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# Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

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Like other projects, life, as if it were an artwork or an art exhibition, should be guided by a larger vision that inspires and permeates decisions on career, love, food, clothing, education, friendships, among other areas. This vision can of course be partially modified through time as circumstances themselves change and it thus becomes a process of constant revision and transformation. As each person has distinct experiences and situations, this vision has to be unique to each, it cannot just derive from generic advice as in the self-help industry.11 Discovering this vision involves research, that is, working with the self and searching deep inside this self. “You need to work with yourself” is a common injunction in vernacular parlance, advice columns, and other locus of psy-expertise of neoliberal governmentality, framing the self as a wild animal that should be reflected upon, controlled, disciplined, modified, advanced, pardoned, indulged, tamed, and generally trained to achieve particular results. Understanding, acting upon, and eventually mastering the impulses of this beast is a project that “we”, the rational and mindful beings inhabiting us, should curate.

In economic phraseology, the idea of the “project” refers to a timespecific work arrangement that captivates the aspirational horizon of neoliberal societies; projects are flexible, they welcome individual creativity and initiatives, they can be completed at one’s own pace, and escape the standard working routine (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2018). As a common laboring practice of both artists and entrepreneurs, projects are unstable and precarious, but they are also a means of socialization in the marketplace allowing the imagining of a better future and upward mobility. Projects can never be completed as one should move from one project to the next or do more than one at the same time. Through them one may meet new people, present their work to new audiences, or develop collaborations that could lead to other projects and professional development. Following the idea that life is a project, with an undiscovered “self” lying at the core, turns life (including the past, the present, and the future; memories, emotions, and desires) into a sort of construction site, on which productive and value creating processes unfold. Similar to a construction site where workers unearth minerals, the unearthing of the true self involves diferent forms of labor aiming to discover the spiritual gems buried inside of us leading our souls to the path of self-fulfillment and happiness. This work with the self can “never be understood as assured or complete” but is always “a work in progress, requiring continual introspection and labor” (Organ; Gill, 2022: 10)—constant revision and the mobilization of novel resources as circumstances themselves change. Self-labor is here a central unit of exploitation; this is the “work you have to do with yourself”, demanding research, coordination and often the recruitment of psy-experts, mindfulness specialists, trainers, yoga teachers, care workers, and counselors as well as input from technology, including from medical equipment, self-tracking devices, personality tests, exercises, and so on. This construction site is a work in progress where capital gets accumulated and valorized by activating forms of labor, infrastructure, and technical equipment around it.

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“A person without vision will perish”, states Ramsay at the beginning of his course, as “when we don’t have a compelling vision for our lives, we can end up going round and round the same old circles” (Ramsay, nd). Similar to artists who need to have strong vision statements for their projects or the curators whose curatorial statements need to reflect the exhibitions they organize, a person’s life project needs to have a vision, that is to come up with a story that would interpret their past life and inform their future goals and objectives. “Self-concept comes first”, Ramsay argues, it has to be determined at the beginning of the coaching process; it is about “how we see ourselves, how we define ourselves, how do we define ourselves to be”, and it thus regulates all the smaller aims and goals we set in our lives (Ramsay, nd). Yet self-discovery is not an easy task, it needs thoughtful contemplation as the possibility of misrepresenting our real selves and authentic desires lurks beneath. And if we fall for this misrepresentation, the consequences can be grave: if our self-concept does not line up to who we are at the core, “we are operating in an incongruent way”, says Ramsay, which means that everything we do eventually will head to the wrong direction (Ramsay, nd). There is thus an essence, a significance, a meaning at the heart of us that we need to determine, and which exists independently of external influences. “Very few of us know how to determine our own significance outside of external factors such as career, wealth, company, and status”, writes Ramsay in his book with the evocative title Responsibility Rebellion, and we are thus “all vulnerable to falling into this pit of defeatism and purposelessness” (Ramsay, 2020: 102). Unless we unearth this essence, we will drift aimlessly like leaves in the wind that swirl around, themselves dragged by external forces and circumstances. The path toward self-discovery and happiness is synonymous with growth, development, and purpose to avoid “going round and round the same old circles” (Ramsay, nd).

