Juliet Schor's Plenitude

I found this attempt to rebrand voluntary simplicity as a kind of wealthiness unconvincing. Schor hopes we will eschew growth and income as measures of prosperity and embrace more nebulous concepts, like how meaningfully our time is spent. Though I agree people should consume less, work less if they can, enjoy their work more, slow their consumption in general, and so on, I don't think impending environmental disaster will motivate them to do it. Yes, everybody would probably be happier and better off -- but the same would be true if we all became meditating Buddhists. Yet we are not all Buddhists. We can not will ourselves into taking a different view of what it means to be happy, or what happiness required -- that is conditioned into us as we come into our subjectivity and requires a great deal of sacrifice and discomfort to alter. Some manage to achieve it, but they are by definition extraordinary. Most want to cling to the kinds of pleasures and ideals that first brought them to themselves.

Sustainability is not sexy, and there is no point trying to make it seem so. Better that the concept retain its critical, adversarial edge, rather than be warped to fit with the prevailing consumerist spirit of self-preoccupation, consumerism, and abundance fetishism.

Sustainability, no matter how sexed up, is not enough in the face of the ideology of income and consumerism and symbolic goods and personal branding and so on, which I think the ideology of collaborative consumption colludes with more than undermines.

Schor raises the interesting point that prosperity erodes the idealized community of yesteryear, in which a kind of forced gift economy was necessary for collective survival. Instead we have temporary communities of affinity, which bear with them no responsibilities and can feel shallow.

I'm skeptical that forcing economic relations can replicate the lost relations of community that were forced on people when the world was less prosperous and technologically advanced -- when "convenience" didn't yet breed isolation but the necessity of dependence made people dream of that possibility. People have used income to reject community, and Schor implicitly suggests that they are going to have to re-accept community as environmental catastrophe strips us of income. (yet at the same time she suggests productivity gains from technology will make us all time-wealthy -- not sure I understand how that works, why that can't translate into conventional income measures.)

Essentially, Schor wants us to shift to an economy that generates less in profit without changing capitalist relations of production, which seems to avoid the source of the problem that has saddle us with environmental crisis in the first place.

Ebooks as template for media turnover

This Ars Technica piece on e-books offers this synopsis of the rationale for their inevitable triumph.

In the case of e-books, the merits are there, as plain as day. In fact, they're some of the same merits that have driven other successful media transitions.

Convenience: One thousand songs in your pocket? One million books in your pocket. Carry your entire reading list with you at all times. No loose bookmarks. No dog-eared pages. No rips, tears, or smudges. No shelf space required. No trip to the store. Purchase and start reading in seconds. Read anywhere, any time, using only one hand. Stop reading at a moment's notice without fear of losing your place.

Power: Search the text instantly. Look up the definition of any word with a single tap or click. Add and remove highlighting an infinite number of times without degrading the text. Annotate without being constrained by the size of the margins. Create multiple bookmarks and links from one part of the text to another.

Potential: Consume, share, and remix all of the above with anyone, an unlimited number of times.

The incentives, the author contends, have always been the same in the development of supplanting media. Users want the above. But media companies, too, benefit.

My main concern is with the "potential" section -- the ability to redisseminate the materials with value added. Users down the road get some of that value, but importantly, so do the owners of the conduits for sending that material along.

Media evolves to allow for the capture of user's consumption as a form of production -- that is what e-readers are about.

That;s what business types mean when they talk about making things "social" -- making it so the products aren't just sold, but they also capture the labor of their consumption and send it back to be exploited by third parties.

This sense of personal consumption being productive is beneficial to the consumer, who uses that experience to reinforce the validity of their personal brand. It gives them something to share and makes them feel as though they are being social. But it is immaterial labor for media companies, etc., as well -- it allows them to redefine sociality as sharing info about goods in reified digital form and captures the usable information from the flow of that sharing back and forth, as it adumbrates networks and so on.

From the commodity self to the personal brand

From Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson's "Advertising in the Age of Accelerated Meaning." Sorry, what follows is a bit repetitive, but important for me to make it clear to myself for future reference. The key point: ad discourse dissolves reality into free-floating signifiers and prompts us to adopt them as the language of self, replacing the identity-making role of tradition in a capitalist world that has eroded all traditional ways and demanded flexibility from its subjects. Design ideology makes that shift more palatable, and social media coincides with our taking a more active role circulating signs the way ads do. With social media we can readily represent ourselves as personal brands, and we shape our identity with that inescapable structuring metaphor in mind. We take the way ads may once have seemed to force us into a particular sort of cobbled-together self out of products and their associated signs and turn it into a positive active procedure, in which we build our personal brand and use our consumption as productive labor building our brand equity.

