Part I: Hollow Dreams & the Hall of Mirrors
Sometimes while I am facilitating emotional intelligence workshops for high school students, I ask them what they want to do when they finish school. In the last couple of years, there has always been at least one kid in every class that says, “I want to be an entrepreneur.” Every time I hear this, I feel a bit sad inside. I feel the same kind of deflation when I hear a teenager say they want to be an influencer.
It’s not young people’s fault. They are submersed in entrepreneur and influencer culture. It just makes me sad because I wish we lived in a socio-economic system that supported teenagers to have real dreams.
Some people might read this and feel a pang of outrage. They might think that the desire to be an entrepreneur is a real dream. But if you take a step back, it’s not. It’s a dream of a dream. It’s a placeholder for a dream.
When someone says they want to be an entrepreneur without having any idea about the product or service they want to offer, they are saying they want to own their own business and get rich. Entrepreneur is simply the word that represents a wealthy lifestyle. So, the teenager who says they want to be an entrepreneur is telling me they want to become rich and therefore successful within the metrics of capitalism.
You want to get rich under capitalism? Groundbreaking.
That isn’t a real dream; it’s the uncritical adoption of the American dream. A dream that Hollywood tells us is right and good and attainable, but is in fact, boring, uninspiring and hollow.
Similarly, when someone says they want to be an influencer, they aren’t often thinking about the particular influence they want to have on people. They want to be an influencer for influencing’s sake.
Influencer status is bestowed to people who have enough social media followers to make it worthwhile for advertisers to pay them to do sponsored posts. Of course, many influencers also sell their own merch as well. So the only thing influencers really influence people to do is to buy things.
The marketing strategy of celebrity endorsement dates back to the late 19th century. However, for more than a century, the celebrities used in advertisements were famous for something other than self-commodification and product-endorsement. They were often beloved actors, athletes or musicians. Today, influencers are renowned for being influencers; for curating content that characterizes their personal brand.
When I was growing up, Paris Hilton’s fame was framed as kind of novel and wacky. The tagline that accompanied her wherever she went was “famous for being famous.” In the early 2000s, we had the decency to be repelled or at least puzzled by Paris Hilton’s unearned status. Now we live in an era where the Paris Hilton flavour of fame has become garden-variety. No one blinks an eye.
“Media status has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing.”
- Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
As Debord observed, we live in a social system in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between representation and reality. Genuine connection is replaced by interaction with the images that represent or misrepresent reality. This is what Debord called the Society of the Spectacle. Debord died before the proliferation of social media, but it is a striking example of the Spectacle.
Our social media profiles are carefully orchestrated representations of ourselves and yet we treat them as if they were real. In fact, it is not uncommon for people to treat and experience social media as if it were more real than reality. This is an expression of hyperreality, a concept made famous by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard describes the successive phases of hyperreal reproduction in this way:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.
Social media cycles between all of these phases. We dedicate less time to seeing real friends in real life because we can “connect” online. We form parasocial relationships with people we have never met and are unlikely to ever meet. We interact not as people, but as profiles, spectators, consumers, and commodities.
As Tiernan Morgan and Lauren Purje write, influencers and celebrities “not only peddle commodities, but are commodities themselves. They serve as projections of our false aspirations.”
Matthew Remski of the Conspirituality podcast has written about the “aspirational self” as the ultimate product. There will always be more products and services to consume in the pursuit of becoming hotter, healthier, wealthier, and more spiritual versions of ourselves. There will always be aspects of the self to update and improve.
The shift from simply buying commodities to becoming commodities ourselves is an important one to reckon with.
Part II: From Consumer to Commodity: How did we become the Product?
In his documentary, Century of the Self, Adam Curtis traces the shifts in advertising trends throughout the 20th century. Below, I will summarise Curtis’ timeline of marketing trends.
Needs-based Marketing and Consumerism
In the early part of the century, the objective of advertisements was to describe and demonstrate the functions of a product. Curtis refers to this as a needs-based phase of marketing and consumer culture. When I think about needs-based marketing, vacuum cleaner advertisements spring to mind as an archetypical example. Specifically, the ads or in-person demonstrations that showcase a vacuum cleaners’ sucking power by vacuuming up sand or gravel. The consumer has a need for a clean floor and the vacuum cleaner adverts demonstrate the way their product can meet that need.
Desire-based Marketing and Consumerism
However, in the 1920s, there was a calculated shift into desire-based consumerism. This was heralded by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who harnessed the insights of psychoanalysis in service of consumer capitalism. Bernays pioneered some of the earliest forms of associative marketing, whereby advertisers associate market products with non-market consumer desires such as confidence, friendship, sex appeal, wealth, and happiness.