The personal challenge, however, becomes even more severe once we get a glimpse of our internal gems; once we discover our true self, the labor not only needs to continue but to become more intense and uncompromising. This is because, as mentioned above, the uncurated self in life-coaching cultures is messy and unruly, almost like the barbarian in orientalist narratives who needs curbing to follow the proper direction and be lifted to a higher state of self-awareness. The curatorial imperative embarks on a self-colonizing and self-civilizing quest since the highest stage of self-awareness implies curtailing our uncurated savage instincts. Maintaining unfaltering progress to our vision is possible, for Ramsay, only “when we start developing this

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level of self-awareness” as ultimately “self-control is the ultimate expression of maturity in life” (Ramsay, nd). Speaking in a podcast of Castillo, the “selfdiscipline coach” Monika Levi shares a similar opinion: “the most successful people are not the most intelligent or talented. They’re the most disciplined people” (Castillo, 2023). Therefore, “every action you take is a vote toward the person you want to become, the identity you want to build. And so it’s all about the compounding of the little choices we make every day” (Castillo, 2023). If our curator self does not pay attention to these “little choices”, the uncurated self can easily fall prey to malicious forces, which will make us act in whatever erratic way they desire. As Ramsay confirms in his book, “When you allow your emotional and mental well-being to be controlled or manipulated by your unmonitored thoughts, external circumstances, or forces, you become immediately disempowered and out of control” (2020: 91). There is then an ever-present danger that these wicked agents, unmonitored thoughts, and external forces, will take advantage of our vulnerable selves and rail them across evil lines.

This fight with evil is constant and should inform all of our “little choices”. Even when we indulge in some unmeditated pleasure this should be subject to the same self-observation and self-discipline apparatus; for instance, we should be allowed to treat ourselves with sweets or holidays only after we make some sacrifice that brings us closer to our vision (i.e., like trained dogs, we have to deserve the reward). For Castillo’s radical self-Stakhanovism, observation and self-discipline should be constant so that we eventually disavow all indulgent, unproductive moments:

When we indulge in food and we indulge in eating Oreos, when we know that that’s not what we ultimately want to do with our lives, it’s very similar to indulging in emotions that we know aren’t going to serve us.

(2015)

Even the common feeling of confusion should be prohibited as ultimately it serves no purpose, no vision, it only drags us back to inaction:

“I’m confused,” is very indulgent. It’s a way of not taking action. It’s a way of confusion, indulging in the emotion of confusion. I do like to talk about it as an emotion that serves no purpose. It doesn’t help you. All it does is stall you out.

(Castillo, 2015)

Thus, when this everyday feeling arises, we must strive to overcome it, since it distorts the straightforward grasp of our desires. Radical self-discipline should lead to an improved self, that is, to a self that is capable of achieving goals and aims that correspond to what we want to be. For Levi, self-discipline means to do something unwanted, it sacrifices present-day joy and convenience for achieving our ideal future self, “it is doing something that you don’t want to do, literally in the moment, for your future self” (Castillo, 2023). The apparatus of self-discipline in coaching cultures is then similar to religious asceticism, serving a transcendental narrative of the real self that has to be unearthed and sustained so as to reach a fulfilling spiritual deification.

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More than that, self-discipline should rely on developing a specific mindset that would be able to enforce it. For all the coaches I have studied, the very concept of “mindset” and idea that we should develop a specific “mindset” were extremely important to the point that they provided the overarching goal of their training; for Joeel and Natalie Rivera, for instance, “all success is attributable to mindset” and the right mindset, according to them, is called the “growth mindset” that allows for adaptability, change, and improvement over time (Joeel and Natalie Rivera, nd). This is contradicted by the “fixed mindset” which implies stagnation and inaction, or, in other accounts, with the “victim mindset”. Ramsey regards the victim mindset catastrophic as, “for powerful people, the victim mindset is nothing more than an unnecessary chain holding them back from living exciting and rewarding lives” and this victim mindset is “detrimental to your growth and self-mastery” and not productive; it is a fetter that prevents us from growing (2020: 48).

