Attention-economy identity requires continuously producing new content to prevent being replaced by one’s double

Evidence

Was this my fate? To be carted away? Did I need to start screaming more in order not to be deprived of my own identity? Probably. To prove to others—and to myself—that I do indeed exist, I needed to give the machine fresh content: new takes, new rage, new intimacy. Yet I found myself utterly unable to deliver, unable to do the basic identity maintenance I had done for my entire adult life and that the attention economy demands. Having developed the out-of-body habit of watching my doppelganger blow back on me, it was as if all I could do was watch: me, her, the confusion. A spectator to my own life. Which meant, according to my mentions (now almost all about her), that I was fading away. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 133

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The collapsing of a personal psychological crisis into a structural diagnosis of the attention economy’s identity-production demands is the book’s core method working at full strength.
• XREF: connects to: Commodity exchange reduces difference to identity through endless novelty — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 548