by the toilet are quaint. Clocking out is obsolete when, in the deep quiet of our minds, we lack the pay grade to determine worth.
The internet is designed to stop us from ever switching it off. It moves at the speed of light, with constantly changing metrics, fuelled by “‘ludic loops’ or repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback”—in other words, it works exactly like a Jackpot 6000 slot machine. (On a basic level, social media apps like Instagram operate like phone games. They’ve replaced classics like Snake or Candy Crush, except the game is your sense of self.)
The effect of gamification on artmaking has been dramatic. In Rebecca Jennings’s Vox long read on the necessity of authorly self-promotion, she interviews William Deresiewicz, whose book The Death of the Artist breaks down the harsh conditions for artists seeking an income in the digital economy. Deresiewicz used to think “selling out”—using the most sacred parts of your life and values to shill for a brand—was “evil.” Yet this economy has made it so there’s “no choice” if you want a living. The very concept of selling out, he says, “has disappeared.” A few years ago, much was made of the fact that the novelist Sally Rooney had no Twitter account—this must explain her prolific output. But the logic is back to front: it’s only top-selling authors who can afford to forgo social media. Call it Deactivation Privilege.
It’s a privilege few of us can afford, if it’s the algorithm we need to impress rather than book reviewers of old. 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.”
The self is the work, just ask Flaubert. But data collection’s ability to reduce the self to a figure—batted about by the fluctuations of its stock—is newly unbearable. There’s no way around it, and this self being sold alongside the work can be as painful for a writer of autofiction as it is for me, a writer of speculative fiction who invented an imaginary world.
Itell you all this not because I think we should all be very concerned about artists, but because 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.
Certainly, smartphones could be too much technology for children, as Jonathan Haidt argues, and definitely, as Tim Wu says, attention is a commodity, but these ascendant theories of tech talk around the fact that something else deep inside, innermost, is being harvested too: our self-worth, or, rather, worthing.
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.
Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?
When my eldest child was in kindergarten, she loved to make art, but she detested the assignments that tried to make math fun by asking kids to draw. If I sat her down to complete one, she would stare rebelliously at her pencil or a strand of her hair rather than submit. Then one day, while drawing a group of five ants and a group of eight ants, my kindergartener started to sketch fast. She drew ants with bulbous limbs growing out of their bodies, like chains of sausages. “Bombombom!” she cried, flapping her arms up and down. “These are their muscles.” She continued to draw and mime pumping iron, giggling to herself, delighted to have planted something in her homework that couldn’t be accounted for in the metric of correct or incorrect. She had taken drawing back.
The ludic loop of the internet has automated our inner worlds: we don’t have to choose what we like, or even if we like it; the algorithm chooses for us. Take Shein, the fast fashion leviathan. 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.
Automation isn’t forced upon us: we crave it, oblivion, thanks to the tech itself. As the ascendant apparatus of the labour market, it’s squeezed already dire working conditions to a suffocation point, until all we desire is the sweet fugue of scroll, our decision maker set to “off.”
After my novel came out, whenever I met an author, I would ask, with increasing frenzy, how they managed the grisly experience of work going to market. I was comforted and horrified when everyone agreed it could be dispossessing. Then they all said the same thing: “I kept writing and I felt better.” That was the advice: keep writing.
The market is the only mechanism for a piece of art to reach a pair of loving eyes. Even at a museum or library, the market had a hand in homing the item there. I didn’t understand that seeking a reader for my story meant handing over my work in the same way I sold my car on Craigslist: it’s gone from me, fully, bodily, finally. Or, as Marx says, alienated. I hated that advice to keep writing, because if I wrote another book, I’d have to go through the cycle again: slap my self on the scale like a pair of pork chops again. Now, I realize the authors I met meant something else. Yes, sell this part of your inner life but then go back in there and reinflate what’s been emptied. It’s a renewable resource.
When I grasp this, all of it becomes tolerable. It’s like letting out a line, then braiding more line. I can manage, because there’ll always be more line.
Iwill try to sell this essay to a publication, and if successful, the publication will try to sell it to readers. If you are reading this, it’s a commodity now, fluctuating and fungible, like so much digital dust.
Thea Lim is an author, a culture writer, and a creative writing teacher. Her most recent novel is An Ocean of Minutes.
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