Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?

September 21, 2024 7:59 AM

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age is an essay by author Thea Lim in the Walrus on what happens to your self worth when everything you do, from work to leisure to hobbies becomes something measured by someone, something you can, perhaps have to, monetize.
If you find yourself asking "why am I doing this?" this is worth your time to read.
posted by tommasz (20 comments total)

This is an excellent essay, well worth the time even if you are staring at your phone to read it.
posted by chavenet at 8:14 AM on September 21 [2 favorites]

tldr: capitalism
posted by Reyturner at 8:41 AM on September 21 [1 favorite]

"this is worth your time to read"

What does it pay?
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 8:47 AM on September 21 [9 favorites]

I was telling someone the other day how much I miss the early days of the internet before "content creator" was a thing when people made elaborate hobby sites and shared their passions for free.

At the same time, I recognize that the early days of the Internet were a time of immense privilege. The people on the Internet were mostly full time students or had professional jobs and had the time to develop the technical chops to build their own websites as well as do their hobbies and share them. Expecting that kind of free labour from people in a time when real job wages aren't liveable for many is selfish.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:02 AM on September 21 [28 favorites]

This article is great and thank you for posting it.
posted by lauranesson at 9:18 AM on September 21 [3 favorites]

All the way at the end, there's this:

Yes, sell this part of your inner life but then go back in there and reinflate what’s been emptied. It’s a renewable resource.

When I grasp this, all of it becomes tolerable. It’s like letting out a line, then braiding more line. I can manage, because there’ll always be more line.

Most of the essay is talking about things many have talked about before (and doing it well!), but this last bit about a potential way to cope or adapt is new to me. I'd love to hear more about that.
posted by whatnotever at 9:43 AM on September 21

You keep doing it because you must. It's your raison d'etre. If you are good you will rise to the top, like cream...Get there first...let the copycats follow and watch them falter.
posted by Czjewel at 9:46 AM on September 21

I liked “there will always be more line” but there is another aspect of this, which is how much do you change what you do to meet the expectations of a market? How do you pick the color of the line or the type of braid?
My spouse sews. Not as a job but as a way of life. Costumes, bags, camping gear, a wide variety of things. Any conversation with other people invariably comes around to how this could be a business. However, all the business aspects of this job - social media, staying with trends, marketing - actively reduce the joy of doing the thing. It’s unfortunate that you can’t make things today without somehow making it part of your Business Model of One.
posted by q*ben at 11:07 AM on September 21 [6 favorites]

If you are good you will rise to the top, like cream.

I’d like to believe this too, and I don’t want you to feel called out or belittled by my comment, especially since you’ve done this thread a service by stating it so cleanly.

But the paucity of women and minorities at the top does unfortunately give it the lie.
posted by jamjam at 11:13 AM on September 21 [23 favorites]

shared their passions for free

This is still one of the things that I find so refreshing about fandom spaces, which are still predominantly based around sharing stuff you made for free.

And it's one of the things I find so offensive about the way that fans who were raised in hobby-as-hustle culture have been trying to monetize their fandom. Apart from the legal issues, it's an unwelcome cultural shift. So far the pushback has been strong but there is still more monetization than there used to be, in particular a lot of fan creators moving their works behind paid patreon subscriptions or "I'll release the next chapter if I get X donations on ko-fi."

Not all of that is the artists' choice (in particular, NSFW artists have few free hosting options) but it's really depressing and hard not to get angry about, at least for me personally.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:34 AM on September 21 [5 favorites]

Man, also, a personal story -

I was talking to my stepdad about how work-life balance is important to me because, unlike him, I have things that I want to do with my life outside of work. Like writing. His first question: Is that something you can do for a job?
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:36 AM on September 21 [12 favorites]

Sometimes things that are good sink to the bottom like boba, then get thrown away because they got stuck in the straw and you're full by that time anyway. In this metaphor, the straw is the algorithm.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:37 AM on September 21 [18 favorites]

The effect of gamification on artmaking has been dramatic. ... [This] economy has made it so there’s “no choice” if you want a living. The very concept of selling out, he says, “has disappeared.” A few years ago, much was made of the fact that the novelist Sally Rooney had no Twitter account—this must explain her prolific output. But the logic is back to front: it’s only top-selling authors who can afford to forgo social media. Call it Deactivation Privilege

So like...you don't even have to want to make a living from art to have to post. You have to post to be seen at all, because if you don't have a portfolio (an Instagram feed being one of the lowest-effort ways to have one), you won't get your art into shows. Unfortunately, creating a portfolio that way also means that in the U.S., at least, your art will be used to train the art-making algorithms. The robots will see and steal your work, and maybe 2 percent of your actual friends and artist friends will see and like it.
posted by limeonaire at 12:28 PM on September 21 [9 favorites]

When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating...

