Self-help tech gurus succeed by affirming, not challenging, tech culture’s core values

Evidence

I think Vaynerchuk and Ferriss are successful for two reasons. First, they uphold the values of the tech community by emphasizing passion, business success, self-improvement, and meritocracy. They do not criticize or interrogate anything that the tech community holds dear. Second, they evangelize tools developed by the tech community like blogs, Twitter, YouTube, online advertising, and so forth. Overall, both men emphasize Web 2.0’s revolutionary impact on business, employment, the self, and even the body. This reinforces the Web 2.0 scene’s sense of itself as uniquely special, smart, and socially revolutionary. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 463

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital — tech authorities validate the field’s doxa to accumulate legitimacy. — connects to: Within tech culture, status must arrive as innovation, not as self-marketing — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 265; Self-help gurus script acceptable affect for self-branding, naturalizing and gendering it — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 510; Individualized self-improvement solutions block collective confrontation of structural crisis — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 1074

Broader Connections

• Self-help gurus script acceptable affect for self-branding, naturalizing and gendering it #expands (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 510
• Individualized self-improvement solutions block collective confrontation of structural crisis #complicates (0.72) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1074