Summation of Creation
A Personal Post
(Please read the Project Overview for further details)
“This blog space is intended to cover topics that reside under the umbrella of the Commodification of Human Companionship – partly for study, partly for my own curiosity.”
Over the past few months, people have asked for more details on this particular project whenever I mention it in passing. Questions like, “What have you been up to?” turn into a real challenge for me in offering up a suitable answer to someone uninitiated with my work.
Over the past year or so, many people have asked for more details on this project whenever I mention it in passing. Questions like, “What have you been up to?” turn into me verbally fumbling around for over an hour, trying to condense five years worth of information into a 'simple explanation'.
What's worse is that there are barely any centralized sources for the topic of commodified companionship or emotional commodification; save for a few books from a handful of modern sociologists. And seeing how I've been focused on how both of these topics have translated into online marketplaces... well, there's even less information on that. Its not really anyone's fault for the lack of accessible documentation – as most of these online services have cropped up slowly in the shadows of the internet. And they're shadows which lengthen every few seconds. With no centralized source of information to relay this peculiar subject, I decided I would make a simple, ad-free space to talk about them in a casual manner.
Some day I'll likely put up a more detailed website with all of my data pooled, but seeing as a lot of this is sensitive information (from personal interviews and the like), I wanna keep it subtle and interesting for now.
Pulling together the information for this has been much akin to creating a mosaic. A mosaic conjured up of both statistical data and human recounts. What started out as my friends giggling at “companion for hire” services turned into me sorting through almost a two-hundred year period of human sociological studies – eventually landing myself on essays covering the past eighty years of intense industrialization and cultural change. And after a while, I was paying for interviews out of my own pocket and sheer interest.
It's not an easy subject to point to for the uninitiated. Social interaction is a nebulous topic; not a single entity, object or definition. Hell, its not even an objective experience! But we are at a point now in human history where some of us are willing to pay each other for platonic, personal interaction over the internet. And I think that is a significant situation to talk upon; considering all the negative that can and does arise from a trend like this.
It's easy at first to snicker at the person paying eighty dollars for a causal conversation with someone for a few hours. But, if you peek behind the veil and investigate the circumstances without bias, you just might end up in a position where you see the methods by which your own society encourages the selling of simulacra entertainment, imitation experiences, and the commodification of emotional experiences.
So this has been what I have been casting my eye over since November 2020, and really conceptualizing well before that. I wanted a simple, ad-free space to present some of my compiled information for those curious enough, and to see what sticks with the readers.
Good luck – bring some warm milk, a blanket and do not forget to take frequent breaks: because this stuff is the road to depression just by reading it in passing.