---

...delighted to have planted something in her homework that couldn’t be accounted for in the metric of correct or incorrect. She had taken drawing back

This reminds me of the self-consciousness friends of mine have about making actual art. It takes the joy out of it, as they stare at a blank page and almost visibly fret that whatever they make might not be good enough to merit the paper. It's so surprising to see them make something small and self-contained that barely takes up space on the page, that almost apologizes for itself. It makes me hate the people who did that to them—in many cases, through years of thankless work and criticism at home that taught them to deny their own instincts.

But it's possible to get that back! You just have to start doing it. Something I learned at a music camp: One way to get past that self-consciousness is to deliberately make the art badly. Then work your way into the groove of making something you actually like.

And don't buy from SHEIN, because the company steals its designs from actual artists.
posted by limeonaire at 12:36 PM on September 21 [19 favorites]

I had ambitions to be a professional writer and I even got a few paid gigs during the blog boom of the '00s. (It wasn't anything I could live off of, of course.) Mostly, it just made me hate writing. And that took me a really long time to get over. It's really only been within the past few years where I've done some writing projects because they're fun. I know they're not going to make me money and I don't need them to.

I've also being making some daily art for almost a year now. It's mostly abstract art and I enjoy it. I think I'm good at it, for the particular kind of thing that I'm doing. It's always going to be what it is, though, and I'm OK with that.

I do have an Instagram account for it, but it's mostly to keep myself accountable in not missing a day. Some friends and family follow the account but I don't follow anyone with it. The most promotion I'll do is sometimes post on my main account that hey, I'm still doing this thing.

I love it. It's just about the pleasure of creating. I've pondered maybe making some into repeating patterns for some purpose, but I don't think there's a path to making any money doing this. Nor do I want there to be. I'm having fun and that's all I need.

(My mom once said my art was "unencumbered" which I jokingly took a polite way of saying it was "bad" -- she doesn't actually think it's bad, to be clear. She meant that I didn't overthink it and just kept creating. If one day wasn't great, there was always tomorrow. There is something very freeing in that.)
posted by edencosmic at 4:44 PM on September 21 [9 favorites]

Watching my two-year-old on walks made me realize I could look so much more closely at the world, so now I do. Watching her make art three years later, completely enthralled with what she's doing even though she knows she'll put it in her file and completely forget about it, has made me realize how completely analysis has replaced expression for me. I'm trying, by god, but it's a lot harder than just stopping to look. Music, blacksmithing, drawing... It takes a long time to tell whether the despair I'm feeling is just the pain of learning something new, or if I'm genuinely barking up the wrong tree.

(Mostly I'm commenting much more often on Metafilter because I am highly-trained in Having Opinions, so... you're welcome)

As whatnotever noted, we've covered a lot of this essay's terrain before, but I found the more-personal parts of it quite moving.
posted by McBearclaw at 6:27 PM on September 21 [11 favorites]

I don't know if it's my personality or a psychological generality but the quickest way to ruin something I love is to force me to do it. The freedom to do art/translating/crochet/writing at my own pace is intrinsic to the joy. May we achieve a 20 hour work week in my lifetime so we all have that unrenewable resource, time, to do what we will.
posted by petiteviolette at 7:54 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]

A thing I've been unpacking in therapy lately is how strongly I resist my friends'/family's exhortations to monetize my "hobby" while yet knowing full-well that I absolutely don't do that hobby for any kind of internal satisfaction at all. Literally I only do it because it's like the one thing I'm good enough at to get external approval.

It's like I'm getting away with something when I refuse to monetize it, because I know people assume it's out of some kind of Pure, Fuck Capitalism motive. In truth it's just because while my friends and family are very nice they do not know shit about shit, and there's no way I am good enough at my hobby to make any money or get any followers out of it.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:19 PM on September 23 [3 favorites]

Like writing. His first question: Is that something you can do for a job?

No. We have AI for that now.

I'd monetize my hobby if there was some way to do it without Running My Own Business, which sounds excruciating.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:03 PM on September 23 [2 favorites]

If you are good you will rise to the top, like cream...Get there first...let the copycats follow and watch them falter.

Hello fine sir! I see you value indicators of value! Now, I wouldn't discuss an opportunity like this to the common consumer, but you strike me as man of taste and sophistication, with discernment for that which really matters and others fail to appreciate.

Perhaps you might be the kind of up-an-comer who could see the opportunity in my new Dream Cream! It is nothing like old milk people whine about, this miracle of science not only rises faster, but can be produced rapidly, without fields or cows, at a fraction of the price!

It has everything you indicate you value! Do you like protein? Please, test a sample! You'll find it's chock full of nitrogen, just like that you would find in naturally occurring amino acids! If you want, we can add more than the old cream from your father's farm. The choice is yours, but if you are bold enough to take it!

Although maybe... this is more of a Shelbyville idea?
posted by 1024 at 12:23 AM on September 26 [1 favorite]