The product is You

By Carla D'Antonio

Topic: Personal Data

Medium: Book

Institute: Politecnico di Milano

Year: a.a. 2023-2024

Hustle culture is that unbearable societal pressure to maintain a high level of productivity, demanding you to constantly work. It glamorizes the idea of overworking yourself, telling you that your self-worth is measured by how productive you’ve been. Is productivity really a parameter to define human value? By basing people’s descriptions and costs on my computer usage habits for work, the catalog questions the idea of productivity as a yardstick for evaluating the individual, going so far as to suggest a future in which the individual can even be bought, and prompts the user to reflect on the social pressure to overwork in recent decades.

Featured image of the project The product is You

Complementary image of the project The product is You

Metaphor used:

A product card will be associated with each version of myself. Each of these cards will show the person through a picture of myself in a different work place and a description explaining the main characteristics. Each product card will show a price associated with each person, as if it were a product to be purchased. An AI generated image will be featured in the catalogue reflecting the description. The price will be decided by an Artificial Intelligence that will be given information on the different versions of myself and will be then asked to rank them in order of productivity and give a price based on the productivity of the cluster.

Intended Meaning:

Hustle culture is an unbearable pressure on people. The idea of productivity stems from industrial revolutions and in fact is a concept better to be applied to machinery, not people. Overwork harms the individual as well as the community in which the individual lives. The project, albeit in an ironic way, invites us to reflect on this issue in order to unhinge this social pressure and prompt the user to think about possibly finding an alternative way to ensure balance and quality of life for the individual.

Source:

Data of app and services usage from and Apple (macOS) from the last year, so starting from Jan 2023 up to Dec 2023.