This argument is at least a decade out of date. The idea that selfies represent some kind of challenge to or subversion of corporate capitalism would be pretty amusing to shareholders of Apple and Facebook, which between them are worth about 10 times the value of Time Warner, CBS and Viacom put together. The new lust economy is just fine with consumers reveling in imagery they create. In fact, the new lust economy has figured out that paying middlemen to create imagery was a waste of money that could have gone directly to the bottom line.

The problem with selfies isn’t that they threaten capitalism, or that they feed the narcissism of millennials, or that they edit our imperfections, or that they’ll betray us to the killer robots. The problem with selfies is they’re an art form that exists because we all spend several hours a day staring at tiny glass screens, because the smartest engineers on earth have gotten enormously wealthy convincing us that’s a way to live. To be sure, some great art forms have arisen from servitude. But the creators of those art forms didn’t fool themselves into thinking their chains were tools of liberation.