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

The grouper is juicy and fresh with the coolness of a buttery Tangerine sauce, steamed greens in grouper and lime broth—with parsnips in 3 diferent textures. An emotional tasting tour on the path of creative Thessaloniki cuisine!!!28

Kotsi (pork shank) as you have never imagined it!!! We were patient enough to cook it for 48 hours at low temperature to caramelize it, and it was finally worth it!!! We made the velvetiest potato cream like the master chefs in the good French restaurants. Polenta gnocchi with a little espresso is the touch that will take of the unexpected taste event. A tasty journey from tradition to postmodern Gastronomy!!!29

TALIATA, the Italian version of the steak loved by the people of Thessaloniki. A challenge to ofer the ultimate steak experience to the gourmands of a city that lives and breathes good food. THRiA’s tagliata […] Aged Port / fried potato nest / prosciutto chips / parsley spirit for cooling / beef skirt !!!30

The portrayals of the dishes are symbolically rich and appeal to the senses (e.g., “velvetiest, textures”), experiential (e.g., “the ultimate steak experience”), merging locality (e.g., “kotsi”, “creative Thessaloniki cuisine”, “a city that lives and breathes good food”) with more acknowledged gourmet centers (e.g., “French restaurants”, “Italian Taliata”). In this journey “from tradition to postmodern Gastronomy”, the menus enact a site of refinement and sophistication as they promise to uplift the eaters via the profound knowledgeability of the chef. As the 2022 film The Menu directed by Mark Mylod wittily shows, the new chef’s persona dwells in inspiration, creativity, and guru-like spiritualism by deploying expert menus and descriptions.31 As Finn puts it about the ethics and aesthetics of expert menus:

Similarly, the presence of essences, foams, or fancy terms such as soubise and escabèche on a menu are not only signs of gourmet cooking but also go hand in hand with the use of ingredients typically supposed to be healthier, more sustainable, and novel or exotic. The gestalt you can invoke with a single word, such as “artisanal” or “kale,” often feels like a coherent aesthetics and ethics of eating.

(2019: 19)

The “gestalt” Finn is speaking about, whether via words or images, assembles a food atmosphere that invokes aesthetics and ethics alike around various performances of the self. This is neither to deny the magnificent sensations and pleasures of eating nor to downgrade the genuine subjective investments people may have to alternative foodways. It is more to underline that the distributed gastronomical imaginary retains an ideological angle that in the age of platforms gets intertwined, either strategically or unwittingly, in everyday routines such as particular ways of photographing, sharing, commenting on, and reacting to vis-à-vis manifold foodscapes. These routines negotiate forms, longings, and aspirations of belonging and thus of identity-building. The prevalent concept of a “romantic dinner” in dating, for instance, a theme we shall also discuss in Chapter 6, suggests an upgraded eating experience that breaks away from the routine. In Thessaloniki, a romantic dinner in THRiA would for most people fulfill this role by granting a temporary belonging in an elite group of connoisseurs in contrast to a dinner in a kebab place that is typically regarded as banal. The more food is curated in diverse pathways, the more it seizes modes of socialization filling us with anxieties of identity, class, and selfhood.

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5.6 Conclusions

This chapter argued that gastronomical curating is driven by the readjustment of capital to the condition of information oversaturation through recourse to expertise and artification, so that food consumption becomes meaningful and unique. As many smaller businesses are becoming increasingly artified in their design, architectural, decorative, and labor practices, especially in big metropolitan centers, the span of gastronomical curating ranges from the boutiquization of bakeries, restaurants, and cafés, usually in minimalist, “clean” style, to the post-2010 boom in new global liquor scenes, such as crafted beer, cocktail, and wine bar milieus, and the spread of fine dining, expressed in curated menus, auteur chefs, or Michelin stars. The development of gastronomic curating encounters consumers with concepts and figures previously unexplored by capital. As locality, authenticity, and the generic babushkas and nonnas—concepts and figures previously excluded from the accumulation process or restricted to the domestic sphere—become a means to win the hearts of new consumers and thus produce capital, they need to be staged or literally put to work as a customer-desirable image of themselves. This staging further blurs the lines between reality and representation and is evocative of the disintegrated spectacles of communicative capitalism (Dean, 2013; Wark, 2014).

