Article by Leigh Alexander / Dystopianism

While I was aware of this concept for a few years, the first time I was saw someone give it a name properly was when I read this recent article by freelance games journalist Leigh Alexander. The whole thing is well worth a read, and is forming the basis for how I'm thinking about this topic going forward, but here are some particularly important quotes:

... creating the impression of intimacy is becoming increasingly crucial to the content economy today, and it’s happening everywhere. As the bottom plummets out of the advertising model and the “stuff Facebook with clickbait” approach begins to run out of rope, content creators [...] are striking out on their own and funding their work through alternative means, from crowdfunding to patronage and subscriptions. In general, people seem more likely to pay for content when it’s “voiced.” In the era of YouTube stars, we expect to see faces. We want eye contact.

Anyone you admire starts to feel available to you via social media, and the more they cultivate that impression of a relationship, the better you, as a consumer, will perform.

... people are spending money because they like us, or some idea of us; they are spending in part because of the idea that they are engaged in a parasocial relationship with us.

Pretending at closeness is really the only way forward for anyone who wants to make money on the internet. As such, watch as organizations pretend, with increasing intensity, that they are individuals.

Your feelings are now professional currency. Everyone who makes anything digital is monitoring the exchange rate to survive. Every content creator is now a community manager.

As an aside, the idea of a sense of intimacy or social closeness on the part of a customer as being equal to (or sometimes more important than) more concrete or actual value is not a new one: it's been floating around for well over a decade now in science fiction, particular post-cyberpunk and transhuman sci-fi, like the world of Eclipse Phase in which an economy of reputation and social nicety has overtaken traditional capitalist forms. This certainly plays into the (half-joking) dystopian refrain of Leigh Alexander's article. It's maybe a little passé to keep comparing our modern situation, especially re: the internet, to Gibsonian cyberpunk, but it's certainly a useful reference point for talking about how sinister this sort of stuff can be.