The platformized life coach follows these micro-celebrity techniques to various extents in order to be elevated to the level of an expert, trustworthy, and guru-like figure in matters pertaining to spiritual guidance. I followed several coaches in their platform-based incarnations, listening to podcasts, tracking their social media accounts, subscribing to groups and mailing lists, and taking two coaching courses so that I become a certified coach myself. The virtual communities, forums, discussion groups, and seminars that these life coaches maintain help garnering additional publicity and magnifying their reputational scope. For instance, the self-described “social entrepreneur and active thinker” Kain Ramsay (Ramsay, 2022), whose course I attended, maintains a discussion group on Facebook titled “The Principles Into Practice” with nearly 70,000 members at the time of writing. The purpose of the group is to bring together “like-minded individuals from all around the world who are studying, or who have studied, Kain Ramsay or Achology associated on-demand training courses” and one of its stated goals is to give “details about NEW Kain Ramsay training products” (The “Principles Into Practice” Discussion Group, nd). Ramsey is thus the spiritually leading persona around whom the activity of the group revolves. For example, the group’s feed consists of inspirational quotes from his work, links to his writings and courses, lives streams with Ramsey ofering advice, interviews with Ramsey taken by other Achology members, and other people’s testimonies about how useful Ramsey’s coaching was. There are also regular links to the website of Achology (of which Ramsey is the founder and director) and to Ramsay’s own webpage. These websites serve as both permanent information hubs for Ramsay’s past and future work and commercial spaces selling courses, books, merch, and other material. In this sense, the platform is both an amplifier of the guru’s voice and a scafolding that facilitates transactions by directing to personal websites that sell the coach’s services. Apart from the aesthetic, Ramsey, or most probably his media managers, take care of the organizational part by coordinating the group, setting community guidelines, and administering the micro-debates and often disputes that occur between members. Groups, pages, and forums are sites for micro-curatorial labor within the larger space of the social media platform.
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism