Self-commodification in the attention economy creates an escalating spiral of exposure and attack

Evidence

I understand their cynicism, but I’m too old and soft to share it. It seems to me that both things can be true: these young influencers can be in real emotional distress over the pressure to produce mediated widgets and the cruelty they continually face from those they have invited into their lives, and they can simultaneously be figuring out how to monetize that pain. Because that is what they have been told they must do if they are to avoid becoming attention-economy roadkill. And, like so much else, it’s a vicious cycle. If you successfully thing-ify yourself, then other people will begin to believe you are a thing and will throw all kinds of hard objects at you, sure that you will not bleed. And then you have to conjure up even more revealing forms of self-exposure—up to and including having a full-blown nervous breakdown in your bedroom with the webcam rolling. Don’t come for me, these influencers seem to be pleading to their fans-turned-foes, I’m wounded—can’t you see that I’m bleeding here? Forgetting that the pack loves blood and there is nothing bloodier than performative trauma. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 207

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the author’s broader framework of the Mirror World and attention-economy analysis; the self-thingification spiral resonates with how Klein later describes the right metabolizing influencer dynamics. — connects to: Market-driven exaggeration of eccentricity makes the individual complicit in his own commodification.; Being attacked beats being ignored in the attention economy — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 155; The war technostructure outsourced demand creation to the attention industry — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 150 (+7 more)