Influencers, Thought leaders, and Self-exploitation

How we’ve learned to see ourselves as commodities

You don’t need to spend too much time on LinkedIn or Twitter before coming across someone with the job title of ‘Thought Leader’. In the past, the term was used to highlight businesses or the strategies they adopted to create a competitive edge through innovation. A thought leader was a company that set the pace. Today, however, the term has shape shifted reflecting the changes in our economic environment — the growth of the precarious labour market and our idolization of the ‘entrepreneur’.

Now, the term has become a self-prescribed moniker meant to reflect a person with a large social reach, an ‘influencer’, or someone who claims to have such an understanding of an industry that they can, with their immense insight, influence the industry all together, a “thought leader”. Away from the historic meaning of the word that centered on innovation, the terms today focus on an inversion from the relationship of an individual or a company leading the way for many to follow because of their accomplishments, to the accomplishment itself being the creation of followers by feeding off the ‘wants of your customers’. This might seem a superficial analysis as the point of a business, and its lifeline, is to produce products and services that meet the wants and needs of its customers, a small but major difference here is that the product or the service here has become the individual.

This marks a great transformation in the functioning of capital in that where previously, capital limited and alienated the individual, it has now completely subsumed the individual into its functioning, moving beyond the power dynamic of submission into a totality within the individual.

The economic road to capitulation

In a tragic way, the achievement of the totality of capital has been welcomed, not only welcomed, but warmly embraced as a slight to traditional market structures. Individuals have embraced these modes of commodification to escape the tyrannies of traditional workplaces while failing to realize that these are simple extensions of them — that these manifestations are the result of the tightening noose of capitalism and capitalism creating new forms of exploitation as it bleeds previous forms dry or no longer useful. How did we get to this point?

The traditional workplace environment consisted of strict hierarchy. Taylorism, going hand in hand with onset of the era of mass production — Fordism, set the pace for the workplace. Employees were assigned specific tasks designer by a managerial team. The tasks required the minimal amount of skill to make sure that the employees were as interchangeable as the parts that went into whatever they were making. In this environment, productivity increased, and consumer products flourished. Workers, seeking to gain in this flourishing of production and profit began to organize and demand workplace rights, safety, pay, rest, etc. saw an understanding of work being a part of an individuals identity and not their identity. The fight for the 8-hour work week was summarized in the phrase ‘8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, and 8 hours for what we will (or ‘recreation’ in other places)’.

As industrial practices were made efficient, other markets and industries began to emerge. Our conception of the current office environment and financial markets was born. A globalized economy also meant the availability of a cheaper workforce outside a country’s borders for low skilled work. With this, the economy took on its current face. Low skilled work became isolated to the service and agricultural industries, both having components of immigration labour, with the other sector becoming our white collar ‘knowledge’ based workforce.

Precarity and totalitarianism

The post-war era also saw the mobilization and empowerment of unions. Through processes of collective bargaining and action workers were able to share in the growth of production and wealth. This changed in the mid 70’s though with the implementation of neo-liberal policies in the UK and the US that continue to influence economic policy in the west. Since then, growth in wages has slowed to a near halt as productivity continues to grow and workers rights have been diluted.

Organizations have started leaning on contract, including zero-hour contracts, and temp work to skip out on paying benefits leading to a sense of precariety for employees who are constantly looking for their next ‘gig’ before the end of their current contract or, forcing employees to occupy more than one role to cover expenses.

The line between employed and personal life is also blurred under these conditions as the drive towards creating an even more efficient and compliant workforce continues. Human Resource departments are enforcing social media policies that dictate what employees can and cannot say about their employers on social media. Discussions about workforce health have led to articles being published on how active workstations — “workstations with treadmills or bicycles attached, inflatable balls used as desk chairs, and under-desk elliptical machines”, should be encouraged as they create a “return on investment … typically between $3 and $7 for every $1 invested”. Charlie Chaplin would be happy to know that we’ve replaced the monotony of the assembly line with the literal human equivalent of a hamster wheel as employee health, at risk due to prolonged periods of inactivity caused by work, becomes another way to coerce employees.

Erosion of workers rights have also changed company culture on promotions and rewards. Certain roles within an organization now can’t claim overtime and are still expected to put in extra work as it reflects the ‘nature of the role’. Employees then are supposed to be grateful for the extra work they get to do as it reflects the status of their position! A prime example of the functioning of the ‘internal labour markets’ where doing well at your job is no longer a good enough reason for a promotion or a raise. Now, you are to compete against your coworkers and prove that you are willing to go above and beyond the role you are being paid for to then earn the raise. In essence a dynamic where you are rewarded in relation to the lengths you take to prove your willingness to be exploited. Better hop onto that treadmill desk.

Nothing portrays the encroachment of the market on the self better than the so called “sharing economy”. Here, an ad from Uber presents this new emerging market as a tool for empowerment, a “side hustle” allowing us to make some extra cash with our capital. We are supposed to believe that these markets have serendipitously appeared and provide benevolent ways for us to make more money. There truth is far from this, Uber is a perfect example of how the entire concept of what counts as an employee has changed. Now, an ‘Uber driver’, not an Uber employee, can drive you around with no training requirements or regulations and have his ‘salary’ be determined by an algorithm. Airbnb is another example of how the “sharing economy” is presented in a benevolent light when it has been linked to increased rent prices and gentrification. It’s true that these services provide cheaper options for consumers, but they have the double role of impacting the poorest in our communities and bypassing regulations put in place to protect the consumer. The immediate winner here though are these organizations who are culling millions by skirting regulations and contributing to a culture of exploitation under the guise of market ‘disruption’.

It’s important to understand that the acceptance of the sharing economy and the culture of the “side hustle” did not emerge because of our hatred of leisure but as a result of the erosion of the idea of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, and 8 hours of sleep because we simply can no longer afford it. We are all encouraged to be our own little entrepreneur using whatever private property (Capital) we have to meet our basic needs.

The next frontier

Nothing in this analysis is surprising. Karl Marx described the phenomena of Capital infecting the personal life in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx exclaimed that: “The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour — your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

Yet, even today we have those that believe these market ‘innovations’, and the technologies emerging from them, hold the key to our own liberation. But the notion that we will all benefit from the onset of things like automation is false. The path we have described in this article makes it clear that every market innovation is met with a further exploitative push repackaged as something new. This is to say that the capitalist system will always find new ways to reinvent itself and further exploit the individual in its drive for profit and no amount of innovation or “social entrepreneurship” can save us. Even radical seeming market ideas such as basic income will become tools used to further erode workers rights and promote even more alienating forms of work.

This brings us back to our original topic of “thought leaders” where we see the individual beginning to look at themselves through the lens of capital as a commodity. With this transformation, individuals become their own exploiters, punishing themselves for not “hustling” until they bleed from their eyes and glorifying their own alienation or ‘estranged being’, as per Marx, as they continue to present themselves on the basis of market demand. It’s this phenomenon that has been attributed to a rise in a wealth of mental illnesses.

The arrival of the “thought leader” and the “influencer” is proof of the versatility of the capitalist system in recruiting us to do it’s bidding at the benefit of the capital holders. As regulations and workers rights are degraded and technology is used to push out the work force. It’s clear that those who hold capital will continue to gain as everyone else deals with an increasing level of precarity. It’s important here to realize that this is simply the next, not final, frontier in the cycle of capital reinvention. What is to follow remains unknown, but it’s clear that the alienating and exploitative reinvention will continue as long as the system stands.