Under modern capitalism we are pressured to treat self-expression and branding as synonymous. I see two broad harms with this:

1. Shallow Expression

Branding is meant to be understandable at a glance. People are obviously too complicated for this to be possible. This incentivizes self-expression to be easily understandable and therefore shallow. In the US in particular there is a tendency for people to latch onto a part of themselves which fits a stereotype and then lean into that stereotype. I think this pressure makes marginalized identities that much harder to express because people are used to being presented with pre-established imagery.

2. Brands As Personalities

We expect brands to reciprocate the self-expression in a way that is more natural to us. Again, this is not always possible, but when it is possible, it leaves us much more vulnerable to deception. It’s obvious that Google, for example, has no “true self” to express, so any attempts at convey personality are amoral marketing at best and cynical manipulation at worst. There may be an argument that Google initially had some “self” in its company culture as it made the Silicon Valley work-and-play culture famous. There is probably good discussion to be had about how group identity is neither constructed nor naturally emergent, but somewhere in between. Regardless, Google no longer allots employees 10% of their time for personal projects and the bean bag chairs in the break room have quickly become a cliche, so their “self” is at best the boring and repugnant culture of whatever ghouls inhabit the Alphabet board of directors.

The Space In Between

[Warning: uncited historical narratives/anecdotes ahead. Corrections or clarifications would be appreciated]

This one isn’t a harm in and of itself, but it does exacerbate the others. In societies where corporations held less control over how we perceived the world, the lines between marketing and self-expression would be more obvious. It is the blurring of these lines that makes their conflation possible.

As appealing to a dominant and homogenous culture has become harder, attempts by companies to appeal to shared values have become more and more bland. The blur between self-expression and branding was accelerated first by the visual culture of an age shaped by television and now by the migration of that culture from tv to social media. We’ve seen how the birth, death, and subsequent beating of the horse that is “relatable brands” on Twitter has occurred in under two decades. Recently, an ad was shown on Reddit which claimed to be an intern for a household name brand begging for upvotes so their boss wouldn’t fire them. If you had told me in 2000 that this happened, the idea that it was cynical outrage marketing would not have occurred to me. Today however, this was my first thought.

I think we’ve all had this thought online when trying to figure out whether someone was a bot, a shill, or simply someone indistinguishable from one of the two. The versions of people available online are presented in exactly the same format as accounts without a “self” and a lot of the time they lack sufficient context to tell the difference. And in true dialectical fashion, these simulacra are the references we use to create our own identities. This is the blur. It is what makes this all this possible.