Digital Capitalism and Friendship

Abstract

This paper starts from an understanding of friendship as a series of gradients – a definition provided firstly by Aristotle – to observe the similarities and differences between interested friendship, disinterested friendship, and market relations. Introducing the notion of surveillance capitalism, the paper discusses the advent of social media and the implicit definition of friendship that underlies it. Social media favours the quantification and bureaucratisation of friendship, transforming it into a measure of personal achievement, i.e. widely promoting instrumental friendship. This transformation raises a number of issues related to alienation, self-exploitation, and the ability to relate to otherness.