1. In the modern economy, individuals are no longer just consumers of goods, they are the goods. Every interaction, preference, and expression becomes data to be collected, analyzed, and sold. People are now both the audience and the product, caught in a system where attention is monetized, behavior is commodified, and identity is reduced to a marketable asset.
2. The rise of surveillance capitalism has transformed everyday activity into economic value. Search history, location data, purchase behavior, health metrics, and even facial expressions are captured and used to build detailed consumer profiles. These profiles are sold to advertisers, political campaigns, insurance companies, and other entities interested in predicting and influencing behavior.
3. Social media platforms are the most visible examples of this shift. Users provide content for free, while platforms monetize their engagement. Likes, comments, and shares feed algorithms that determine what content to push, who sees what, and how users are categorized. Users believe they are expressing themselves, but in reality, they are training systems to better exploit them.
4. Personal branding has become a social necessity. Individuals are encouraged to treat themselves as micro-businesses, optimizing appearance, language, and online behavior to attract followers, employers, or sponsors.
5. Influencers, gig workers, and online creators are often portrayed as liberated, entrepreneurial figures, but most remain tethered to platforms that dictate the terms of visibility, compensation, and success. Their identities are shaped by what sells, and their labor be it emotional, social, or creative is continuously extracted by the platform economy.
6. This process extends into everyday life. Dating apps turn attraction into swipes. Fitness trackers convert health into statistics. Mental health apps reduce emotional states to patterns of input. Human experience is repackaged into quantifiable metrics that can be tracked, optimized, and monetized.
7. Even offline, individuals are judged by data they don’t control. Credit scores, background checks, loyalty cards, and biometric databases shape access to housing, jobs, and services. The individual becomes a moving target of analysis, permanently evaluated by systems that see people not as human beings, but as risk factors, productivity units, or revenue streams.
8. The consumer economy depends on a feedback loop in which individuals consume to define themselves, and then are defined by what they consume. Identity becomes a product of purchasing behavior, and self-worth is reinforced by visibility within consumer culture. In this system, to exist is to spend, and to matter is to be marketed.