The 'For You' Everything

December 2023

Media Analysis

economics and individualism

Part 2 of a series on self-identity and technology.

A Lehman Brothers executive made a speech in the early 20th century about the future of the American economy. His argument: the economy had gotten very good at producing things people needed. To keep growing, it would need to get people to want things they didn't need yet. The task was to cultivate desire. To train people to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed.

This is usually presented as a critique of capitalism. It's more interesting as a description of a genuinely difficult problem. If you've solved scarcity, what do you optimise for next? The answer, apparently, is identity.

Advertising shifted across the 20th century from emphasising practical benefits — this cleans better, this lasts longer — to emphasising the kind of person you'd become by using the product. You don't buy the car for the car. You buy it for what owning the car says about you. The product becomes a vehicle (sorry) for self-expression. The economy learns to sell identity.

Christopher Lasch tracked this shift in The Culture of Narcissism (1979). His argument wasn't that people had become more vain — it was that the social and economic conditions of late capitalism had made identity maintenance a primary psychological task. When external measures of worth (religion, community, stable employment) lose their grip, people turn inward. Self-conception becomes the main project.

This is what he called narcissism — not the crude version of selfishness, but something more subtle: a preoccupation with how one appears, a dependency on external validation, a difficulty distinguishing authentic desire from performed desire. A low-key main character syndrome where people seek confirmation that others perceive them as they wish to be seen.

Technology accelerates this dramatically. The TikTok For You Page is the logical endpoint of the advertiser's dream from a century ago. Every piece of content is optimised for you specifically. The algorithm learns what you engage with and gives you more of it. The result is an environment that constantly reflects back a version of you — not who you are, but who your behaviour reveals you to be, which is a much more uncomfortable thing to confront.

Because your behaviour reveals you to be interested in things you didn't consciously choose to be interested in. It reveals the preferences you have but don't advertise. It reveals the gap between your self-presentation and your actual attention.

Personal spending accounts for about 60% of UK GDP. That means the economy depends on people buying things, which means it depends on people having identities that require purchasing. The FYP doesn't just reflect preferences — it produces them. It tells you what someone like you watches, which is also subtly telling you what someone like you is.

As AI blurs reality and generated content becomes indistinguishable from authentic content, people lose confidence in external information sources. The self becomes the remaining anchor for certainty and belief. Who am I? is the question that can't be outsourced. Everything else can.

Which makes the self the most valuable thing in the economy.

And also the most profitable thing to colonise.