The substitution of manual labor with machinery in farming especially after the 1950s and the development of transnational supply chains makes food global and ubiquitous (Pratt, 2007: 286); in this context, the authentic and the local assume a new currency in the form of traditional recipes, methods of cooking, the capacity to categorize ingredients, or the insights into the qualities of materials corresponding to diferent geographies, types of soil, and weather conditions. In the global food market, locality and authenticity are the last frontier of identity; they are bound to expert knowledge as the keepers of this knowledge are entitled to mobilize their expertise for curating experiences. As we have seen, the authentic does not necessarily link to a single consumption practice; it is a currency mobilized to address diferent class backgrounds by adding a romantic appeal to consumption that is supposedly against mass culture. This romantic yearning for the past is captured in another popular idea among urban milieus, that is of “a return to nature”, or as Michael Pollan advises in his foodie bible Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual of avoiding “anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” (2013: 17). The economization of similar ideas and ideals entails the extraction of value from consumers’ emotional, communicative, and afective capacities, intensifying the regime of capital accumulation down to everyday meaning-making and subjectivity. This mass mobilization of food as a sign of status is part of a new “consumer ideology” that promises the consumer a distinction from the masses on the grounds of a presumed encounter with a mythical past that has been lost to modernity (Schmitt, Brakus, and Biraglia, 2022). Or, as Sherry Turkle keenly puts it, “I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination” (2011: 4).

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The curatorial imperative of the authentic babushka and nonna permeates popular culture representations in varying intensities and degrees spreading to everyday as well as luxury settings. As such, curating operates both at the mass level, in which ordinary users are interpellated by entrepreneurial platform-based opportunities, and at the celebrity level, where individuals or brands strategically position themselves in the marketplace. In both cases, the abovementioned aspects of curatorial production are key: the conceptual selection and arrangement of signs, the framing of commodities through storytelling techniques, and the production of oneself as niche expert are all mobilized so that food consumption is converted into a sharable experience. In the next chapter, we will follow the thread of curatorial production in another notable figure of authenticity and inspiration in platform capitalism: the life coach.

Notes

2 The mediator is anonymized and this is not a direct quote but a paraphrasing of his words.

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cleaning, auto repair, wholesale distribution, and telephone access” (2011: 3), for which the consumer pays to satisfy a practical need. As the significance of the service sector in the post–World War II world increases, especially in the West, this new economic unit, the experience, is posited as a means to save capitalism from crises.

5 As Per Darmer and Jon Sundbo put it:

It is not the shoes, but the fact that these shoes are fashionable and show who you are, which is the experience. This is an experience you cannot get from just any pair of shoes. It is the design, the marketing, the usage and symbolic value of the shoes that makes them an experience. The shoes acquire a story or a theme and it is the story or the theme, rather than the product, which the consumers buy and cherish in the experience economy.

(2008:1)

6 Yet, as each “economic ofering”, to use the language of Pine and Gilmore (2011: 8), navigates diferent expectations about the uses of consumer time, there can be no overarching formula of success. In a setting like a fine dining restaurant, for instance, where time is not simply procedural but expected to be gratifying to the senses—taste, sight, and smell—time should be pleasing and memorable. In the digital banking and retail sphere, for instance, the customer experience would consider usability and easy navigation of one’s services, the fewer clicks and the less time to make purchases and other bureaucratic tasks, the better.

7 www.airbnb.co.uk/experiences/289574

8 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/curated-news/id1592149063

9 This comes from the website The World’s 50 Best Restaurants that voted Noma no 1 in 2021: www.theworlds50best.com/the-list/1-10/Noma.html

10 www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/16/594310548/the-russian-chef-who-isbringing-back-his-homelands-colorful-classic-cuisine

12 This advertisement has been changed on the oficial Airbnb page of the Experience, but it is still persevered electronically here: https://allevents.in/mobile/amp-event. php?event\_id=10000308121247947

13 Pasta with the Grandmas: www.airbnb.gy/experiences/1610894

14 Pasta with the Grandmas: www.airbnb.gy/experiences/1610894

15 I copied-pasted this and the questions below from the Airbnb Experience review page for which no direct link can be provided.

16 These are taken from the Airbnb questionnaire after completing the Experience.

17 www.airbnb.com/host/experiences

18 Platforms are key in spreading Marie Kondo’s brand, as apart from her own “static” website, her oeuvre spreads in Instagram (4 million followers), Facebook (1.4 followers) and Netflix (with the popular show “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo”) while through Amazon her books are deliverable practically anywhere in the world.

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21 Ibid.

22 https://greekcitytimes.com/2021/11/10/unesco-thessaloniki-gastronomy/

23 Indicatively, from around the early 2000s onwards, there have been instances where bands were turned down from the space for having previously played in bars; or in some of the squat’s parties there was a decision to ban any monetary transaction in the space and was thus often impossible to buy any drinks (so that people had to buy them from nearby stores). In this sense, the space had to remain, as much as possible, “pure” from monetary exchange.

