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The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?
In 1994, Philip Agre described this as the “capture model,” or “the deliberate reorganization of industrial work activities to allow computers to track them in real time.” Gregory Sholette, the author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, describes how workers in a Pennsylvania factory spent their break covering a wall of the plant with “newspaper clippings, snapshots, spent soda cans, industrial debris, trashed food containers and similar bits and pieces.” They called it “Swampwall.” It reminds me of the sculpture on a high shelf in the back of a diner where I worked, composed of unusually shaped potatoes. Even non-remote jobs, where work cannot pursue the worker home, are dogged by digital tracking: a farmer says Instagram Story views directly correlate to farm subscriptions, a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers. Certainly, smartphones could be too much technology for children, as Jonathan Haidt argues, and definitely, as Tim Wu says, attention is a commodity, but these ascendant theories of tech talk around the fact that something else deep inside, innermost, is being harvested too: our self-worth, or, rather, worthing.
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