Identity Commodification
January's Curated Ingest
Hey everyone! Had a few hectic weeks — many of the sources below were collected at the end of December and in the last week. Trying out a new format for this one. If you have any particular thoughts about any of these themes, please start a conversation - many of my thoughts are pretty unresolved. I will also start including a soundtrack as you peruse my curation — here’s this edition’s. Hope you enjoy!
Must Reads (many about identity)
Couldn’t stop reading Nadia Eghbal’s work over break. Two standouts: ‘The tyranny of ideas’ and ‘The New American University.’ Honestly blessed to have read these.
The Twilight of the Ethical Consumer - I have had a hard time with the concept of ‘voting with your dollar,’ and this concept is challenged strongly here by Cline.
shopping for love - a lot of good commentary on consumerism, love, and gender norms. I used to think that a good loving relationship was a partnership - while I still think this is true in some ways, it is also a problematic term to use which is outlined well in the quote from Fromm.
The BuzzFeedification of Mental Health - I will be discussing this and What May Have Been at length below, so please click these two links if you only click on two in this entire newsletter! With that, bear witness to my stream of consciousness:
In the paper, Peretti wrote that capitalism would need to create an ever-growing number of micro-identities for people to fit themselves into, so that those identities could be commodified and marketed to. … Peretti writes that capitalism breaks down codes, rules and social desires, scrambling the code of human behavior and the human mind so that it can replace these necessities with its own rules, codes and desires.
“As capitalism decodes and deterritorializes it reaches a limit at which point it must artificially reterritorialize by augmenting the state apparatus,” Peretti writes. In other words, capitalism must give us things to make sense of the world because capitalism has taken all our inherent internalized senses of self and community away.
The first part of The BuzzFeedification of Mental Health kind of gets at some of the reasons why terms like ‘main character’ and movie’ are assigned to moments colloquially by Gen-Z. Thoughts that come to my mind: are those moments really yours? What happens when they stop feeling like special tape-worthy moments and need to be sensationalized more and more to feel relevant? I don’t know... I just find the terms uncomfortable I guess.
The author also covers micro-identities and how polarizing they can be when people online don’t assign their identities to a few larger ones. I personally feel as if people have forgotten the term intersectionality today; the majority of my identity is intersectional. I feel as if (in New York especially - maybe that’s just emblematic of my social circles) people are much less open to witness parts of my identity that are mixed, built on top of, or even at-odds with, itself. It feels as if many people I meet just assume something about me at first and box up the rest of my identity in their mind from that assumption. Frankly, I’m tired of feeling like I have to work against this and it is disappointing. I’ve spent time in spaces where I have felt much more accepted and seen; my closest friends have always been open-eyed in this regard and don’t assume as much as people in NYC that I usually encounter.
“Sure, inherent brain differences would exist in any society, but what makes a brain difference maladaptive, what makes it hard for people with neurodivergent brains to exist, be happy, thrive, is the societal structure around them. This is not a new nor particularly controversial point—it’s essentially the social model of disability, which has been advocated for by disability activists for generations.”
This reminds me of how differently neurodivergent people were treated not too long ago, and how helpless it does feel sometimes to change anything cultural with how consumed culture-participation is today.
“but the firestorm really hammered home just how much our lives on the internet have been captured by the micro identity formation outlined in Jonah Peretti’s essay, and later exploited by his company.”
Helps explain all of Buzzfeed’s personality quizzes! 🥲
Another good piece on the compartmentalization of identity which bothers me so much:
“Since the fall of the Soviet Union, globalization, finance capital, mass consumerism, and mass media have asserted dominance over not just every sector of the world but of our social relations, our behavior and minds, our hopes and dreams. But this economic and cultural hegemony doesn’t exist purely in recognition of itself ...”
Of course the Oregon boy likes buying eco-friendly products outdoorsy products, he’s from Oregon! They must either conform to current reality or reject it vehemently... Wait, why am I perceiving this boy as masculine in some ways and not in other ways? Does that mean he isn’t straight, only kind of? How can that be!? It’s exhausting.
“Pre-Recession nostalgia can also be understood as an attachment to form, “to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary existence.” What haunts us isn’t merely an imagined idyllic time before global market crashes, terrorism, and the constant interconnectedness of a digital, online world, but what may have been if the creep and then acceleration of neoliberalism (and its consequential crises) was frustrated by an alternative. Inundated and obsessed with the past and locked into a dismal present, we long for lost futures.”
I have personally definitely found a lot of excitement in beginning to discover and even reclaim ‘lost futures,’ especially technological ones. This is a way I’ve also come to terms with my intersectional identity.
Has anyone else who’s attended university in New York City felt like they interface with people with only a small slice of their identity? I am having a hard time time with this - assumptions aside.
Honestly kinda sad these kings:
felt the need to release a song out of their retirement called ‘Where’s the revolution’ four years ago…
Design
This was honestly amazing to just witness: “Grok {Shan, Shui}*: Advent of understanding the generative art.” A Ukrainian software engineer did a 'CS advent calendar’ where he tried to piece together {Shan, Shui}*’s algorithm. Pretty cool! Related: Perlin Noise and world building.
Recently learned about Herbert Bayer in earnest.
How Architects Design for Less Lonely Living, YouTube - physical world affecting us as always,
Klaus Krippendorff’s Trajectory of Artificiality - Pirsig adjacent view of design,
FlipDot Communicator - thought this was a pretty cute way of communicating,
Tom Keelan Writeup - dope portrait photographer with a unique style,
Former janitor now Bar Mitzvah photographer in Montreal.
Misc.
The End of Neoliberalism in Chile? - a lengthy read but really informative, makes me optimistic.
Camera Arhiva - “Functioning as a subjective research platform that is a permanent work in progress, Camera Arhiva retrieves material traces and documents of communist everyday life, such as almanacs and journals, state periodicals and union-owned magazines, brochures and booklets, newspapers and pamphlets, posters and exhibition catalogues, fiction paperbacks and do-it-yourself manuals.”
Some perfumer is making scents based on scent building blocks? Very interesting, I want to smell these… the claims of the scent adapting itself to you is true for any scent… no?
Argues that friend groups should build and invest together. To me it feels like they’re asking why float around ‘keeping up’ with people when you could spend more time with those that matter - who you want to build with.
“The broadcast commentators can be seen practically bouncing up and down in their chairs. This Wimbledon final's got the revenge narrative, the king-versus-regicide dynamic, the stark character contrasts. It's the passionate machismo of southern Europe versus the intricate clinical artistry of the north. Apollo and Dionysus. Scalpel and cleaver. Righty and southpaw. Nos. 1 and 2 in the world. Nadal, the man who's taken the modern power-baseline game just as far as it goes, versus a man who's transfigured that modern game, whose precision and variety are as big a deal as his pace and foot-speed, but who may be peculiarly vulnerable to, or psyched out by, that first man. A British sportswriter, exulting with his mates in the press section, says, twice, ‘It's going to be a war.’”
from ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’ by the late David Foster Wallace… :(
Have recently been very into the shows Station 11, Billions, and Euphoria. I realized that the reason I’ve been into the first two specially is because of their dialogue (and visuals, but that I already knew). The dialogue is so terse? Atypical from how people around me usually speak that I find it interesting? Was fun to become aware of! I think tangentially one of the many reasons I find Euphoria interesting to watch is because of what people close to my age notice and how different that is from my experience hahaha.
Well, that’s all for this month. Hope you found something interesting - I thought I found a lot of gripping content this last month and it was hard to organize into something at least somewhat coherent. See you all in February.
ANDREI
love this format!