Some of this essay, from 1996, seems dated, mainly because it couldn't have anticipated how the internet would change what they call the "commodity self" -- the identity we fashion for ourselves out of signifiers put into play through advertising discourse. Their key point derives from Baudrillard's idea of the code -- ads detach signifiers from some sort of organic, natural constellation of meaning and makes them free-floating; ads marshal and mobilize signfiers and make them attachable to any product or idea. They become a kind of flexible language of images and memes that individuals can apply to their own identity construction; in fact, the chief accomplishment of ad discourse (of all the money put into making ads ubiquitous and their discourse and ideology hegemonic) is to make consumers bathe in ads and adopt its discourse as their own. "Advertising has established the premise that the most gratifying social relations are those associated with the confident, discriminating, sign user." You know, the hipster (the good, on-trend consumer). We hate hipsters because the system, ads as a discourse, is making a promise about what it will be like to be a hipster that actual people seem like hipsters can't live up to. The prevalence of ad discourse generates outsize expectations of those subjectivated by it. We wish they would stop so we could, but it's not them, it's the entire structuring discourse in all its ubiquity.

Omnipresent ads make us think the language of self should also be the language of ads, which seem by their ubiquity to be the surest way of securing social recognition. Social recognition comes from sounding/seeming like ads, which are manifestly the dominant mode of public discourse. The language of power, measured by exposure, is ad discourse (a consequence of money buying exposure, of commercial media and the leasing of public space to private companies); hence to be powerful, we try to speak of ourselves in that discourse. Of course, ad discourse, as Goldman and Papson point out, "tends to further the hegemony of commodity and market relations" without their being any conscious effort on the part of any evil masterminds ruling from the commanding heights. They "reflect the logic of capital" while they "disguise and suppress inequalities, injustices, irrationalities, and contradictions."

The authors argue that advertising was "in crisis" in the mid-1990s, but that seems to have been a misreading of the significance of advertising's reflexivity and self-deprecation. As Thomas Frank pointed out in Conquest of Cool, this has long been a cyclical strategy for replenishing potency of ad's messages. If anything, the language of ads and branding have become more accepted, almost embraced as a model for one's self-concept -- talk of the personal brand is not at all ironic in contemporary culture, and conceiving of personal goals along the lines of building brand equity are also becoming common as social media turns individuals into mini-media companies with logos/avatars of their own. This amateur population working to detach and recirculate signifiers has forestalled the "sign wars" they anticipated in the 1990s. Instead of advertising eating itself, co-creation and Web 2.0 and productive consumption and the like emerged. We have become the meaning makers and appropriators -- separating things from their ordinary context and allowing them to float free in social media and elsewhere through sharing.

Personal branding and actual product brand managers now complement one another -- we work alongside of advertisers to appropriate and reconfigure and remix signifiers, to generate new meaning possibilities that have value. The intermediate step from being subjected to ads to becoming little ad agencies ourselves lies in the promulgation of design ideology, as epitomized by Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, to take one of many possible examples. The insidious creep of design ideology -- that we should choose fonts the express our inner truth, for instance -- works in conjunction with the ideology of advertisements, that magic self-transformation is possible through purchases, no logic required. Both assume that the inner truth can be expressed through manipulation and display of decontextualized signs (in one's appearance, or in one's online presence) rather than through sustained practices. Or rather in replaces all other possible practices with one, the practice of clever sign manipulation. Design ideology rationalizes the overflow of signs pouring in and over us, gives us a protocol for handling the plenitude, for how to slim down and screen some out. It makes the commodity self -- "based on the packaging of self as a collection or ensemble of commodity signs" -- tolerable. Designy-ness is a subjective response to ad culture that accelerates our transformation into a personal brand. It allows us to interpret the ads which saturate our lives as opportunities, as a positive condition, rather than an inescapable blight. Then, armed with design consciousness, we start conceiving of identity explicitly in branding terms.

In a sense, social media is a form of democratized bohemia, extending the design consciousness mentality and the opportunity for commodity-self-nourishing display to everyone, not just hipsters in the right neighborhhoods, or not just urban people generally. So social media not only allow for more peacocking personal display (more "sharing") but they also make it more pressing to have more signifiers at the ready, makign it expedient to collaborate with advertisers and toelrate them, let them and their detached signifiers into one's intimate life.

Sennett on the challenges facing neoliberal subject

Neoliberalism demands a certain kind of subject able to tolerate precarity, evince flexibility, revise traditions on the fly and so on. This subject needs to inhabit postmodernity without remorse or much regret, without breaking down so much that he can't work efficiently. The subject needs to be more or less self-motivated to produce, to regard himself as a creative personal brand that generates economic value through the practices of everyday life as well as whatever wage work he is lucky enough to secure.

In The Culture of the New Capitalism, Richard Sennett examines what kind of individual could thrive in this environment. (my bolding)

Only a certain kind of human being can prosper
in unstable, fragmentary social conditions. This ideal
man or woman has to address three challenges.

The first concerns time: how to manage short-term
relationships, and oneself, while migrating from
task to task, job to job, place to place. If institutions no
longer provide a long-term frame, the individual may
have to improvise his or her life-narrative, or even do
without any sustained sense of self.

The second challenge concerns talent: how to develop
new skills, how to mine potential abilities, as reality’s
demands shift. Practically, in the modern economy,
the shelf life of many skills is short; in technology
and the sciences, as in advanced forms of manufacturing,
workers now need to retrain on average every eight
to twelve years. Talent is also a matter of culture. The
emerging social order militates against the ideal of
craftsmanship, that is, learning to do just one thing
really well; such commitment can often prove economically
destructive. In place of craftsmanship, modern
culture advances an idea of meritocracy which celebrates
potential ability rather than past achievement.

The third challenge follows from this. It concerns
surrender; that is, how to let go of the past. The head of
a dynamic company recently asserted that no one owns
their place in her organization, that past service in particular
earns no employee a guaranteed place. How
could one respond to that assertion positively? A peculiar
trait of personality is needed to do so, one which
discounts the experiences a human being has already
had. This trait of personality resembles more the consumer
ever avid for new things, discarding old if perfectly
serviceable goods, rather than the owner who
jealousy guards what he or she already possesses.

Basically the ideal neoliberal subject is driven by the quest for novelty, interprets its innovative consumption experiences as a kind of self-production and the source of identity (which is no longer derived from meaningful work or craft skills). That identity is never anchored in tradition or community or even continuity of life experience because it must always be revised to accommodate new experiences and pursuits. It must be frequently updated.

That is where social media comes into play. Social media serves to help shape neoliberal subjectivity along these lines and support it once it is established. It helps establish the personal brand model of the self and offers a broadcast channel for making consumption into meaning-making production (immaterial labor). And it offers a way to manage the plenitude that threatens to overwhelm people, sustaining the balance of productive curiosity and drowning in meaningless, futile choices. The social-network environment allows meaningless choice to become meaningful because concretely shared and tallied, and allows for accelerated consumption to seem not useless if not damaging to personal identity (not mastering anything for real) but extra efficient, as social-media sharing is a mode of processing that feels like mastery. This leads to more acts of communication, more data for media companies to attempt to monetize.

And in general, social media supports the ideal of convenience over difficulty, making dilettantism normative and making social behavior subject to time-shifting, that is, to be done alone at one's convenience rather than in periods of direct reciprocity and co-presence. Social media attempts to streamline affective labor, carework, which neoliberalism and neoliberal states by and large refuse to pay for.

I've just started reading the book, so I'll probably follow up with more posts, but this seems like a useful way to frame my subject -- how social media supports the neoliberal/post-Fordist subject faced with expectations of precarity and flexibility and novelty and co-creation and so on. Neoliberalism's flexibility and precarity => personal branding (mandatory self-reliance, productivity of everyday life and sociality) => social media (medium for personal brand, expediting accelerated consumption to extend identity and co-creation and generate marketing data for pigeonholing purposes). We work on our identities and mistake this for a politics and for entrepreneurship.

Jonathan Beller's "Paying Attention"

For a while I have been interested in the way that attention can add value, as a form of immaterial labor that enhances the sign/symbolic value of things -- the attention that attenuates meaning. Attention qua attention may not entirely qualify as this sort of labor yet, but it may in the data trail that our attention produces online. This can be monetized in the connections it produces, the associations. "People who liked this also liked that" -- that sort of thing. One offers this data by virtue of using online media; even if one establishes credibility as an innovative tastemaker, one couldn't, as things stand, withhold the data trail one creates -- one can only choose disconnectivity. That sort of pursuit of isolation seems appealing only when you consider how you are being "ripped off" and having your identity-making "stolen" from you by marketers. But the climate of social media makes such conclusions seem reasonable, "realistic," ideologically appropriate.

