humans or markets?

Neoliberalism and social media. Content creation, the death of authenticity and dangers of commodifying ourselves.

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This essay is heavily inspired by the creator @louismunchtheory on TikTok, who is a critical theorist and analyst so please check her out.

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Exhibit A: Bonnie Blue otherwise known as Tia Billinger: an OnlyFans content creator and mattress actress, who is very much infamous for breaking the horrid world record of sleeping with the most number of men in twenty-four hours, and has been a subject of scorn, disgust, sometimes pity, but mostly lots of clicks and views.

Exhibit B: Mr Downloader. I will be referring to him as such as I was unable to get his full name. He took the Nigerian internet space by strom just by consuming large and large portions of food, often, as people begin to point out, at the detriment of his health and well being. But despite that, his harmful binge eating practies accumulate a lot of laughs and attention, as he sits with over 150,000 plus followers at the moment.

Exhibit C: we have Habeeb Adelaja, also known as Peller. A Nigerian creator and streamer with millions of followers, who is currently trending for crashing his car after a breakup with his ex-girlfriend and fellow content creator, Elizabeth Aminta otherwise known as Jarvis. Habeeb made sure to be on Instagram live, to crash into the safest spot in which it won't be fatal and made sure to check his phone before his collation, bringing a lot of attention towards his page.

Now, what is the correlation between these three separate individuals? Neoliberalism.

A concept that doesn't only shape our current global economics but our perspective on personhood and individuality. It has created a space whereby individuals like these, as well as many more, are willing to sabotage maybe their bodies, as we see with Bonnie, their health, and their lives in general to feed the attention economy that has now become the internet. And with the way these platforms are shaped, they can monetize their self-abuse and gain immensely from it.

As a result, they turn themselves to markets, to commodities, loosing all sense of individuality for a couple of clicks, likes and views.

This essay aims to address the dangers of neoliberalism in our content creation space, and how we have come to turn our personalities and creativity, into “branding”, to feed capitalist and monopolistic platforms.

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First off, what is neoliberalism?

“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Margaret Thatcher famously states, thereby rejecting the idea of collective responsibility and being in favour of radical individualism, free markets, privatization and the general removal of the state in matters regarding private enterprises. Neoliberalism then becomes a dangerous extension of capitalism.

David Harvey, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism written in 2005, he defines the economic and political ideology as, “ Neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” It shifts power to cooperates and elites with little or no governmental restrictions, and privileges markets than humanity in the pursuit of freedom.

As much as this is political and economic, it is also philosophical, and as a result influences how humans treat society as well as themselves, as it rejects the idea that we are fundamentally, at the core, social beings. It also poses a notion that individual failure has nothing to do with the dysfunctional systems or limits placed by government and capitalist monopolies —but rather due to our inabilities to do better or work harder. This absolves institutions from blame and inadequacy.

As a result of this current ideology that now shapes how we think, interact and associate, it forces relationships to be transactional, friendships to be based on merits and network, communities being an audience, all just to reach a point of economic stability and independence. The sad part being that we are not aware of these actions and see it as norm, oblivious towards the manipulation the systems we’ve built begin to redefine what is human.

Neoliberalism and Social Media.

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This harmful construct has breached into the way we interact on the internet as well. Take for example, the constant clamour by brands through advertising to convince you that your insecurities are your fault, and as a result make one indulge in harmful consumer practices for a mystical idea of increased value thanks to beauty. They sell what they think is beautiful, and admonish that it is an individuals failure for not reaching this level and give ways to fix it.

But I mostly want to focus on it's correlation with the Nigerian content creation and social media space. Content creation in this country is a huge jackpot, mainly because it's most likely the easiest and low effort way to make money, if you're able to break though the algorithm and grasp the attention of the millions of Nigeria watching Tiktok every single day. Living in a country with limited economic opportunities, all you have to do is set your camera, do a dance, recreate a trend, or do something incredibly wild and outrightly dangerous to yourself to be relevant and get brand deals or make money from the platform itself.

You could stand on the tip of a door frame or do some reckless flips, or try to push dangerous agendas because you know the ones who disagree would flood your page and gift you visibility. Take down massive amount of food, promote poor living conditions and detrimental patriarchal standards, etc. These are the heights Nigerian content creators are willing to go to to get a following and reach relevance.

Do I blame them for their actions? Not really. For they are victims of a system and social conditioning that has sold the notion that such things are the integral factor that brings forth engagement and by extension, money.

One of the creators engaging in an example of what I listed above was able to move out of her rickety home into a new place with her husband and kids. It gives them the notion that such practices might offer a glimpse of a better life, and honestly, given how bad the country is, they don't really have much of a choice.

Personal “Brand” and the Myth of Authenticity on Social Media

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A current trend within the internet space has to deal with the concept of personal branding, the term coined by Tom Peters in his 1999 book “The Brand Called You.” exploring his detest with the monotony and suffocation that comes with being an office worker. Picked up by the internet, it reflects that people who want to make a statement, rather thought their art, livelihood and who they are in general have to conform to this fixed pattern of self—forgetting that we are much more than that. And so, in front of an audience, shifting from such “brand” feels like betrayal and not being true to yourself.

Even authenticity has turned to a market as well and as it turns out, we can’t really explore our individuality under general scrutiny for it becomes something to project on and then commodify. In front of the internet we all have bar codes on your heads waiting to be scanned and bought, as long as you do or do not fit their perceptions of your character.

Why does this even matter?

There is a lot of striking benefits that come with internet self-sabotage. Most of them monetary but that the same time there lies the problem.

Humans then become an asset, as well as the product, where if you don’t stop conforming to this harmful notions in front of a camera and big audiences of onlookers you lack the power to put food in your stomach. As result all things concerning what makes you, you are either neglected or even worse, turned into a resource.

And the real catastrophe is that makes exploitation feel natural or not even seem like exploitation at all. While harming personhood for attention, it graduates into hiding a labour condition underneath. It turns either your personality or whatever form of content as a job, no protections, no limits, until maybe you break and can’t continue anymore, and you’re labeled as a fraud.

As radical individuals we need to deconstruct neoliberalism with every fiber of our being, and stop seeing life on the basis of wealth and humans as products. It might be hard to erase this ideology from our systems or economics, but when that break down is done internally, it limits the harmful practices we see all around us today and pushes a society based on association rather than individual hoarding of wealth and power.