English essay
Always Be Optimizing

The ideal woman has always been generic. I bet you can picture the version of her that runs the show today. She’s of indetermi­ nate age but resolutely youthful presentation. She’s got glossy hair and the clean, shameless expression of a person who believes she was made to be looked at. She is often luxuriating when you see her-on remote beaches, under stars in the desert, across a carefully styled table, surrounded by beautiful possessions or photogenic friends. Showcasing herself at leisure is either the bulk of her work or an essential part of it; in this, she is not so unusual-for many people today, especially for women, packag­ ing and broadcasting your image is a readily monetizable skill. She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or husband: he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached.

Can you see this woman yet? She looks like an Instagram­ which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal. The process requires maximal obedience on the part of the woman in question, and-ideally-her genuine enthusiasm, too. This woman is sincerely interested in whatever the market de-

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around the world who take them feel awful. We have not “opti­ mized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representa­ tion; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all.

For the way out, I think, we have to follow the cyborg. We have to be willing to be disloyal, to undermine. The cyborg is powerful because she grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because she accepts without question how deeply it is embedded in her. “The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment,” Haraway wrote. “We can be responsible for machines.” The dream of the cyborg is “not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia”-a form of speech contained inside another person’s language, one whose purpose is to – introduce conflict from within.

It’s possible if we want it. But what do we want? What would you want-what desires, what forms of insubordination, would you be able to ac<;:ess-if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and dimi?ishes you every day?