We're constantly bombarded by data. And it's easy to think that with the right clues, we could answer the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything.

But data aren't facts. They're not a secret code. Data are media—they mediate our interactions with the world around us. To make them useful and meaningful, we need a critical framework for working with data as media. That's what I've got for you today—a deep dive on how predictability, relevance, and actionability can help us see data for what they are and for what they're not.

Footnotes:

• Anytime I talk about data and how it mediates our lives and work, I'm referencing the work of philosopher C. Thi Nguyen and his concept of value capture. I've written about his theory previously here
• I also make use of Byung-Chul Han's The Crisis of Narration, specifically his critique of a 2008 Wired essay by Chris Anderson about the end of theory

Get written versions of all new episodes at whatworks.fyi—where you can also become a premium subscriber for just $7 per month and help support the work I do at What Works.

• (00:00) - A hypothetical

Today's episode is about tips. As in gratuity. Wait, wait, wait! Where are you going?

I know, you probably don't receive tips for your work. Maybe you don't live in the US, and you're thinking, 'What is this American BS about tips?'

Well, when I first heard about Trump's (and then Harris's) proposal to eliminate federal taxes of tipped income, my brain went a hundred different places: how many people would it impact, how much savings are we talking about, what will this do to the proliferation of tipped work, and how much could this accelerate re-proletarianization?! You probably weren't expecting that last one. 

Here's the thing: tipping is a class issue. Which means it's also a social justice issue. And it's also an issue that intersects with frustrations with the way all of us work. To find out how, you've got to trust me—and listen.

Footnotes:

• Information on the federal tipped minimum wage
• 'Tip baiting' Instacart drivers via CNN
• "The Economic Logic Behind the 'No Tax on Tips' Policy" by Jadrian Wooten
• Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities by Kerry Segrave
• "'It's the Legacy of Slavery': Here's the Troubling History Behind Tipping Practices in the U.S." via Time
• "Tipping is a racist relic and a modern tool of economic oppression in the South" via the Economic Policy Institute
• "Errand Runners of Digital Platform Capitalism" by İsa Demir
• "Defending Hierarchy: The Conservative Impulse" by Matthew McManus
• The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
• "The problem is proletarianization, not capitalism" by Solange Manche (about Bernard Steigler)
• Capitalism is Dead: Is This Something Worse? by McKenzie Wark
• "The Practical Utopian's Guide to the Coming Collapse" by David Graeber

Find essay versions of every new episode at whatworks.fyi!

If a chatbot writes your novel, did you really complete NaNoWriMo?

Two niche internet panics caught my eye over the last couple of weeks: a bungled AI policy by the organization that promotes National Novel Writing Month and a viral story about people hiring Strava surrogates to run for them so they can claim the kudos. And those two stories got me thinking about the ways that we delegate away the intrinsic value of other activities.

So with the help of a 1935 essay by Walter Benjamin, let's unpack the cult value of novel writing, running, and social media.

Footnotes:

• "NaNoWriMo Says Condemning AI is 'Classist and Ableist'" via 404 Media
• "Some Thoughts on NaNoWriMo" by Sarah Gailey
• Channel News Asia on the Indonesian Strava jockey trend
• "People are paying 'Strava mules' to do their runs for them, but why?" via Women's Health
• Velljko's Strava mule confession on TikTok
• Leigh Stein on the internet's difficult with satire on TikTok
• "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin
• "Unpacking the Attention Fetish" on What Works
• "In Defense of Inefficiency" on What Works
• "Why AI Isn't Going to Make Art" by Ted Chiang via The New Yorker

Essay versions of every episode are posted at whatworks.fyi, where you can also become a premium subscriber and support What Works for just $7 per month.

Inspired by the current vibe shift, I'm interrupting my rebroadcast of the Self-Help, LLC series with an interlude about values—personal values, business values, American values, even Christian values. And it's about what is so often misunderstood about values.  Values aren't chains; they are wings.

This is the 6th installment in the Self-Help, LLC series, which originally ran in October 2022. Today's episode has been revised and re-engineered!

We form an impression of our voices early in life. While it might shift some as we age, those impressions tend to stick with us. For many of us, what we learn about our voices is how they don’t quite measure up to the ideal: too high, too low, too soft, too loud, too this, too that. This is especially true for women, queer people, transgender people, non-native English speakers, Black people, people of color, indigenous people, and really anyone whose voice doesn’t fit into the white, male baritone mold.

