Thea Lim
thewalrus.com
Originally published 17 Sept 24
Here is an excerpt:
When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating.
Years ago, I worked in the backroom of a Tower Records. Every few hours, my face-pierced, gunk-haired co-workers would line up by my workstation, waiting to clock in or out. When we typed in our staff number at 8:59 p.m., we were off time, returned to ourselves, free like smoke.
There are no words to describe the opposite sensations of being at-our-job and being not-at-our-job even if we know the feeling of crossing that threshold by heart. But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. 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.”
Here are some thoughts:
The article examines how the pervasive influence of algorithms and digital metrics is eroding our intrinsic sense of value, particularly in artistic endeavors. Thea Lim traces her own experience as a novelist who, despite finding immense satisfaction in her craft, becomes consumed by external measures of success, ultimately leading to a sense of alienation and diminished self-worth. Lim argues that this phenomenon is not unique to artists but is affecting everyone as the digital realm increasingly quantifies our lives, reducing our experiences and relationships to data points and rankings. The article's purpose is to raise awareness about this insidious effect and encourage readers to resist the external validation system that digital technology has created, reclaiming their inner sense of worth and autonomy.