The right mindsets should be accompanied by specific traits. In contrast to the tendency for self-destructiveness found in the fixed or victim mindsets, some of the staple attributes of the right mindset are confidence, empowerment, and resilience for achieving one’s vision. Confidence refers to the ability to believe in yourself, which is ultimately the indicator of success; as Joeel and Natalie Rivera put it, “whether or not a person will succeed depends on the level of confidence” rather than, say, inherited financial status, educational background, or social capital (Joeel and Natalie Rivera, nd). The confidence imperative is widely distributed not only in the life-coach discourse but is key in the neoliberal apparatus at large in which market competition is impressed upon all dimensions of social life (Wilson, 2017). The prevailing “confidence cult(ure)” is an integral part of the therapeutic narrative that imposes an “obligated freedom”, as Organ and Gill argue, “in which not achieving the required change is framed as moral and psychological failure” (2022: 6). In other words, it is impossible to be “free” unless you do all this labor of unearthing and orient the “work with yourself” toward self-transformation. The confidence imperative, however, especially when targeting female audiences, does not set a transcendental “perfection” as its standard but admits (and comes to terms with) the messiness of life, its weaknesses, and negativities. Confidence is thus accompanied by a “vulnerability turn” (2022: 6), according to which people should love themselves, embrace their past mistakes, and turn harmful psychological traits into assets. Castillo, for instance, in her podcast episode Embrace Your Negative Parts tells us: “Think of all the things in your past that you wish you hadn’t done, and take a deep breath and say, ‘Oh, I’m human. This is part of my human experience’ [… .] And human beings do things that cause problems for other people, and human beings do things that ‘hurt’ other people. And it’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay” (Castillo, 2022e). Be willing to embrace your weaknesses, then, even the ones that can lead to harming oneself or others comes from a position of acceptance rather than pathology. In this sense, the vulnerability turn inhabits the same neoliberal version of individual empowerment as it addresses traumas as opportunities for self-improvement (instead of, say, searching for their social causes and collectively struggling to confront these causes).12

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This is also the departure point of positive psychology, according to which traumas should not be simply encountered so that we understand and reflect on them, but they should be molded into feelings of happiness. Martin Seligman in his bestseller Authentic Happiness (2002), for instance, believes that through constantly maintaining an optimist outlook we can eventually uphold a protective shield that would guard our well-beings from external negativity. This corresponds to the trait of resilience that requires a constant attitude of optimism, flexibility, and adaptability, as damaging events, like losses and traumas, should be used to make us stronger. Resilience is a property of the strong and powerful, who abide by Nietzsche’s dictum “what doesn’t kill me make me stronger”, a widespread citation in meme cultures that transposes the coaching vision of constant internal struggle against adversity into everyday parlance. Resilient people need to stay positive, as positivity “constitutes a ‘bufer’ against adversity, giving the feeling of being someone competent, who cannot be ‘crushed’ by the world”, as Illouz puts it, like reactive and elastic materials that will be enduring whatever attempts to crush them (2020: 84). Discourses on resilience “call on people to be adaptable and positive, ‘bounce back’ from adversity, and embrace a mindset in which negative experiences must be reframed in upbeat terms” (Organ and Gill, 2022: 17), that is to absorb, convert, and repurpose negative occurrences into shields for the future well-being.

Assessing whether coaching discourses may (or may not) work for individuals or social groups is not the point here; the point is instead to place the curatorial imperative within the cultures it harvests and, given its immense popularity, the “truths” it gives rise to in the broader social space. The key truths of the coaching narrative prey on common interpellations of neoliberal ideology and specifically on what Julie Wilson calls a “self-enclosed individualism” (2018: 6). As AnaLouise Keating (2012) puts it:

Self-enclosed individualism relies on a dichotomous framework that positions the individual in opposition to all other human and nonhuman beings. (“It’s me against the world.”) In this binary-oppositional structure, each individual is entirely separate from the external world. Self and society are mutually exclusive; to survive and thrive, each person must focus almost entirely on herself, evaluating all actions in egocentric terms: “What’s in it for me?” “How can I succeed?” “How will this event, this situation, afect me?” “What can you do for me?” “What can I take from you?

(quoted in Wilson 2017: 4)

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In the coaching narrative then, “negative” events that antagonize power relations, such as strikes, boycotts, or protests, should be not evaluated from the standpoint of a possible social improvement but from whether they serve or not our individual happiness and self-fulfillment. References on class are stunningly absent from this discourse, or better they are present insofar as coaches want to highlight that class and social position eventually do not matter. In this sense, the curatorial imperative contributes to further canonizing atomization as the fundamental unit of social reality in which personal interest and the maximization of one’s pleasure should always come first instead of, say, sacrificing oneself for a larger cause. In the next section, I explore how this atomized narrative plays out in the training of heterosexual men on how to form relations with women, a sphere that is particularly apt for reproducing narratives of success and self-realization.

