The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age Th

🎀 Highlights

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.

Not-job, or whatever name you prefer—“quitting time,” “off duty,” “downtime”—is where we restore ourselves from a mere jelly,

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.

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.

the only gauge for art is your own measure,

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.

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.

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.

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.”

We are all data workers.

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.

ever switching it off. It moves at the speed of light,

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

book The Death of the Artist breaks down the harsh conditions for artists seeking an income in the digital economy.

William Deresiewicz,

“Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture.”

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.

have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?

Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?

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.

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.

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.

Not-job, or whatever name you prefer—“quitting time,” “off duty,” “downtime”—is where we restore ourselves from a mere jelly,

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.

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.

the only gauge for art is your own measure,

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.

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.

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.

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.”

We are all data workers.

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.

ever switching it off. It moves at the speed of light,

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

book The Death of the Artist breaks down the harsh conditions for artists seeking an income in the digital economy.

William Deresiewicz,

“Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture.”

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.

have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?

Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?

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.

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.