You are your numbers: Visibility fetishism and social value in the age of social media

Visibility has become a central organizing principle of social life on digital platforms, where recognition is increasingly expressed through quantifiable metrics such as likes, shares, and follower counts. Existing research has examined self-branding and the attention economy, yet it tends to treat attention-based engagement as an indicator of popularity or success rather than as a form of value in itself. This article asks: how does the transformation of visibility into quantified attention produce a new regime of social value, and what are its consequences for publicness? To address this gap, it proposes the concept of visibility fetishism—the process through which quantified attention appears as an intrinsic property of individuals, obscuring the platform-mediated conditions that produce it. Drawing on Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, Debord’s critique of the spectacle, and a growing body of literature on algorithmic mediation and platform capitalism, the article argues that social media do not simply reflect underlying value but actively participate in its production, generating a fetishized regime in which visibility operates as the dominant mode of recognition. Under these conditions, social value becomes increasingly structured around measurable attention, displacing validity and argumentation as primary criteria. The concept is shown to operate through interrelated functions which together naturalize metrics as indicators of worth and refigure the self as a measurable entity. The implications for democratic communication and subjectivity are examined, and the article concludes by outlining avenues for future research into alternative platform architectures and the potential for different regimes of value.