6.6 Conclusion
This chapter looked at the manifestations of the curatorial imperative in life coaching both as a productive as well as a consumptive enterprise in which “individuals are expected to construct and self-regulate their own human capital in all spheres of life” (Fenwick, 2001:127); to make the best of their potential, human beings have to grapple with the self as an ongoing project that requires labor. The self is a work in progress subjected to often competing discourses and expertise, and we should continuously cherish and cultivate this project in order to achieve a life worth living. As the self does not exist prior to its discursive articulation in given material contexts, the spread of the curatorial apparatus in everyday media technologies accelerates an existential questioning around what the self is and what it should be. To go back to the premise of the sections above, the skyrocketing of the therapeutic ethos correlates with the unprecedented afordances for value creation that are released via the development of platform capitalism. The figure of the coach, from the perspective of political economy, is a symptom of these afordances which exploit the audience’s attention and the constant displacement of one’s identity in platform-based interactions. When speaking of the Foucauldian technologies of the self, we should take into account that these are an efect of the drive to accumulate and maintain a continuous regime of growth, a drive that shapes social life after its own image.
The chapter further explored how techno-social afordances construct new material conditions for the production of the guru or the spiritual guide. The platform guru needs to make a much more varying and multi-directional claim to charisma, according to the possibilities each platform can ofer. Similar to what was referred to in Chapter 3 with The Dodo and other content creators, the coaches make use of these platform techno-social afordances for raising their visibility and reputational capital as well as facilitating transactions and enabling independent forms of self-branding. The platformized production of the life coach organizes “the self as ‘entrepreneur’ ” (Foster, 2016: 83), both as a commercially curated enterprise and as an inspirational address curating others. The figure of the life coach performs, even more efectively than the previous cases we discussed, a constitutive link between “self-curating” and “curating others” as the eficient curation of a coaching persona in platform cultures is a prerequisite for being fashioned as a charismatic authority that can then curate others.
150
Cultures of Platform Capitalism