Thinking about attention as capital implies that we are alienating our own attention span, abstracting it rather than allowing it to be a spontaneous consequence of our inner motivations. We spend attention rationally, as an investment or to win the exchange, rather than as a consequence of finding ourselves absorbed, giving over our attention with no expectation of future reward, simply for the pleasures of being engaged in the moment. Imagining we have some attention as capital to invest rationally for profit seems to spring up with the idea that we are a personal brand whose equity must be built. But if we are a brand investing our attention, what sort of "being" is behind those concepts to actually profit from the activity, and what form does the "profit" actually take? Mustn't our being engrossed in something be in its own reward? Otherwise, we have abstracted ourselves out of life itself. (Which is to say "value" to the individual is a matter of being engaged in something, absorbed with it. Otherwise the value is strictly theoretical, unable to be actualized. It's frozen, dead like Marx says of capital generally, which is why he occasionally expresses an ironic pity for capitalists, who are turned dead inside.)

Jonathan Beller's The Cinematic Mode of Production: Towards a Political Economy of the Society of the Spectacle is about these ideas, I think, but I haven't yet read it. In the meantime, I've read this 2006 essay in Cabinet, which presumably condenses the core ideas. In the essay, he also concludes that the "final subsumption of our cognitive-linguistic capacities by capital (and its huge industries dedicated to the production of signs) is the mark of the real subsumption of society by capital and the full economicization not only of culture but of what was once called 'human.' " That is, there is nothing beyond capital for its own sake -- no humans outside the system who are "using" capital for some other noble end, or even for self-satisfaction. The self disappears into capital; it is an effect of its circulation, not the thing that does the circulating. (That circulating happens automatically, presumably on account of the total system set in motion as capital was subsuming everything.) That we can talk about the "attention economy" without sounding insane means that the facility has been subsumed by capital, can be understood by its logic of measuring, commoditizing, circulating, and profit-seeking.

Beller's essay is densely theoretical and to my mind needlessly obscure, but interesting nonetheless. Still think a lot of what he's arguing has been superseded by recent and more comprehensible analyses of social media. Actually, Virno, whom Beller cites at the end, is way more lucid on the subject of the "general intellect" that our various media organize. Total mediation of experience means that all of that "general intellect" is captured in exploitable form and can be alienated from the common, privatized as proprietary information.

Beller draws on some of the management/marketing hoopla about the "attention economy," which is "built upon the premise becoming conviction, becoming fact, that human attention is productive of value." As I understand it, that is not the same as when our attention is the product being sold. When attention can be reliably measured, it can be monetized, it can be brokered and sold. This has long been the case with Nielsen's measuring "audiences" broken into demographics for mass media ("selling eyeballs"), but new internet micromedia and emerging social media have put individuals' attention span into play. In the economic climate of measurement and metering, we shouldn't assign (give is now the wrong word) our attention to anything without receiving something in return. Awareness of this "opportunity" is what threatens to prompt our self-exploitation. We are tempted to withhold genuine attention we would naturally give to something in hopes of some other reward than the fact we have been seduced. Beller describes this as a matter of humans being reduced (or reducing themselves in exchange for spectacle-pleasures) to a medium for data. (In his estimable prose: "This brutal calculus that renders human biomass into a mere substrate for information, is symptomatic of the qualitative transformation of the cinematic mode of production into the world-media system")

Attention as "creating value" is something slightly different. This makes attention into a kind of labor that seizes upon a thing and makes it richer. Knowing that you looked at a painting, say, and possibly commented on it and interpreted it could make it a more valuable object to everyone else. Beller writes: "Phenomena such as the cult of the celebrity or the fetish for the painted masterpiece are revealing—the celebrity is not an individual but a social relation characterized by the accumulation of attention, and similarly the masterpiece accumulates the value of all of the gazes that have fallen upon it."

At one level, this is another way of conceiving network effects -- the more people who use certain thing, the more utility it has for all the users and the more value it has for the owner of the network -- and presumably the more the owner can ultimately charge for its use. With social networks like Facebook, the users aren't charged directly; instead the value of their attention is expropriated and sold to advertisers. So this is not that different from the classic radio-TV model, nothing has really changed except the programming, which Facebook gets for free. "Network effects" measure utility benefits to users but also measure the size of the captive audience for the marketers parasitically attaching themselves to that utility (assuming the utility for users is not in the "information" that ads supply -- not as safe an assumption as it might seem).