6.5 Curating Masculinities in Sexuality and Intimacy Coaching

Similar narratives are then palpable in the men’s coaching, and more particularly, in the courses, guidelines, seminars, and prescriptions focusing on dating and romantic relations, which attempt to outline the proper ways of curating men’s sexuality and intimacy. This section explores men’s coaching as part of the curatorial tropes that received widespread popularity in platform society.

The areas of sexuality and intimacy, similar to other areas, as we saw, are dramatically impacted by the curatorial imperatives of self-presentation, authenticity, and personal vision that digital technologies have brought about. In this section, I especially look at how sexuality and intimacy are instrumentalized in heterosexual men’s coaching cultures for dramatizing male identities of empowerment among shifting socio-economic realities and conceptions of gender. Sexuality refers to the ways that (gendered) people perform (or not) sexual desires around other (gendered) people and bodies; intimacy in turn refers to the warm and tender feelings or gestures, not necessarily sexual, that people experience around particular individuals. While these afects often overlap, when it comes to male coaching in particular, sexuality becomes primarily the subject of so-called dating coaches while intimacy that of so-called relationship coaches. In men’s coaching and wider popular culture discourse, sexuality and intimacy are considered to be core parts of one’s identity. By understanding and enabling one’s sexuality, for instance, one can have more possibilities to find the ideal partner and achieve happiness (Cabanas and Illouz, 2019). $\mathrm { O r } ,$ by mastering intimacy, one has more chances to succeed in other significant areas of life, such as professional growth, personal development, and family, or to elevate emotional states linked to personal well-being, including feeling protected and cared for. Sexuality and intimacy (maybe along with career) are, in the coaching narrative, the most important areas of one’s identity, to which one should invest time and resources. To go back to the premise of the last section, then, discovering and eventually efectively performing one’s sexuality is part and parcel of unearthing a real self in coaching cultures.

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I have followed coaches addressing heterosexual men who specialize in both sexuality and intimacy across social networks in order to familiarize myself with the tropes of the male coaching romantic discourse.13 As a systematic analysis of male coaches is not the aim of this section, I include some selective examples of dating and relationship coaches which I regard paradigmatic of the curatorial strategies and micro-techniques employed for mentoring their audiences. Indicatively, I discuss Corey Wayne, who is a popular sexuality and intimacy coaching celebrity with 500,000 subscribers on YouTube and 100,000 followers on Instagram as well as the writer of bestseller books, such as How to be a 3% Man. I also include insights and material from other male coaches who perform diverse masculinities: from more fragile, including Reese Stockhausen in a website called “Practical Intimacy”,14 to hardcore and uncompromising alpha, who can be fully misogynistic (an infamous example being Andrew Tate). Despite the diferences in style and nuance, all male coaches address a neoliberal hegemonic masculinity that should be dominant, assertive, and entrepreneurial as opposed to uncurated masculinities of disorientation and servility. In this context, sexuality and intimacy are areas that should be curated toward a winner-takesit-all vision of successful manhood, a vision that can be adapted to diferent constructions of male types from the adventurous and risk-taking “player” to the responsible “family person”.

Dating platforms and apps, according to Chris Haywood’s account on masculinities and online dating, “impel us to reveal ourselves (or particular edited aspects of us)” and more explicitly to valorize the self, making it “more explicit and accessible” (2020: 6). They thus create new anxieties not only for discovering one’s sexuality but also performing one’s unique sexual identity, desires, and romantic aspirations. In a non-binary gender landscape, the notion of masculinity is constantly being made in diferent contexts of interaction that mark the self in diferent ways. Coaches addressing heterosexual men commonly resort to the idea that there is an impending “crisis of masculinity”, according to which men have become weak, disoriented, and incapable of fulfilling their traditional roles. They attribute this “crisis” to the feminist undoing of traditional gender roles, the disappearance of the muscled breadwinner in light of the deindustrialization of the West, and expressions of multiple genders and sexualities that do not conform to traditional binary notions.

