Platform metrics reduce a person’s entire value to measurable attention

Evidence

“Existence in late capitalism is a permanent rite of initiation,” argued Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, their classic analysis of midcentury American capitalism. “Everyone must show that they identify wholeheartedly with the power which beats them.” Today, in the age of influencer culture, the power that beats us determines the relative value of individual lives through the ability to gain and maintain attention, intimacy, relatability. Yet the infinite scroll of social media appears as a constant stream of the same, in which one’s “success” or “failure,” as an individual, as a person, as a worker, is reduced to the instrumental measurement of attention given through the metrics supplied by platforms. This reduction of social life, personal life, and economic life is tacitly accepted by many. One either gains attention and is valuable or remains unseen and invisible, a failure, to disappear and remain beyond value. Beaten. “Unless I am seen, then I am a failure,” says the influencer—and that is that. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 12

Categorization

• XREF: Frames the influencer value-subsumption that will connect to Marxian value analysis of attention as commodity. — connects to: Attention extraction reduces people to quantifiable commodities and demands collective remedy. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 32; Target-driven institutions substitute easy measurable tasks for meaningful ones — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 93
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly is the commodity being measured — attention itself, or the influencer’s self-presentation?