24 THRiA opened its doors in 2015 and closed in late 2022.

25 The prices were around €15–20 per dish.

26 www.facebook.com/THRIArestaurant/posts/1273547392777116/

27 For instance, Lunchbox is an AI-powered app that gives to restaurant owners the opportunity to turn dishes into photographable artworks in a matter of few seconds without the need of the professional photographer.

28 www.facebook.com/THRIArestaurant/photos/1898706816927834

29 www.facebook.com/THRIArestaurant/photos/1793461097452407

30 www.facebook.com/THRIArestaurant/photos/1779909678807549

31 The chef in the film is praised: “The way he weaves in historical allegories, […] it is a concept. […] That is what makes his food so exciting. He is not just a chef. He is a storyteller”.

References

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6 “A Person without Vision Will Perish” Curating Mindsets, Micro-Celebrities, and Intimacies in Life Coaching

6.1 You Know How Much I Love Paris!

Opening an early 2022 episode of the Life Coach School Podcast, titled When You Just Can’t, the “Master Coach”, host, and founder of the School, Brooke Castillo, admitted that today: “I just can’t, […] I want to crawl back into the covers, I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to show up, I don’t want to deliver, I just literally can’t do it” (Castillo, 2022b). Days when you “just can’t” can afect anyone—Castillo assures us that “I have those days too and I want you to know that it’s okay”—yet not everyone has the right approach to face them. Castillo tells the listeners that she is experienced in handling incapacitating days—“I am doing that quite well”, she admits—and thus she sets out to ofer a “mental way of approaching” these days. Here, the coaching advice and expertise are closely tied to first-hand experience. From a similar position of experience comes the advice of the so-called Breakup Coach Dorothy A.B. Johnson, who in a previous episode of the same podcast, titled Thriving After Break Up, explains to Castillo that she decided to pursue the “breakup” specialization after a traumatic “break up with my significant other of 7 years” (Castillo, 2022a). During this painful time, Johnson tried everything to ease her pain, even spending “about a year googling how to get over your ex”, and yet she “was still feeling super angry” with him. The pain was healed after attending a life coach school, where she “immediately realized” that she wanted to be a break-up coach, with the knowledge she acquired “in two break-ups” being key for advising others. And yet in another episode, Tonya Leigh, a Self-image Coach, tells Castillo that her self-image was always a serious problem, as “for so many years I was spending energy and time trying to fix myself” and the unfortunate result was to “perpetuate the story that I was broken” (Castillo, 2021). After years of failed attempts, she suddenly realized who she wanted to be when she travelled to “Paris for the very first time” (“You know how much I love Paris!” she exclaims to Castillo), and it was in this mythical land of romance and charm that the troubled Leigh finally “got the glimpse of the woman” she wanted to be: “everything”, she confesses, came together, “from how I dress, to my mindset, to just how I curate myself” (Castillo, 2022c). And there, in the eternal City of Love,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003182801-8

Leigh finally came up with a discovery, whose sharp insight accompanied her professional career ever since: “we as women get to create ourselves”. As a self-image coach, Leigh coaches how to create a female self-image that brings more status and money, simply by “elevating” three fundamental pillars of female identity—“mindset, style, and surroundings” (Castillo, 2022c).

The rise of life coaching into a multi-billion-dollar industry and mass phenomenon, as a potential profession and therapy technique, follows the decades-long impetus of “psychologizing” social, political, and economic problems, a rationality first appearing in Western societies and then spreading and adapting throughout the globe (Nehring et al., 2020: 4). Psychologization means simply to “make something psychological”, a discursive maneuver which involves the reduction of “moral, political, or social categories” to a “question of psychology” (Nehring et al., 2020: 4). While traditionally the question of psychology was encountered by a certified expert, such as an academically trained psychologist, a psychoanalyst, or a psychiatrist, life coaches rely on a version of therapeutic credibility that is very loosely regulated, if not occurring in a legislative vacuum (Aboujaoude, 2020: 3). The rise of platforms deepens the deregulation of the industry as it ofers unparalleled promotional, educational, and networking opportunities to aspiring and professional life coaches; coaches can embody their inspirational personas in a variety of formats, including in videos, podcasts, seminars, photos, and personal accounts. In this expanded terrain of struggle for institutional recognition, the capitalization of a previous feeling, most preferably referring to unease and sufering (and their overcoming), such as dificulty in getting out of bed, a painful break-up, or troubled self-image are key in proving the credentials of expertise.