By operationalizing flirting, dating, and relationships with women, men’s coaching inhabits a place both in the so-called manosphere, an online movement that avows men’s rights in opposition to feminism (Ging, 2019), and the so-called seduction industry, which is itself a fragment of the manosphere, and aims to train men to seduce, and generally managing relations with, women (O’ Neil, 2018). The manosphere community claims sexist mythologies, such as the Red Pill philosophy, taken from the film

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Matrix, that supposedly aims to liberate men from a feminism-dominated society as well as the fundamental distinction between alpha and beta males (among some other types), with the former conforming to independent, assertive, and autonomous men who can handle any situation for their own benefit and the latter to docile men who have lost their maleness as a result of feminism and social degradation. The manosphere is also a place of more underdog, self-described beta masculinities, such as the incels, or involuntary celibates (O’Malley, Thomas and Holt, 2022), who constitute a resentful online movement holding women as well as the alphas equally responsible for their poor dating life and subordinate status and codifying them in derogatory slang such as the Staceys and the Chads, respectively (Menzie, 2022). The seduction community inhabits overlapping codes and vocabularies with the manosphere, such as “friendzoning”, that is when a woman wants to remain friends instead of having a sexual relationship, and the “Mr. Nice Guy”, which refers to the passive beta males whose desires are colonized by dominant society. Male coaching in essence trains the “Mr. Nice Guys”, the “losers”, the “people pleasers”,15 and the “betas” of this world to escape the friendzone and gradually become the real masters and leaders of their desires.16 In this sense, male coaching represents an uplifting, assertive, positive, and generally curated practice against the uncurated masculinities that are confused in a chaotic social environment; a curated masculinity promises a step toward men’s well-being and happiness. The ideal mindset here is not simply one aiming toward growth, as we discussed in the previous section, but a mindset that corresponds to a curated version of dominant masculinity.

The repudiation of weakness in favor of dominance and assertiveness is a common trajectory in all the male coaches I followed, including the seemingly more fragile ones: “Finally feel like a MAN. With an unshakable confidence and trust in who you are and what you want” (Jodi and Reece, 2019), “Most women crave alpha males who display strength, confidence, and power” (Valizadeh: Ch. 1), “A true Alpha Male, a man who goes for what he wants and has positive expectations that he will achieve his goals, will choose his purpose and his passion over a woman if faced with the choice” (Wayne, 2013: 2), “I am advocating that you develop a strategy for adaptation—like a blueprint for transforming from a beta male to an alpha male” (Blake, 2021: Introduction). Thus, while not all men’s coaches inhabit the manosphere in the same way, they all curate a hegemonic masculinity that is vigilant, forceful, self-controlled, resilient, and adaptive. In light of resilience and adaptability, discussed in the previous section, hegemonic masculinity cannot primarily be defined in its traditional opposition to homosexuality, as some scholars have argued in the past (Anderson, 2009), but refers to a varied process of accommodating values within a given social order, including the strategic adaption of elements from less hegemonic or beta masculinities for establishing strategic dominance—for instance, by being strategically pro-gay so as to adapt to social norms and remain influential within particular milieus (Ging, 2019). Men’s coaching then hinges upon this explicitly managerial framework to curate hegemonic masculinities to new social environments of rising feminism and technological afordances that demand new forms of political correctness and accelerate dating competition: be an alpha “without the toxic masculinity bullshit”, as Damien Blake, the author of the Modern Alpha Male Mindset Strategies, puts it (2021: Introduction).

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Furthermore, apart from helping to build one’s career or family, which are the eternal standards of success in capitalist modernity, male coaching promises that by properly curating sexuality and intimacy a man can further have more and better fun. From a miserable nerd, the man can transform into a muscled and desirable entrepreneur, such as Jef Bezos who often acts as a regulatory example. While, as stated in the previous section, indulgence is framed in life coaching cultures as less productive, in male coaching the concept of “fun” is recurrently brought up as it not only promises pleasure fixes, which are in turn expressive of a charming, powerful, and dominant lifestyle, but also “trains” men to approach and relate with women (O’Neill, 2018). This training has a productive side as it can eventually help them to conquer the woman of their dreams (who can then be their wife).17 To fulfil similar demands, dating and flirting coaches have to teach men various tricks. The proper communication style then is broken down into a set of learnable instructions that streamline and rationalize romantic exchange stripping away the contingency or awkward and improvised moments. This is typical of all courses, seminars, bootcamps, and books on men’s dating I came across, which generally purport to teach men “how to approach women […], what to say, how to say it, and […] how to respond to her questions and her tests” (Wayne, 2013: 5). The experience of the instructor as a self-proclaimed master on flirting, dating, and relationships here again certifies that there is a “script that works”, which, if followed, will aford clients with an abundance of dating options.

