How the Totalized Economy Commodifies Even Social Life

In the November column, I wrote about how, under the pressure of making every aspect of life as efficient as possible — what I’ve been calling Taylorism — our world becomes increasingly quantified and commodified.

This essay first appeared in The Catholic Spirit.

Totalized Taylorism thus results in a totalized economy: there is little left in the world that is not for sale. And this fits hand in hand with the external systems I’ve been suggesting today radically monopolize the sources of production and make it very difficult to cultivate any true local community with strong internal social bonds. A world of commodified things is a world in which our lives can be managed for us by expert strangers. This state of affairs had already largely become a reality by the close of the 20th century.

But, as it’s turned out, Taylorism wasn’t as total as it could be. In a factory 100 years ago, or working on a spreadsheet 25 years ago, there was still an outside — a part of life that wasn’t subjected to standardized measurement, a domain that was not commodified. Today that outside is dwindling fast, especially as digital technologies penetrate deeper into the corners of our lives, and as radical monopolies make use of these technologies, making us dependent on an increasingly vast institutional apparatus.

At the time of the first factories 250 years ago, it was often pointed out that the newly emerging economy tended to make human labor into a commodity. That itself was bad enough, as the popes pointed out, because it meant that your life depended upon selling your God-given abilities. But again, at that point there was still an outside — plenty left of life that couldn’t yet be subsumed into the market.

Today we’re confronted with something else. Increasingly, our entire lives are bought and sold.

This happens in a variety of ways. Everything that we do online is, of course, tracked and subsequently sold as data. And to the extent that our lives are not only expressed, but actually take place online, ever more of what we do, think and feel — more of who we are — gets sold to the highest bidder. We even pay for the devices that will sell us most efficiently and totally — watches for our bodies and Alexa for our homes.

The so-called gig economy means that employment is increasingly broken up into odd jobs or one-time gigs: pick up someone’s dry cleaning or McDonald’s, do their laundry, babysit, create a website, mow the lawn. And this means that ever more of our actions become marketable: driving becomes Uber, thinking goes on social media or our Substack, we sell our apartment on Airbnb when we’re away. All of life is a potential commodity. And with most of this economy run through digital platforms, apps or websites, we become even more dependent upon these external systems and the web of institutions that supports them.

At the same time, the internet-based nature of this economy makes it increasingly hard to find work at all that does not require us to maintain a second digital self — our online profile — which we have to be constantly curating and optimizing. This means making a living is to be always producing our very selves online. We make ourselves part of the totalized economy, an extension of the factory society has become. In social media, business profiles, or commercial platforms, I now optimize and Taylorize not machines or other people on an assembly line, but myself. I become the product that I produce and sell.

I often do this to make a living, but today there are even more compelling enticements to be constantly selling ourselves online than simply making money. We all desire friendship and community, and today these — or what currently passes for them — increasingly take place online. But this means that there’s no limit to the time and energy we spend selling ourselves to our online constituencies. Social life takes place digitally, and so if to be human is to be social (as we humans instinctually know), this adds even more pressure to constantly manage our image. If we don’t do this, our so-called friends will just go on without us. Sell yourself or be alone. So, never-endingly self-optimizing simply is the fabric of life.

We treat ourselves like a factory just to have a social life. That’s Taylorism totalized.

Next month, we’ll draw some conclusions from all of this and take a look at the toll this way of life is taking on us.