The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age ⇥ thewalrus.ca

I loved this essay from Thea Lim, as published in the Walrus, about our quantified digital lives subsuming our reality, but I have a quibble with this otherwise excellent paragraph:

[…] What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. […]

To the contrary, this is something we not only talk about with frequency, but usually with anxiety approaching a moral panic. I share those worries, for what it is worth; I am not sure it is a positive thing to have constant reminders of our social and physical performance. I am sometimes upset I do not scrobble my vinyl records with Last.fm, even though I also know this is very silly. Since I stopped wearing a smartwatch or any kind of fitness tracker, I am no longer recording health metrics and I feel healthier as a result. I track webpage views here and have a vanity search for the site URL because it lets me see when cool people have noticed something I wrote. Your experience may vary.

This next paragraph in Lim’s essay, though, is noteworthy:

And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure — photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry — are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.

We are all helping create webpage views, ad impressions, and video plays, all of which are reported to people who are ostensibly concerned with accuracy. But all of these stats lie. If one’s livelihood depends on what they report, it is hard not to see why they are taken so seriously, even if everyone kind of knows they are not real. We are all participants in this shared delusion.