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

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.

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Notes

1 The encoding of self-help as political responsibility was indeed more prevalent in the early self-help cultures that, at least in the United States, were initially emphasizing idealism and self-sacrifice over entrepreneurial personality traits like creativity, domination and masterfulness (Hampel, 2020: 220).

2 For instance, the bureaucracy of colonial enterprises in Africa, as Sloan Mahone argues (2007), preferred psychologized explanations over socio-economic ones for analyzing anti-colonial dissent as the psy-apparatus partly developed by studying the cultural other (Nehring et al, 2020: 8).

3 Furthermore, according to Walter Ong, “The electronic age is also an age of ‘secondary orality’, the orality of telephones, radio, and television, which depends on writing and print for its existence” (2013: 3).

4 The term “niche internet micro celebrity” (nimcel) has recently entered the lexicon of popular media cultures, for instance (Taylor, 2022). On the other hand, Marwick prefers the term “subcultural micro-celebrity” over “niche microcelebrity” as the former is able to account for the often subcultural communities that give rise to micro-celebrities (2015).

5 For Senft (2008), the figure of the camgirl was empowering, for the camgirls she studied were realizing the feminist slogan “the personal is political” by performing a confessional style. However, while technologies can be empowering for some, for others usually located in in the Global South are disempowering. Wang notes that in the Chinese camgirl industry the aspirational labor is combined with desperational labor: camgirls in the Chinese industry “employment status difers from that of the self-employed Western social media content creators, because of its inherent desperation” (Wang, 2021: 622).

6 These two difer for Abidin, with the micro-celebrities preceding the “platform revolution” being niche, homemade, and hobby-driven while the internet celebrities are global, multi-platformed, and vocation-driven. Here, I will not be strictly following Abidin’s typology and using the terms interchangeably as these diferences are not important for the purpose of this chapter.

7 As Hendriks puts it:

Consequently, and despite all its rhetorical strengths, charismatic legitimacy is relatively unstable, since it is vulnerable to de-legitimizing crises. If information surfaces in public that contradicts the guru’s self-presentation as a bearer of charisma, then many of the followers could quickly lose their faith and interest, throwing the guru’s position as guru into crisis.

(2017: 8)

8 This information can be found at the following link: www.udemy.com/user/ kainramsay/ and www.udemy.com/course/life-coaching-a-complete-guide/#ins tructor-1

9 Here, I use the term “English-speaking” instead of “global” so as not to reproduce the narrative that English equals “global”. In reference to the rise of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), Taskeen Adam writes on the issue:

“…regional” MOOC platforms have emerged since 2015, supporting other countries and languages: e.g. XuetangX (China), MiríadaX (Spain), MéxicoX (Mexico), France Université Numérique (France), EduOpen (Italy), ThaiMOOC (Thailand), SWAYAM (India), and Edraak (Jordan) […] These platforms are termed “country-specific” and “regional” while the platforms from the US and UK are termed “global” because they are in English […] reinforcing the narrative that to be global is to be Western.

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(2019: 2)

10 “When a profession is relatively new” as the coaching guide supporting ICF’s supreme position in the field tell us, “it is ripe with opportunity”, it “makes for an exciting time for those just breaking into the field, but it also makes for some uncertainty around qualifications […]. Who is to say what constitutes a “good” professional? Who is qualified, and how is that determined?” (Ackerman, 2021).

11 We should thus keep in mind that there are always disciplinary diference between therapeutic practices and fields; as Ramsay, the trainer of the Life Coach certificate course I undertook, categorically stated in the first classes “life coaching is not about advice”, in the sense that it is a tailored, feedback-driven, and thus responsive practice that (at least in theory) avoids of-the-shelf counseling. It rather requires training the self and this training is customized as each one of us is unique (Ramsay, nd).

12 As we will see in the next section, and as Organ and Gill also point out, the mandate to embrace vulnerability is more directed toward women as in masculine coaching cultures men mostly have to inhabit assertive, “alpha” personas where there is less room for vulnerabilities.

13 The relationship coach Reece, for instance, describes himself via the myth of previous transformation that as we previously saw is a constantly enable to prove certifying expertise:

Hi, I’m Reece. You probably can’t tell by looking at me, but I’ve battled a lot of shit over my 42 years on this planet—suicidal depression, substance abuse, severe social anxiety, emotional trauma, sexual shame, epic Nice Guy syndrome… I have spent a lot of time figuring my stuf out and learning how to transform my pain. And that’s what I help men do—to stop hiding, get real with themselves, and live an authentic life on their own terms.

(Reece and Jodie, nd)

14 See the note 13.

15 For example, “You’re A Chronic ‘People Pleaser’ ” (Jodi and Reece, 2019).

16 Even though their discourses may difer communities such as “Men Going Their Own Way” (r/MGTOW forum in Reddit), Incels, and Men’s Right Activists are all part of the manosphere.

17 The idea that men should have fun is grounded in the popular manosphere belief that marriage has become “such a bad deal for men”. On the one hand, as this thinking goes, the abundance of dating choice can make men happier and on the other the supposedly unfavorable divorce laws in the West will “trap” men in complacency and underdevelopment: “over the decades, the goals of men have shifted from family to fun”, as the notorious male coach Roosh Valizadeh emphatically asserts (2018: Ch. 1). In this entrepreneurial sexism, it is often the mere quantity of women a man has slept with that can be an indicator of a successful man (O’Neil, 2018), especially if this is combined with “quality”, which in the manosphere refers to a grading 10-point scale system—with the women graded as “ten” being the “God’s gift to mankind; the definition of perfection”: www. urbandictionary.com/def​ine.php?term=1-10%20Female%20attractiveness%20sc ale%29%2C

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18 The “game” for another pick-up artist is “a collection of beliefs, behaviors, strategies, and tactics that make women more attracted to you while increasing your likelihood of experiencing intimacy” (Valizadeh, 2018: Introduction).

