Online identity formation and capitalist schizophrenia
Jonah Peretti, one of the original founders of BuzzFeed, wrote a paper that foretold the site’s entire business model, and the business model of much of the internet. In 1996, as an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, Peretti submitted a journal article titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and The Acceleration of Identity Formation and Dissolution.
In the paper, Peretti wrote that capitalism would need to create an ever-growing number of micro-identities for people to fit themselves into, so that those identities could be commodified and marketed to.
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