The exchange value of ideas

What happens to an idea's innate value when replaced by exchange value? Let's start with the ideation-workshop. The workshop's defining quality, as learning outcome, is for participants to explore ideation tools of their choice in order to raise their awareness of the ideation process. In this, there is no external assessment only participants' own perception or judgement to determine the criteria for most favoured ideation tool or tools. The workshop activities, then, are driven by curiosity and the value of the tool or tools can’t be arrived at through an outside, top-down measure. That is, participants can assess the value only by individually and carefully attending to what the value the tools or tools contain and, on their own, concluding their merit. Yet the end point for the ideator, or working designer is to create a product or service for sale. That is, the idea going to market. Once the product or service enters the market, the intrinsic value of the idea behind the product or service is emptied out, compacted by the market’s logic of ranking, until there’s only relational worth, or exchange value. That is, the idea has no longer interior worth. Instead, the personal, or intrinsic value of the idea is for the market to decide. And so, the workshop is evidence of the liberating fact that ideas, and ideation have intrinsic value not be measured, or processed as market productivity, or captured as market value. Now, what happens to the idea in the digital culture where everything seems dogged by digital tracking, where any online activity is capturable by artificial intelligence and transmuted into data? In this digital scenario, the ideator is a data worker which suggests that the ideator must engage in authorly self-promotion to replace the innate value of the idea with exchange value. In other words, the ideator must monetise their ideas in order to make a living from their ideas. That is, Gen AI, as data collection technology, hollows out authenticity and authorship which means the ideator is faced with crumpling self-worth as creator. This blog was inspired by Thea Lim, The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age (2024).