For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”
Artmaking—the cultural industries—occupies the middle of an uneasy Venn diagram.
Only twenty years ago, there was no public, complete data on book sales.
THE INTERNET is designed to stop us from ever switching it off.
Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture.
We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value.
If you are reading this, it’s a commodity now, fluctuating and fungible, like so much digital dust.