In this chapter, I look at the online manifestations of life coaching as a professional practice and general inspirational difusion pervading platform societies. I am interested in how the coaches curate themselves in social media accounts, seminars, and other performances of the self as well as on the social constructions they advocate when they curate others. The coach needs to live a stimulating life that inspires and thus guides by example and, as such, there is a constitutive link between self-curation and curating others: to guide others one needs to first showcase a convincingly inspiring life story. Inspiration, of course, as a tool for raising publicity, is not just specific to life coaches but is employed by various actors, including politicians, celebrities, and everyday users. As internet fame appears to have become “increasingly accessible and practiced by or bestowed upon ordinary people from all walks of life” (Abidin, 2018: xiv), everyone with a social media account is interpellated as a potentially inspirational actor. It is in the practice of a life coach that the inspirational ethos finds its full purpose, as the successful management of inspiration and the generation of what we can call “inspirational capital” can be significant gateways for self-gurufication.

In the scholarly literature, the figure of the life coach rests on the terrain of the “therapeutic” (Nehring et al., 2020: 6), an umbrella term that consists of the modern disciplines purporting to “saving the self” (Illouz, 2008: 41), and histories ranging from Freud and self-help to psychoanalysis and popular psychology. The spread of psychology in particular consolidated the idea that “emotions were entities which should be managed and manipulated, that they needed to be expertly managed for healthy and authentic selfhood to be achieved” (Illouz, 2017: 15), which is a key discursive construction in therapeutic cultures. Accordingly, as Illouz argues elsewhere (2013: 45), any obstacle impeding the realization of a healthy and authentic selfhood and of reaching our full potential became a potential pathology to be confronted. Thus, from the 1960s onward, with the growth of the so-called humanistic psychology and figures like Abraham Maslow, the idea “that health and selfrealization is the same” and that people who had “unrealized lives where in the need of care and therapy” entered the lexicon of psychological discourse in the United States (Illouz, 2013: 45). For Maslow, for instance, the highest principle in the pursuit of emotional well-being is self-actualization and the unearthing of the inner potential of the self. The non-actualized and unfulfilled selves—the selves which are not reaching their full potential—are, according to this view, problematic if not outright sick. This concept enlarges the psychological pathologies in need of treatment; any obstacle to self-realization is a problem that drags us down the path of misery. A more recent instantiation of this discourse in the domain of psychology is positive psychology with figures like Martin Seligman who extend Maslow’s thought for eliminating any negativity that holds the soul hostage (Illouz, 2020). Coaching is a branch of the therapeutic; with its premises in the world of sports, it suggests that the self can reach its full potential in career, family, relationships, body, and all spheres pertaining to life with the proper and continuous training.

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In the first section of this chapter, I discuss the “self” as the main element of analysis and introspection in therapeutic cultures. The self in these cultures is a site where competing discourses, interpretations, and solutions are pronounced in psychological expertise (Rose, 1999). This preoccupation with the self in liberal modern societies has been viewed in the critical theory of the last decades via an “epistemology of suspicion” (Illouz, 2008: 4), in the sense that it manufactures governable and docile subjects in the context of capitalist governmentality (Rose, 1999). For some, it is unimaginable to even consider neoliberalism independently of the development of psy-expertise and therapeutic cultures (Foster, 2016). In the following section, I look at the micro-celebrity strategies of life coaches across their multi-platformed interactions. Micro-celebrity regards “the commitment to deploying and maintaining one’s online identity as if it were a branded good” (Senft, 2013: 346), as personal accounts, professional profiles, courses, groups, and other platform afordances can turn the coach into a micro-celebrity who gathers fans, audiences, and publicity around them. As I describe, I took courses for becoming a life coach myself in order to become familiar with the modes of self-presentation in the platform economy and with the recurring talking points in the coaching imperative. In the last two sections, I look at how these talking points construct reality by proposing ways to curate the souls of audiences and fans. In Section 6.4, I focus particularly on the idea that the self is a project revolving around signifiers of “discipline”, “mindset”, “confidence” and “resilience” and in Section 6.5, I look at curated intimacy and sexuality in men’s coaching. The rhetorical constructions of the latter suggest a form of “intimate entrepreneurship” (O Neil, 2018: 14), whereby romantic and intimate relations are subjects to be learned, managed, and conquered for upholding hegemonic masculinities. This chapter overall argues that the curatorial apparatus of life coaching not only reflects a form of neoliberal ideological indoctrination, but that this indoctrination is a material efect of platform capitalism that opens up the potential for acquiring inspirational capital and micro-celebritization to anyone.

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