Call it what it is!

More darkly, this acting easily blurs into con artistry. For example, service workers are coached and trained to cunningly deploy their own pleasant affect to maximize sales (and tips). Any “real” feeling that remains is often distant and diluted. In on the game as we all are, we become suspicious of those treating us with respect and affection; they may only be conducting a scam, we may only or mainly be objects of manipulation and exploitation. So the already frayed social fabric suffers further tears.

More darkly yet, when entrepreneurialism becomes the essence (such as it is) of the self and is always in the service of selling itself, we come perilously close to something that may most honestly—and realistically—be called prostitution. What, after all, is prostitution except the successful presentation of an attractive body for sale? And what is the entrepreneurial self if not body and soul totally enlisted in an unending hustle, the next sale?— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 47