Everybody can own themselves
This week: techspeak, Telegram, tarot cards, The Devil Wears Prada, 24 hours in Waffle House and unintended consequences
Friends, a confession: I made the grave error of reading a blog by a LinkedInfluencer™ this week, and I’ve been hung up on it ever since. I was attempting to better understand the dynamics of BitClout — essentially, a crypto-powered stock exchange for human reputations, good God I should’ve been born in a different era — and in the process encountered a bit of techspeak so gross I feel compelled to tell you about it.
“This shift toward the financialization of people may sound insignificant or even harmful on first glance,” writes the entrepreneur Michael Simmons. (Emphasis mine, obviously, but: Just on first glance???) However: “With BitClout, all customers can easily own their favorite products, employees can own the companies they work for, friends can own each other, and everybody can own themselves.”
I did not have “the financialization of people” on my 2021 Bingo card, and yet … here we are! On BitClout, users basically spend crypto tokens to buy shares in another person (with or without that person’s consent) and hope they go ~to the moon~ (by doing something other users of the platform find valuable/relevant).
On June 12, BitClout capped the number of tokens in existence, which occasioned a New Yorker profile chock full of phrases like this one: “It collapses everything—art, humor, personhood—into money, laying bare just who, and what, we are willing to pay for.”
What’s amazing to me is not that some people enthusiastically subscribe to the notion of financializing people — we are living in the era of meme stonks and invisible statues, after all — but that boosters frame this as an unquestionably positive development, a means for “creators” of all stripes to finally get paid for work that has never previously been compensated.
On BitClout, for instance, you can presumably profit from things like having interesting ideas and avoiding major scandals, which you might’ve once done for the mere pleasure of … existing in society. NFTs have made products of tweets, farts and selfies. Platforms like NewNew even let you sell off your mundane daily choices, like who to hang out with and what to eat.
It’s wonderful that some creators have made bank off this movement. I do not begrudge them their newfound wealth. But you gotta wonder about the assumption, common in these discussions, that monetizing someone’s every idea and utterance incentivizes *good* behavior (near the top of BitClout’s current rankings: David Portnoy, Donald Trump) or the conviction that undercompensated people will gain richer and more fulfilling lives when every aspect of them becomes … labor.
It’s a particularly weird pitch to make now, when millions of workers — creators included — feel both overworked and over-surveilled. But then again, when have our foremost tech visionaries ever let mere human feelings impede progress? 🙃
P.S. Juneteenth is our newest federal holiday in the U.S., and it’s tomorrow! You can learn a bit more about it here.
P.P.S. If you live in Miami and want to tell me what to do on my first post-pandemic vacation, I would very much appreciate your tips. To be clear, this transaction is unfinancialized on all sides: You will not pay me to follow your recommendations, and I will not pay you for sharing your commodifiable knowledge!!
If you read anything this weekend
“The Amazon That Customers Don’t See,” by Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise and Grace Ashford. Disclaimer: You will need to set aside a long time on an actual computer to adequately appreciate this one. But I’d argue that we all have a moral obligation, of sorts, to look full in the face of the havoc our Amazon addiction has wrought on workers. To quote writer and editor Damon Beres: “This is a colossal story about the failures of a company that devalues human labor in favor of automation—it would be a cautionary tale about technology and corporate power were Amazon not already so deeply entrenched in nearly every facet of American life.”
“Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away,” by Olivia Carville in Bloomberg. Did you know Airbnb employs a team of ex-military and intelligence operatives to handle rapes and murders in its rented properties?? I will only be staying at hotels from now on, coincidentally.
“Why Bo Burnham, Jenna Marbles, And Shane Dawson All Logged Off,” by Scaachi Koul in Buzzfeed. This feels of a piece with the “financialization of people” crap: Some of the first creators to monetize large parts of their lives online now want out of it. “The internet isn’t fake — it’s real life — but it has commodified conflict and trauma [note: commodified!!] in a way that … is pretty spooky for kids and adults alike.”
“The Telegram Billionaire and His Dark Empire,” by Christina Hebel, Max Hoppenstedt and Marcel Rosenbach in Der Spiegel. Long-time readers know I have an enduring fascination with Vkontakte/Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who basically gave two middle fingers to Putin, disappeared for months, and now spends his time practicing yoga in Dubai/presiding over a worldwide web of crime, guns and drugs. Kinda the internet’s last wild west. Still not sure how it’s legal!
“The Devil Wears Prada Oral History,” by Joey Nolfi in Entertainment Weekly. This has nothing to do with the themes or purpose of this newsletter, but it was far and away the thing I most *enjoyed* reading this week.
The classifieds
This edition of Links is powered by my two new go-to rhubarb recipes, this cover of “Teenage Dirtbag” from Noel’s perspective, long meandering bike rides in which zero (!) motorists honked at me and the following very wonderful sponsors:
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Postscripts
City roads. You laugh, you lose. The Kenji Effect. “A meditative podcast about cereal” and a lesson in unintended consequences. First we had the work soundtracks that mimicked cafes and offices … now we have one that sounds like home. “In the age of social media, it is memes, not McDonald’s, that are the main vehicle for America’s cultural influence.”
Counter-proposal: Don’t leave an out of office! Just let ‘em sweat. It turns out not many people used Covid contact-tracing apps. Clubhouse, but make it real. Startup logic, but make it farms. Last but not least: 24 beautiful hours in a Waffle House.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin