Context

• In contemporary capitalism, markets increasingly rely not only on material resources but on a new, inexhaustible commodity: the human self.
• Modern economic systems extract value from identity, emotions, and lived experiences.
• Through digital networks and media infrastructures, individuals themselves become economic inputs.
• Personal narratives, everyday interactions, and expressions of identity circulate as exchangeable goods within a global economy.
• The digital environment allows human life to be continuously recorded, interpreted, and monetised, turning personality into a productive resource.

From Labour to Identity: A New Stage of Capitalist Extraction

• Classical industrial capitalism generated surplus value from human labour. In the current stage, extraction moves beyond labour into social existence itself.
• The new target is sociality, relationships, behaviour, and emotional expression.
• Friendships, families, preferences, and habits are tracked through profiling, creating datasets valuable to corporations and institutions.
• The erosion of privacy, intimacy, and trust follows, as daily life becomes observable and commercially useful.
• The process resembles extraction, where identity functions as raw material. The commodification of experience transforms communication into marketable information.
• Every interaction, online purchase, conversation, or political expression, becomes part of a continuous system of data collection.
• Human identity is no longer only personal; it is economically productive. The self becomes infinitely renewable, constantly generating information and therefore profit.

The Global Story Economy: Where Local and Global Converge

• The market thrives on stories. A worldwide demand exists for narratives rooted in specific places yet relatable everywhere.
• Folklore, migration journeys, conflict, and everyday struggles circulate internationally. The boundary between global and local dissolves as a single recorded event can travel across continents within seconds.
• News media, independent creators, and ordinary witnesses act as media networks feeding a shared narrative system.
• A local incident becomes globally meaningful once framed within larger social themes such as migration, violence, or cultural conflict. Locality no longer refers simply to physical proximity but to narrative relevance.
• Communities imagine themselves through international attention, while global audiences interpret distant experiences through familiar narrative patterns.
• This convergence transforms identity into content. Individuals, cities, and organisations participate in a continuous exchange of narratives. The story economy reorganises geography into a networked cultural marketplace.

Streaming Platforms and the Democratisation of the Self

• The rise of streaming services accelerates this transformation. Internet-based platforms distribute entertainment without traditional studios or broadcasting structures.
• Their success depends on relatable characters and ordinary experiences. The appearance of everyday people in entertainment suggests democratisation, where anyone may be visible.
• Yet visibility becomes economic participation.
• The modern individual increasingly exists as an algorithmic profile composed of behaviour patterns and measurable traits.
• Credit ratings, consumption histories, and recommendation systems construct a digital personality. Identity becomes fragmented and quantifiable rather than unified and stable. The selfie symbolises this shift.
• The image promises equality before the camera but simultaneously converts appearance into shareable currency. Personal representation is no longer private expression alone; it functions as cultural capital within platform economies.

Artificial Intelligence and the Expansion of Personhood

• The emergence of AI intensifies the instability of identity. Chatbots and virtual assistants simulate empathy, conversation, and emotional response. Machines now perform aspects of personality once considered uniquely human.
• By reproducing emotion, digital systems compete in communication, companionship, and decision-making.
• This development blurs distinctions between authentic and constructed identity. If emotional expression can be generated computationally, personhood becomes performative rather than inherent.
• Human identity becomes one version among many communicative agents in a shared environment.

The Chain of Storytelling and the Culture of Visibility

• A cultural logic governs the system: everyone has a story, and every story deserves an audience. Social platforms enable constant storytelling, encouraging users to narrate achievements, trauma, failure, or redemption.
• The pursuit of virality drives participation, as visibility promises recognition and economic opportunity.
• Influencers, content creators, and public figures cultivate audiences through regular self-disclosure.
• Platforms reward attention, converting narratives into advertising revenue and social influence.
• Individuals willingly share experiences for validation and opportunity, participating in their own economic incorporation.
• This produces a cycle in which identity requires performance. The desire for recognition sustains continuous self-presentation.
• The audience becomes essential to personal meaning, while attention functions as currency. Human life transforms into an ongoing broadcast within a market for visibility.

Conclusion

• The modern economy increasingly relies on identity and self-presentation rather than material production, turning personal experience, emotion, communication, and data into valuable resources.
• Through digital representation and the circulation of narratives, everyday private life is integrated into economic systems that extract value from how people live, express, and connect.
• This creates a paradox: individuals enjoy unprecedented opportunities for participation and expression, yet their visibility also places the self itself, constantly observed and commercially used, at the centre of a global marketplace as a renewable commodity.