But Beller has something different in mind. He associates moving images with assembly lines, and sees film viewers as paradigmatic attention-laborers. Then he drops this passage on our heads:

This new machine-body interface known as the cinema acted directly on the imagination to harness attention as a force of social production. The visible world and the Imaginary (the unconscious) became technologically linked and constantly retooled to create an industrial technologization of the Imaginary that today has become generalized. Moving images, the utilization of which valorizes their media as well as modifies spectators, result in the continuous modification of a collective, variegated operating platform that images the world and its relations in exchange for pleasure, social “know-how,” what-have-you. Thus “the image” creates the techno-social modifications necessary to engineer the adaptive forms of social cooperation that have become the pre-requisites for the preservation of capital and capitalist hierarchy.

What? Need help. I think he's saying that watching movies changes viewers by changing the sort of pleasure available to them, and then in exchange for that pleasure. These changed viewers are then more likely to reproduce the social relations needed for what sometimes gets called post-Fordist or postindustrial capitalism -- a capitalism that exploits worker cooperation and communication (or the "general intellect") to a greater degree. The key idea, I guess, is that cinema is a way (a "technology") to unlock the "Imaginary" to systematic exploitation -- making "spectacle" and "images" into salable commodities. The result is "socially produced stupidity": Beller asserts that "Americans are stupid by design."

In other words, cinema uses entertainment as manipulation; it is culture-industry product; it is a vector for ideological fine tuning. The media are the "practical organization of attention" and represent "the viral penetration of the logistics of capital into the life-world that turns revolutionary desires (for self-realization, for survival) into the life-blood of a growing totalitarianism." I've probably said similar things about Facebook. It reproduces the conditions that have allowed for inequality, thereby making them worse.

Not sure why he needs to stress visual culture when the problem is mediatization, which occurs in language as well. I suppose visual culture reifies images and accustoms us to that idea that they are on-demand, that pleasurable experience can be reliably bought. Beller wants to argue that capitalism has a vested interest in making culture more visual and less verbal; I don't think this distinction matters all that much; language and images can be equally degraded, and neither has a special, pure relation to being or reflexivity. Everything is always already mediated (reality and TV are "inseparable," as Beller says), but in language and images, right? I also don't think this lens helps clarify the plight of the "slum people," as Beller calls the people in impoverished cities outside of the major economies.

I kept waiting for Beller to define the "value" he's talking about attention creating, but this is simply assumed. People want your attention, thus it is valuable, thus value is created. But value here is divorced from any notion of ultimate utility. I wanted a look into attention as meaning-making.

"Digital exuberance"; always connected, never there

From a Feb. 2006 Prospect article (pdf) by Will Davies.

This article lays out Davies's argument that as we move toward perpetual connectivity, we need a "new ethics of inconvenience" to preserve community in the face of the implicit individualism of gadgetry. "For every technologically enabled gain in convenience or efficiency, there is likely to be a cost to cohesion or stability." Yes. This is because we have come to understand convenience as a special kind of efficiency -- the elimination of the need for social compromise, for politics. Convenience has become the guarantor of the self, or "real identity" to ourselves, since it consists of the fantasy of complete personal autonomy, of total self-sufficiency in pleasing oneself. Against this fantasy stands the real "public value" of democratic institutions that create collective conditions of equality and fairness, that worth of which is easy to forget about in the midst of all the spectacle and self-regarding forced upon us.

Davies suggests that "technological bottlenecks can also be necessary conditions of social interaction or valuable moments of isolation." In the friction generated as we adopt new technology, we are reminded of what is jeopardized by it. Atavistic states of mind can suddenly no longer be taken for granted, and we see for the first time the conditions of everyday life as they are in the process of slipping away for good. Among these conditions are the kinds of makeshift strategies we have derived to sustain community and connection, which new communications technologies tend to supplant or facilitate to such a level of ease that they appear almost superfluous. Communication in many ways inheres in the friction, in the difficulty involved in making it happen, in achieving reciprocal understanding. This same difficulty also limits the degree our personal communications can be commercialized, though emerging social media work to overcome this, removing the stigma on smooth, broadcast interpersonal communication and ending the equation of difficult talk with authentic connection. We may lose sight of the "authentic" as a relevant category with regard to friendship or intimacy.

