Promoting Ourselves to Death
14th April 2020
In the early part of the digital age the résumé—newly permanent, accessible, and social-media ready—took on added weight. We downloaded the right templates. We kept databases of the appropriate verbiage. We learned to match the way we presented ourselves online to the flowery language of college brochures fervently and indiscriminately distributed by our school guidance counselor.
In one way or another, then, we were indoctrinated in the art of self-promotion—not the collection of qualifications in an objective, matter-of-fact kind of way, but the arbitrary fusion of our subjective identity with algorithmically desirable qualities and credentials. No good deed went unpublished.
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In America, unmoored liberalism (social and economic) frees us from all convention. It leaves us with no past and no future, no beginnings or ends. The present-day American is, by and large rootless historically, geographically, spiritually. Broad deracination primes the individual for isolation, relational anxiety, and, ultimately, desperate conformity. As a result, all is dissolved into the same manic desire for recognition, manifested perfectly in the fetishism of the résumé.