The Anxiety of Influencers
I’m extremely wary of the cult of contemporary self-making, and the fact that it’s become an expected part of life in the attention economy for middle-class workers.
From the college essay – the first time many of us are required to tell a selling story of ourselves in the service of social capital – to the dating website to Twitter or Instagram, we... See more
From the college essay – the first time many of us are required to tell a selling story of ourselves in the service of social capital – to the dating website to Twitter or Instagram, we... See more
Tara Isabella Burton • Self-Made ft. Tara Isabella Burton: The History & Future of Self Curation
For creative people this hits especially hard as social media’s invention of “personal brands,” “influencers,” and the “Creator Economy” turned the few remaining aspects of life that hadn’t yet been marketized into the last ways we could make a living without working for somebody else. Gradually and then suddenly creative people found themselves do... See more
Sell out without selling out
In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregat
... See moreJia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance. In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.