The Monetized Life
“It’s absurd to imagine someone trying very hard to monetize their desire to scuba dive once a week or write poetry or hang out with friends. People like to talk about their favorite sports teams or tech gadgets, but why do we have to be in such a hurry to turn that into a profit?”
Absurd? Maybe in 2005, when pioneering blogger and business consultant Seth Godin wrote that paragraph in a blog post defiantly titled “Monetize This.” In 2022, Godin’s plaint seems quaint. Not only it is easy to imagine monetizing scuba diving or hanging out with friends, it can seem unthinkable not to. In 2022, everything can be, and often is, monetized — transformed, as if by alchemy, into cash, or bits, or bitcoin. Motherhood. Pets. Eating. Dieting. Opening boxes. This Medium story, although that’s more an aspiration than a monetization success story. (Last month I earned 19 cents for all 38 of my published stories: half a cent per story.) Even poetry, incredible as it seems. “If it exists, you can monetize it,” promises a site called, unimaginatively, Monetize This.
How did monetize become such a powerful mantra? When did monetization become a goal and a grail? And what has it done to our relationship to work, to money, to value?
I remember the first time I heard the word monetize. It was January 2000, and I, a freelance writer, was in a meeting with a designer and our client…