The discursive construction of “abundance”, that is to say the maximization of choice, is here a fundamental pillar and can even constitute the end point of the men’s journey. In general, in order to succeed, a man needs to have a lot, not only in terms of money but also in terms of dating; the more the better. The dating apps have drastically inflated the institution (or illusion) of choice, which is a fundamental pillar of liberalism, including, at least in theory, the possibility of sourcing up from an infinite pool of potential partners. As Illouz eloquently puts it,

Choice—sexual, consumer, or emotional—is the chief trope under which the self and the will in liberal polities are organized. To have a modern or late-modern self is to exercise choice and to increase the subjective experience of choice. Choice is the trope of selfhood linking freedom to the economic and emotional realms; it is the main modality of subjectivity in the consumer and sexual realms.

(2021: 27)

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If choice, as the main modality of subjectivity, is nominally limitless, then the issue at stake is how to reach a condition of abundance that would allow men to keep as many choices as possible open: “Busy, successful men communicate abundance. They come from a place of abundance. If things don’t work out with one girl, it’s no big deal. There is another bus every 15 minutes”, as the coach Corey Wayne proclaims (2013: 68). Here, the implicit idea is that once a certain saturation point of desirability is achieved, this will trigger a self-generating condition of more desirability and a self-fulfilling cycle of abundance. Knowing that there is choice elsewhere, men can be more relaxed, cool, and chilled when pursuing a woman. In turn, this efortless coolness will make them more desirable for the women they pursue and, as in a self-generating loop, this will create even greater choice when pursuing the next woman. Women are thus perceived as a sort of currency whose accumulation can lead to an abundance of choice and thus freedom from scarcity.

The men’s dating coaching culture inhabits a rationale that treats women as learnable machines with similar features, at least when they have not been “infected” by feminism, which according to the manosphere discourse, is something that decisively alters their behavior. By treating romantic exchange as knowable, the woman becomes a category that displays observable characteristics over time. In the seduction industry, the eventual conquering of this knowledge is paramount for learning how to conquer women in the context of “the game”, a concept that refers to the mastering of seduction play and that was first introduced in the blockbuster book The Game by the now “recovered” pick-up artist Neil Strauss (Gilsinan, 2015).18 Dating coaches hope to curate the archaic “predator” instincts of modern men by teaching them to know and recognize their prey’s reactions and thus adjust their behavior accordingly. Examples thus drawn from evolutionary biology, or the natural world abound and serve to, one way or another, “naturalize” the behavior of men and women. The injunction that alpha men should be “leading their pack” like wolves is one of the most popular ones but one can encounter plenty of them in the coaching discourse. For instance, coach Corey Wayne in a 2022 video titled “Why She Will BE Back After Backing Away” compares women’s behavior with that of cats: “chase a cat and it will run away; leave it alone and eventually it will come back sit in your lap and start purring; like cats, men must let women come to them at their own pace” (Wayne, 2022).19 Or, as he claims in the section of his book titled Women Are Like Cats, Men Are Like Dogs: “Women are like cats. They come and go as they please… and… YOU MUST LET THEM!!! If you don’t, you will destroy their level of safety and comfort with you” (2013: 79). Here, women react in predictable ways, like domestic animals whose reactions are natural and easy to understand following specific instructions while by doing so men exercise their agency and cunningness to reverse the presumably detrimental social developments against them (e.g., feminism).20

The curatorial imperative in men’s coaching brings to the fore an intense preoccupation with manhood that has to be regained and repurposed amidst disorientation and changing gender roles. The underlying assumption is that the uncurated man is constantly confused and thus not be able to evolve in this new reality. In contrast, the curated man can read gender and generally social relations through a series of “do’s and don’ts”, which, if practiced correctly, can bring success and fulfil the (currently compromised) mission of men to lead and be dominant.

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