The Monetization of Life

There used to be something we did called work.

Work was how you made money to pay for life’s expenses.

These days, work is increasingly being replaced by the concept of monetization. The reason is simple: almost anything can be monetized. The things we used to call work, but also the things we used to call leisure, entertainment, friendship, attention, personal expression—and increasingly, even our bodies.

In fact, monetization is gradually taking over more and more aspects of our lives. It is encroaching on everything.

I started thinking about this because my brother sent me an Instagram link that disturbed me to my core. It was a man talking about the blood-products industry, particularly plasma.

The United States is the global powerhouse in the supply of blood plasma and plasma-derived products. It supplies a huge proportion of the world’s plasma, up to 70%, in large part because people in the United States are permitted to sell their plasma, unlike in most other countries. Blood plasma is a commodity in the United States.

There are more than a thousand commercial plasma-collection centres across the country, many of them operated by for-profit companies. Studies have found that these centres are disproportionately located in economically disadvantaged communities, where the financial incentive to sell plasma is presumably greatest.

The point of the Instagram poster was that capitalism is an exploitative and inhumane economic system. When it is done with your labour, it takes your time (and your soul). When it can’t suck anything more out of you, it comes for your blood. And it relentlessly seeks out those who are most economically vulnerable.

It is an important perspective. And it raises many more complicated moral and ethical questions.

How can we condemn the commercialization of blood products when the need for them is so great and the demand is not being met by voluntary donations? If people need plasma to survive, and there isn’t enough of it, then paying people to provide it does solve a real problem. But it also means that one person’s economic desperation can become another person’s medical supply.

As a Canadian, currently feeling angry about the economic pressure being brought to bear on our sovereignty by the Trump administration, I was particularly shocked to learn just how dependent Canada is on the United States for plasma-derived products. We important 83% of our blood product from the US. 

Canadian law does not permit the commercial sale of human blood and plasma in the same way that it is permitted in the United States. The underlying concern is that once we begin treating parts of the human body as commodities, where do we draw the line?

And yet we import American plasma products to meet our needs.

Isn’t that hypocritical? More importantly, isn’t it a national-security vulnerability?

A country should probably think carefully about depending on another country for something as fundamental as the biological material required for its own health-care system—particularly when relations between the two countries have become as unpredictable as they are today.

But the larger point is more instructive.

The story of modern life is, to a considerable extent, the story of the monetization of everything.

Our labour was monetized long ago. Now our attention is monetized. Our preferences are monetized. Our personal data are monetized. Our identities are monetized. Our relationships increasingly become content. Our private lives become brands.

The monetization of our bodies and blood seems to be a logical extension. The separation between the personal and the marketable has gradually disappeared.

There used to be boundaries around what we considered appropriate to buy and sell. Some things were simply not supposed to be commodities. Human organs, for example. Intimacy. Friendship. Personal identity. Perhaps even leisure.

But those boundaries have been under relentless pressure.

Remember leisure time?

Since the Industrial Revolution, it has gradually been squeezed out of our lives. One of the great labour debates of the past century has been about reducing the working week—from six days to five, and now, increasingly, from five to four.

How quaint.

What if I told you that medieval Europeans had something like 140 religious feast days and holidays every year, according to the nineteenth-century historian Pierre Émile Levasseur? That is an astonishing proportion of the calendar devoted, at least officially, to celebration, worship and communal life.

The picture gets even stranger when we go further back.

This comes from an interesting essay by Ted Gioia, who cites the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s argument that some hunter-gatherer societies spent only around 15 to 20 hours a week obtaining food and meeting their basic material needs.

There are obvious qualifications to this comparison. Life expectancy was brutally low, infant mortality was extraordinarily high, and “work” is not necessarily an easy thing to define across radically different societies.

Still, the broader point is worth considering.

For most of human history, the objective of economic activity was not necessarily to maximize economic activity.

The Industrial Revolution changed that.

We made extraordinary gains in sanitation, medicine, food production and life expectancy. We became wealthier and, on average, lived much longer.

But somewhere along the way, we developed the strange idea that the additional time we had been given should be spent producing more wealth, consuming more, and growing the economy.

In the age of tech, that has transformed into the invasive and ubiquitous concept of monetization.

The new technologies ensure that virtually everything can be monetized, even leisure.

We go on vacation and take photographs for Instagram. We exercise and post the results. We have hobbies that become side hustles. We turn our opinions into content. We monetize our attention by watching advertisements and monetize our creativity by building personal brands.

The Industrial Revolution gave us more time alive. The modern market has spent much of the intervening period figuring out how to put a price on that time.

And perhaps that is the real paradox of modern life.

We conquered scarcity, increased our life expectancy and acquired more leisure than almost any generation before us. And then we built an economic system that taught us to regard all of it as an opportunity cost.

The question is no longer simply whether we work too much. It is whether there is anything left in our lives that we are allowed to do for no economic reason at all.