19 Or, as he even more bluntly puts it in the same video: “Remember when a woman feels felt and understood, the legs [opens up his arms] they open” (Wayne, 2022).

20 Rachel O’Neil in her book Seduction (2018) situates the pick-up artists and participants of the seduction industry in the context of neoliberalism, as these phenomena are part of a larger process according to which values of individualism extend to increasingly more areas of life. Male coaching further enables the capitalization of man’s “experience in dating”, as he is now able to easily turn this “transferable skill” into a business that may sell and grow.

References

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7 Who to Be, How to Appear, and What to Consume Concluding Thoughts

This book has discussed curating as an imperative of platform capitalism where social media, streaming sites, hospitality and dating apps—to name just a few—pose questions of who to be, how to appear, and what to consume in profound ways. Making oneself part of a narrative is a difused mandate: What to post, what to wear, what to eat, what friends to have, what music to hear, what films to watch, what places (to want) to visit, what socks to choose, and what opinion to have about serious issues like climate change, military coups, AI, genetics, space colonization, and cryonics, or everyday issues like football, fashion, and diet. And as this book examined, the question of what “narratives to be part of” amidst a world of disorienting information is an encounter shaping the emotional tonality of aspirational class imaginary. The dispersion of this imaginary is not merely a trend that people can simply decide to follow or not, but a totality that interrogates everybody as potential curator, one way or another. By totality, I do not mean that every person at every moment needs to think about how to curate or be curated; since the curatorial-aspirational imaginary is difused in the most routine spaces of cultural production, everyone using a smartphone, for example, confronts it, irrespective of how they respond to this confrontation. Being in possession and in control of self-narratives is a strategic means of socialization that can assist upward social mobilities in our capacities as workers, friends, romantic partners, children, parents, siblings, or all of the above.

By moving from the artworld to wider media cultures, the logic of curating promises to solve the riddles of disturbing communication overload plaguing the self against, yet instead it generates further disorientation and uncertainty, class anxieties, and deadlocks by telling us that the imperatives of who to be, how to appear, and what to consume are inextricably linked with one’s social identity. Countless choices which are packaged as commodities, ranging from self-help seminars and authentic food experiences to cool fashion and personalized diet apps, tell us that we can become something if we consume them: better looking, more diverse, cooler, smarter, and more self-aware. Engaging with curated consumption promises a better self, which is expected to grow toward a vision (or multiple visions); not engaging with curated consumption implies a missed opportunity, a prospect that has not been pursued, or a lost trajectory which can remain as a specter haunting the future. Even if you engage, the self can be left permanently unfulfilled as new niche curated choices unendingly unravel over social imagination: Why not download an app that tells you when the best time is to go and pee while watching a film in the theater and thus improve your film experience?1 The curatorial imperative contends that personal choice inhabits a meaning, a vision, or a concept of the self as choosing becomes a matter of who we are as social beings.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003182801-9

I argue that anxieties, aspirations, emotional tonalities, and subjective investments are taking a mass character with the help of platforms. The idea that choice is meaningful and evocative of one’s social identity was previously limited to more exclusive class formations or niche therapeutic cultures that had time and resources to devote to matters pertaining to the self. I departed from the premise that the overarching organizational core of platform capitalism is the profit motive (Sadowski, 2020b), and that according to this motive platforms, which are vast apparatuses of enjoyment and control, attempt to curate connectivity (van Dijck, 2013) and program sociality (Bucher, 2018) according to value-producing ends. The evaluative, ideological, and afective registers of this motive undermine the potential role of platforms as public institutions, or at least generate a tension between the public sphere, which à la Habermas is meant to be a space of rational deliberation, and commodification, and which involves the extraction of value from this public deliberation, spinning it to value-producing ends. Fake news, for instance, on a platform like X (formerly known as Twitter), is not always purposeful misinformation but an in-built efect of the X architecture. The latter is designed to capture the time, attention, and engagement of users and, as such, it renews the user feed continuously. This drives news channels in X to want to report faster than their competitors in order to be seen, followed, and grow; in other words, the platform architecture itself undermines fact-checking, which, in the context of a hyper-competitive environment where even seconds matter, is a time-consuming process.

Thus, on the one hand, platforms are actively pouring out an informational, communicational, and relational overload, which results in a perplexing social landscape fragmented in terms of discourses, lifestyles, fads, news items, and values. On the other hand, they are also major sites for nurturing the curatorial imperative, enabling ordered narratives. Apart from algorithmically curating the interactions between users by building a coding architecture to increase user engagement, as we saw, they often take on the role of content curator (e.g., Apple News) or ofer curatorial possibilities to the users, either as potentially monetized (micro-celebrities, influencers, bloggers, and so on) or daily practice (e.g., organizing and displaying one’s feed in a social media platform irrespective of the number of followers). Via the latter afordances, platforms blur the distinction between the industrial and the every-day as they give the opportunity to users to monetize hobbies, or subcultural and niche practices. In this way, countercultural traits are constantly exposed to the possibility of commodification. What could once have counted as a counter-public sphere is exposed to instant capturing as information and data—the raw material for value production. A niche blogger or simply the latest Vice article captures and recycles countercultural tropes as algorithmic spectacles which aim to attract user engagement and time. These algorithmic spectacles, which are suggestive of the overall fragmentation of spectacle in neoliberal capitalism (Wark, 2014), are in turn valuable for the platform itself. In this neo-feudal arrangement, the platform resembles a landlord who lends its space to the users and subsequently collects rent in the form of data, premium subscriptions, and attention, among other things (Sadowski, 2020a; Dean, 2020).

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