The next big commodity is the mineable self

A global market in a new commodity is growing exponentially in front of our eyes. It is not artificial intelligence (AI). It is not rare earths. It is not some new source of energy. It is not even in pharmaceuticals, media, or finance. It is integral to each of them and might determine the future of all of them. It is an infinitely renewable resource, which will last at least for as long as human beings and our planet continue to exist.

This commodity is the self, in which a global market has gradually emerged. It cuts across all domains of human life, from entertainment to journalism, from streaming to gender transitions, from banking to branding, from identity politics to soft power, and from crowdfunding to the tariff wars.

Mining the self

Industrial capitalism has a marked predilection for the creation and exploitation of what Marx called surplus value, value beyond the value of the labour required to produce commodities, and floats into the mysterious form of profit for the owners and managers of capital.

Today, human beings are the new object and horizon of capitalist extraction. The new object is sociality itself. It is our friendships, our love lives, our family connections, our classmates, our children, our fellow workers, our neighbours, as well as our digital lives, our political allies, our food and drug suppliers, and more. This is profiling on steroids. It mines our deepest affinities and our most ephemeral social ties. It is a new feat of creative destruction, which renders ideas such as privacy, intimacy and trust obsolete. It makes all our sociality a resource that can be mined without permission or limit. And in this unbounded mining of sociality, our stories are the access code. There are three recent changes in the market for selves, which together drive the mineable self.

This first change is that the seduction of the global has captured the market in characters. This is evident in the global hunt for stories from Mexico to Nepal and Spain to Indonesia. Every form of local mythology, folklore and backwater is trolled by publishers, film festivals, art biennales, and literary prize committees in the ceaseless hunt for portability, local flavour, vaguely universal themes and new character types (aliens, cyber-monsters, souped up heroes, zombies, post-blobs).

The most sought-after stories of our times are about obviously mobile phenomena such as drugs, migrants or mercenaries. More precisely, they are about the local addresses of transborder volatility. And this is as true of the stories that make up the news, as it is of more obviously literary fiction. It has been a few decades since any person with a camera or a video-recorder who happens to be in a scheme of war, crime or terror becomes a photojournalist, a kind of narrative First Responder, who puts the global narrative system on alert. Syndicated news services, stringers, overseas correspondents and their metropolitan handlers become parts of a vast system of triage for these “local” incidents and images, stoking the furnace of global media. Of course, there is a vast pyramid of news organisations, media, audiences and platforms, which form an uneven hierarchy of priorities and tastes. These include media that are resolutely local in their reach. But even they imagine the larger world through their own lenses.

So, “local” news is often a prismatic refraction of global issues, in a manner that changes the texture of locality, which is no longer bound by the parochial, the proximate and the familiar. Thus, locality regarding the news is no longer what it used to be. Nor is the global its simple antonym. The market for stories, whether of the real or of the less real, occupies a new geography which cannot be captured by opposing the global and the local. This development drives the transformation of the self into the newest form of raw material, a new horizon for extraction, exploitation and commodification.

In this new market, everyone has a story, including ordinary humans (who still are the reference point of what used to be called human interest), but also banks, nations, sports teams, genders (old and new), corporations, and franchises and cities among other social forms. This multiplication of the “I” and the “Me” is discernible even in the twilight zone of AI, where Siri, ChatGPT and numerous bots are in the race to display the same emotions, intuitions and vulnerabilities as any garden variety human can do. The strange symbiosis between the mineable self, the rebooted idea of locality and the story market can be better understood by looking at the single biggest force in the story market today, which is OTT (Over the Top) streaming, the entertainment technology of choice for such giants as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney and other companies in this market.

The character of streaming

It is widely known that streaming, driven by OTT technologies, which rely only on the Internet, and not on prior media infrastructures, is colonising much of the market previously dominated by big studios, their business models, their modes of distribution and their approaches to branding, promotion and audience-building.

Perhaps the biggest element of this booming story economy is the rise of “unknowns”, mid-market actors and characters who appear to be woven into modest parts of professional life and seem extraordinarily ordinary. In India, a streaming market that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings claimed in 2018 would bring his company a 100 million subscribers. This trend highlights a more general global trend toward the democratisation of the self, a not entirely positive phenomenon.

The rise of the self is sometimes as seen as an expression of the best of enlightenment values, another face of the rise of the individual, of personal liberty, of freedom from assigned collective identities, and of freedom to craft one’s own path from the raw materials of birth, context and social stereotypes. But that potential has now become a big part of the mineable self of our digital era. The intelligence of the artificial competes with previously human monopolies over affect, judgement and intuition. The classical individual is now an unstable composite of credit scores, actuarial charts, algorithmic storehouses, and consumer profiles, with virtually no need for a unified or continuous anchor in a singular person.

Thus, what the philosopher Charles Taylor studied as “The Sources of the Self” might today be retold as the story of the “sources of the selfie”. The selfie taken with a celebrity, even by photobombing, is a quintessential expression of the democratisation of the self, equal to anyone else before the lens.

The chain of storytelling

This trend is now at the cutting edge of mining the self. Everyone has the right to have a self-centered story, whether of heroism, victimhood, martyrdom, or redemption, and anyone can get help to tell their story better with the paid help of influencers, coaches, writing apps, publishing platforms or, sometimes, through selling the right to mine their stories to entertainers, journalists, publicists or scriptwriters. The great chain of storytelling always strives for more ears and eyeballs. The careers of many YouTube stars have been powered by nothing more than the lucky virality of often trivial self-narrations.

Thus, two slogans meet one another in the global market for selves. One is that every self has a story, and the other one is that every such story deserves an audience. These two pieces of recent common sense fuel the rush to drill into every living mineshaft, looking for a chunk of ourselves with the tools that we have so recently invented. What we have now is a new super-commodity, bound only by our appetite for mining ourselves.

Arjun Appadurai is Emeritus Professor of Media Studies at New York University