Self-optimization serves systemic market function, not personal flourishing

Evidence

From this baseline, all that was required to activate the neoliberal playbook was to reorient these attitudes and practices from a feckless narcissism to a conviction that one was engaged in concerted self-modification to propitiate a market rationality far more omnipotent than anything promoted by any counterculture. One way this happened was a progressive shift in emphasis to the image of a “neurochemical self,” itself a bubbling brew of neurotransmitters and electrolytes, which required pharmaceutical management and enhancement. Both pharmaceutical companies and the neuroscience community promoted a doctrine of the brain as the primary corporeal organ responsible for conferring identity and selfhood. This heightened academic activity in turn attracted the attention of the economics profession, always on the lookout for any nouveau trend in the physical sciences to co-opt and absorb (not to mention new funding sources to tap). Hence another neoliberal development has been the rise of subfields of “neuroeconomics” and behavioral economics, which purport to reconcile the insistence of older neoclassical economics upon the irreducible rationality of the self with the newer neoliberal imperative to optimize the self on a daily basis. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421 (#expands, via linked claim)

While this book is quite SFW, NSFW reflects how business norms affect technology workers’ self-presentation strategies. An online self-presentation must quite literally be “safe for work” to accrue status and benefit its creator. Whether this entails promoting one’s image as a company would promote a brand or celebrity, or adhering to a single verifiable identity so that status can persist across sites, people follow online norms that will increase their status. But what is high status in social media is often that which benefits technology companies and sustains neoliberal discourse. A verifiable identity makes it possible to leverage status across websites, but it also makes it simple to track people as they move around the web. A strong self-brand is a self-regulating mechanism that functions as a response to economic uncertainties. And while the social information created and shared through social media strengthens social ties, it does so in a limited way. “Authenticity” and “being yourself,” advice that is emphasized over and over again in social media discourse, have become marketing strategies that encourage instrumental emotional labor. For all of these reasons, social media has come to promote an individualistic, competitive notion of identity that prioritizes individual status-seeking over collective action or openness. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 44 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The neoliberal regime reappropriated Foucault’s ethics of the self into a self-exploitation device — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 68; Unlimited self-optimization becomes a new coercion producing depression and burnout; Narrow self-interest does not automatically produce efficient exchange (+7 more)

Related

• The neoliberal self-optimization ethic functions as a disguised form of self-exploitation (similarity 0.85)
• Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self (similarity 0.84)
• Self-optimization serves system efficiency, not the good life (similarity 0.82)
• Neoliberalism governs people by getting them to self-regulate toward economic ideals. (similarity 0.82)
• Unlimited self-optimization becomes a new coercion producing depression and burnout (similarity 0.81)
• Self-branding functions as self-regulation in response to economic uncertainty (similarity 0.80)
• Social media self-branding functions as self-governance under neoliberal capitalism (similarity 0.80)
• Self-branding functions as a neoliberal technology of subjectivity shaping its practitioners. (similarity 0.80)
• Social media self-presentation is a technology of self-governance under neoliberal capitalism. (similarity 0.80)
• Neoliberalism works best when subjects voluntarily adopt market-logic selves (similarity 0.79)
• Entrepreneurship became a generalized ideal pervading personal identity and relationships (similarity 0.79)
• The neoliberal regime reappropriated Foucault’s ethics of the self into a self-exploitation device (similarity 0.79)
• Online self-presentation expresses a neoliberal subjectivity applying market principles to identity (similarity 0.79)
• Neoliberalism transforms the self so that crises stop being read as system failures (similarity 0.79)
• Neoliberalism’s ultimate ideal self is the autonomous self-made individual (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421
• Narrow self-interest does not automatically produce efficient exchange #corroborates (0.80)
• Self-branding functions as self-regulation in response to economic uncertainty #exemplifies (0.80) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 44
• The market promotes manifestism and flow as self-corrections of its own harms #expands (0.78) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 257
• Markets act as cognitive prostheses enabling outcomes beyond individual rationality #complicates (0.75) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1206
• Market actors are calculative without becoming amoral atomistic egotists #corroborates (0.72) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1186