We think about identity as “I want to be really different, and I want this unique identity.” But we don’t just want a unique identity. We want to have a unique identity that is recognized as unique and valuable, in terms of status.

Yet on another level, her actions are a perfect distillation of the values of the attention economy, which have trained so many of us to measure our worth using crude, volume-based matrixes. How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Views?

As W. David Marx argues, the internet has cheapened and commoditized taste so thoroughly that money is the only meaningful differentiator left.