So what do we do? We try to sound more like everyone else. And that can not only mess with our ability to use our physical voices, but it messes with our ability to use our metaphorical voices and confuses our sense of self.

Samara Bay, a Hollywood dialect coach who’s worked on blockbusters like Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy, is on a mission to help everyone find “permission to speak.” In this episode, we dig into how the self-help imperative to “own your voice” might be more complicated than it sounds.

Footnotes:

• Find out more about Samara Bay
• Get Samara’s book Permission to Speak
• “I still have a voice” by Alice Wong
• Samara Bay on Anna Sorokin and Elizabeth Holmes’s voices
• Women and Power by Mary Beard
• More about African American Vernacular English on Pause on the Play
• College students talk about their relationships to their Southern accents on Dolly Parton’s America
• “The Magic of Voice Transitioning with Nicole Gress” on Camp Wild Heart with Mackenzie Dunham
• “Me minus me” on This American Life (Sandy Allen’s vocal transition)
• “If you don’t have anything nice to say” on This American Life (complaints about female voices)
• More on the mid-atlantic accent

As always, find the essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi

How influencers, well, influence the way we see the world, our work, our families, and ourselves? And how does the spectacle we immerse ourselves in daily contribute to our perfectionism, anxiety, or fear? In the fifth installment of Self-Help, LLC, I talk about all that and more with Sara Petersen. This is an edited version of an episode that originally ran in October 2022.

There’s an influencer for every thing these days. Camping equipment? Sure. Nutritional supplements? You bet. Miniatures? You know it. College admissions? But of course. In this episode, though, we’re going to focus on one of the original influencer niches: MOMS.

The rise of the influencer ushered in a new outlet for self-help. Now, not only are there motivational books and talks, there’s a product endorsement to help you live your best life. Influencers give us, perhaps, the direct line between personal growth and consumer capitalism. I talk with the author of Momfluenced, Sara Petersen, about all of that and more.

Footnotes:

• Subscribe to Sara Petersen’s newsletter
• Grab your copy of Momfluenced
• “Life After Lifestyle” by Toby Shorin
• “The Rhetoric of the Image” by Roland Barthes
• The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
• Episode 393 with Kelly Diels
• Episode 395 with Steph Barron Hall
• “The Influencer Industry: Constructing and Commodifying Authenticity on Social Media” by Emily Dean Hund

New!
Join me for an 8-week seminar called Making Sense starting in September! I'll guide you through how to use the process of sensemaking to make media that helps your audience better understand the world.

If you're bored by your current content strategy, tired of coming up with new how-tos or advice posts, and want a fresh and impactful way to approach how you write, podcast, speak, or communicate in any way, this seminar is for you. You'll work week-by-week through on-demand learning, office hours, workshops, and small assignments so that by the end, you have the draft of an essay, script for a video, outline of a podcast series, or slide deck for a presentation.

Learn more about Making Sense!

This is the 4th part of my series Self-Help, LLC, which I'm replaying over the summer! Enjoy!

If your Instagram feed or Explore page looks anything like mine, then you likely see a preponderance of posts about personality types, conditions, or other self-knowledge. We’re hooked on learning about ourselves! And perhaps even more hooked on sharing what we’ve learned—which means that the Instagram algorithm (as well as TikTok’s and Pinterest’s algorithms) has learned to love this kind of content, too.

In this episode, I explore discovering ourselves versus making ourselves, why self-knowledge is big business on Instagram, and how creating viral personality content can wreak havoc on the creator’s psyche. To dig into this with me, I invited @ninetypesco creator, Steph Barron Hall, onto the show.

Footnotes:

• Find Steph Barron Hall on Instagram (@ninetypesco)
• Learn more about working with Steph
• How to be Authentic by Skye Cleary
• Learn more about the Enneagram and find your type
• The Nine Types of Rest
• Self-Help, INC by Micki McGee
• “Double consciousness”
• “Looking glass self”

Essay versions of each episode are posted at whatworks.fyi every Thursday. 

This is an updated version of the 3rd installment in my series Self-Help, LLC, from 2022. Enjoy!