Davies points out how internet technology has brought benefits mainly to the consumer in terms of efficiency and ease of consumption. Technology makes consumption more convenient, mainly by removing the unpredictable human element. "The assumption underlying the digital model of progress is that we want fewer obligations, more immediate satisfaction, less contact with strangers in public spaces and more with those we already know." The result is a growing selfishness, or rather, a sense of entitlement of being left alone coupled with the delusion that one is at the center of everyone else's world because one is linked to them in a persistent network.

Digital technologies are generally personalised and ubiquitous, allowing us to opt in and out of social situations in a particularly egocentric fashion. Already, mobile phones offer us an almost permanent get-out clause from the here and now. As the ubiquity and bandwidth of the wireless internet grows, so the forms of technological connectivity that are constantly available to us will grow also.

Connectivity is, somewhat paradoxically, a way of never needing to be specifically present in a particular moment. Always connected, never there. It extends an on-demand sociality to every consumer of other people's conversation. You time-shift it to when you can be bothered with it. Synchronized reciprocity ceases to be a cultural norm. Collective identity derived from the habits or even the experience of co-presence is harder to achieve; politics becomes self-centered. Davies argues that "community depends on some sense of continuity and co-dependence, and a sense of the inescapability of social relations." Otherwise we imagine ourselves with limitless individual autonomy, and regard the inevitable limits as gross injustices. We seek to eliminate limits by shunting them onto someone else, gaining freedom at their expense instead of compromises for communal welfare.

Thus we must seek out the "beneficial checks on individualistic autonomy" and find some way to implement them. Davies hopes that the "economy of presence" -- the idea that co-presence, since rare, will come to seem valuable -- will reincentivize difficult communication and consumption inefficiency and inconvenience. But it may be that the passive pleasures of consuming media will more than compensate for the loss in aura that was once derived from face-to-face talk and live performance. He is right that "privilege will lie in access to rare face-to-face services" -- that granting facetime will carry more significance, that human customer service will be reserved for elites who can afford it while the rest of us deal with automated "help" that serves mainly to drive us to distraction until we give up our grievances.

But this basically means we only want human contact in a crisis of some kind, and under normal circumstances it is a democratic triumph that most of us are freed from the indignity of other people's frailties. Wanting to talk to a person in virtually any situation is a signal that everything is fucked -- that the self-sufficiency of the individual has been breached. We are forced to face our lack of autonomy, and we likely hope we can buy our way out of extended human contact -- that we can purchase help as commodified labor. When people recognize the need for each other, the need to unite in collective purpose, it is regarded as an extraordinary, and unpleasant, situation, an anomaly rather than the norm, let alone the ideal.

depression

Will Davies quotes Alain Ehrenberg's The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age:

Depression began its ascent [in the 1960s] when the disciplinary model for behaviours, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves. These new norms brought with them a sense that the responsibility for our existence lies not only within us but also within the collective between-us. I try here to demonstrate that depression is the opposite of this paradigm. Depression presents itself as an illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure. The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.

I think I need to read this book. Depression, by this interpretation, is what happens when the burdens of sharing, etc., the incentives to self-actualize through communication, become overwhelming. That burden, arguably, has been progressively made heavier by "communicative capitalism" and its incentives and ideological cajoling it offers for us to develop our personal brand. Davies's gloss is that "the result is a paradoxical combination of narcissism and depression, whereby the individual projects an omnipotent ideal of who they truly are, but (like any ideal) one which their actions are never able to match." This, perhaps, is the "new narcissism." We grandiosely reconceive ourselves as a media company with a personal brand, but we never amass a sufficient amount of brand equity.

We must further attenuate our uniqueness and justify our precious sense of specialness, since it is no longer rooted in a traditional identity, in our social contribution to reproducing a particular community's way of life. With self-fashioning subsumed by capital, capitalist logic now governs it, meaning it must be commodifed (as data) and exchangeable and then turn some sort of profit in being circulated. It needs to continually valorize itself. Thus the self we must become is not a "steady-state" self but a self always on the verge of "creative destruction" -- a self that must continue to grow or die. We end up with an ideology that celebrates an entrepreneurial sort of self that is putatively free to fail, but a lived self that is ravaged or emptied by the perpetual insecurity.

Depression is a different way of conceptualizing a refusal to reiterate the requisite process of ceaseless self-destruction. It is a way of expressing a refusal of the freedom to fail by making a particular failure permanent. Depression is a kind of resistance that manifests as self-destruction, since the self has become caught up in the thing we long to resist in our souls.