Our quest for self-improvement requires us to decide who (or what) to trust with our time, energy, and money. What book do you decide to read next? Which coach do you hire? What accounts do you follow? Our consumer choices seem endless—so finding someone or something to put your trust in might feel like an Olympic feat.

On the flip side, as business owners or independent workers whether explicitly or implicitly in the business of self-help, our goal is to cultivate trust. Why would someone trust us with their business, their marriage, or their hopes and dreams for the future?

In this episode, I sit down with sociologist Patrick Sheehan to talk about his study of career coaches and the role they play with job seekers. We examine the roles that both credentialed and experience-based experts play in society and why uncertainty and instability might inspire us—for better or worse—to put our trust in prophets rather than priests.

Footnotes:

• “We’ve stopped trusting institutions and started trusting strangers” by Rachel Botsman (TED Talk)
• “The Change Rules of Trust in the Digital Age” by Rachel Botsman (HBR)
• “Where did all the coaches come from?” by Patrick Sheehan (Work In Progress Sociology)
• “The new economy as multi-level marketing scheme: career coaches and unemployment in the age of uncertainty” by Patrick Sheehan (Work in Progress Sociology)
• “Gun Culture and Wellness Culture Come From the Same Place” by Alan Levinovitz (Huffington Post)

As always, find an essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi

I’m continuing my rebroadcast of a series I did a couple of years ago called Self-Help, LLC, and asked the question, "Are we all in the self-help business now?"

Today’s episode is all about the aesthetics of self-help and what my guest Kelly Diels has dubbed the female lifestyle empowerment brand. If you’ve ever fussed with your hair or outfit before taking a selfie or sought out the perfect Instagram-worthy spot on vacation, this episode is for you. And if you haven’t? Well, hopefully, this episode will put your mind at ease: you don’t need to do any of that to be successful.

It’s not only self-help or entrepreneurship products that are sold as tools for “empowerment” today. It’s just about everything: makeup, clothing, workout equipment, vitamins, office supplies… Whole brands are built around the promise that a purchase won’t just solve your problem, it’ll make you a better, more fulfilled person. But empowerment isn’t for sale—only the status quo.

In this episode, I talk with writer and coach Kelly Diels about empowerment marketing and what she calls the “female lifestyle empowerment brand.” You’ll also hear from independent beauty writer Jessica DeFino about how empowerment is leveraged by the beauty industry (more from her later in the series!).

Footnotes:

• Learn more about Kelly Diels
• Learn more about Jessica DeFino
• Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
• Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom
• How to be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment by Skye Cleary
• Helen Gurley Brown as quoted in Self-Help, INC by Micki McGee
• “The Rhetoric of the Image” by Roland Barthes

Read the updated essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi

Love What Works? Want to support the work of asking big questions about how we work today? Become a premium subscriber and get exclusive content and live quarterly workshops for just $7 per month. Go to whatworks.fyi/subscribe

This is Part 1 of a series from 2022 called Self-Help, LLC. This summer, I’ll be republishing this series as I work on new essays and episodes. There’s a good chance this series is new to you, and if its previous reception is any indication, I think you’ll love it! If you listened to it the first time through, I’d love to know how it hits differently today.

***

It’s hard to escape the language and politics of self-help today. Whether you’re browsing your LinkedIn, Instagram, or even TikTok feed, there’s a very good chance that the first post you see offers up some idea for living a better life or growing a more successful business. Shoulds and supposed-tos are cultural currency. We gain social capital by sharing advice or “giving value.” And that’s left me wondering: are we all in the self-help business now?

Today’s episode kicks off an 8-part series called Self-Help, LLC which will explore that question from a number of different angles. In this episode, I’m taking a close look at a particular construction of personal growth and entrepreneurship culture: winners and losers.

Footnotes:

• Dr. Rick for Progressive
• Why does the insurance industry have so many mascots? on Planet Money
• Self-Help, INC by Micki McGee
• More about Marshall McLuhan (”The medium is the message”)
• Nixon’s universal health care plan proposal
• Reaganism & Thatcherism
• The Old is Dying & the New Cannot be Born by Nancy Fraser

Find the essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi and support my work critiquing and theorizing the 21st-century economy by becoming a premium subscriber for just $7 per month!