Some basic examples of desire-based marketing are alcohol or perfume ads. These advertisements rarely advertise the qualities of their product, but rather tell a story about how the product will make the consumer feel.
Drink [insert beer brand] and women will find you attractive/you will be the life of the party/your friends will like you more.
Wear [insert perfume brand] and you will be graceful, alluring and beautiful/a mysterious faceless man will always be following a few metres behind you/your life will be a montage of frolicking in fields of flowers.
It’s a compelling story because I would actually love my life to be a montage of frolicking in fields of flowers.
On a rational level, most of us know that Dior perfume won’t fulfil any of those desires, nonetheless the desires are stirred and stoked. Realistically, our lives are so filled by producing and consuming that most of us don’t have time to frolick in the flowers as much as we would like. At least Dior perfume lets us adopt the narrative that we are the kind of people who would frolick in flowers. Yet, another example of hyperreality; the representation of the frolicking matters more than reality.
Bernays taught corporations to scratch the raw wound of consumer’s unmet desires with one hand and offer a soothing balm in the other. Bernays coined the term ‘public relations’ (PR) because he (correctly) believed people would find it more palatable than the term ‘propaganda’.
Desire-based marketing and consumerism emerged from the recognition that PR campaigns (aka propaganda) could be used to persuade people to buy things they didn’t need. Investment banker, Paul Mazur, explicated this shift nearly a hundred years ago:
"People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs."
- Harvard Business Review, 1927
Lifestyle Marketing and Consumerism
In the latter half of the 20th century, associative marketing was superimposed onto brands. People’s desires and values were no longer solely associated with specific products – instead their desires and values became associated with entire brands. Brands came to symbolise specific social identities and lifestyles. In this way, the specific product a person bought became less important than the brand of the product which represented the way the person wanted to be socially perceived. This is known as lifestyle marketing.
Corporations like Nike, Calvin Klein and Apple epitomise this form of marketing. People buy these products in large part because of what being a Nike wearer or an Apple user signifies. In a perverse form of brand fetishism, we have learnt to associate with brands in the same way that we associate with people. Lifestyle marketing forces consumers to decide which brands they want to be seen with.
Lifestyle marketing also involves mimicking the values of a chosen target market; much like a lyrebird mimics the sounds around them. For example, many corporations cynically co-opt environmental and social justice issues in order to capture the market of people who genuinely hold those values. A prominent example of this is when companies make a rainbow coloured version of their logo and launch a range of LGBTQIA+ merchandise every year during pride month. Corporations will promote themselves as allies but only when it helps their bottom line.
Lifestyle marketing teaches people that the only way to express their values and attain self-realisation is through their consumptive habits.
Let’s map the levels of abstraction in marketing and consumer trends thus far:
- Need-based: Sell/buy a specific product for its utility.
- Desire-base: Sell/buy a specific product in an attempt to attain the desires and values the advertisers have associated with it.
- Lifestyle: Sell/buy a non-specific product from a specific brand because the brand proclaims to align with the lifestyle and values of the consumer.
In level 1 and 2, people are buying products in an attempt to fulfil specific human needs and desires. However, a significant shift occurs in level 3: the consumer starts to become a commodity. Lifestyle marketing conditions people to commodify themselves. At this stage, every person becomes their own brand and their consumer habits function as personal PR campaigns. In other words, we learn to associate with specific brands in order to promote our own brand.
Today, we don’t just buy products and services in an attempt to meet our needs and fulfil our desires; we buy products and services in order to sell ourselves. The ultimate commodity is no longer a product or brand, the ultimate evergreen commodity is the self.
Part III: The Project of Self-Branding
Social media and the age of the influencer have heralded in an era of self-branding. The propagation and normalisation of self-branding has led us to commodify every aspect of our human selves.
When people perceive themselves and others as both a product and a brand, new levels of abstraction and commodification are unlocked. Just like non-human products and brands, human commodities need to prove their value through consistent updates, modifications, and rebrands to their appearance, skills and attributes.
We have arrived at a stage of consumer capitalism in which the processes of self-branding are deeply embedded into our daily lives. In the words of sociologist Paul Kennedy, the project of self-realisation through consumption, “is not only our primary life goal, it is also our duty or ‘task’ and no longer a choice.”
I want to dig into two expressions of self-branding that have become prolific in recent decades: the consistent drive to rebrand both our aesthetic (objective) and aspirational (subjective) selves.
The Aesthetic Self: The commodification and objectification of the human body
Naomi Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger, was hands-down my favourite book of 2023. There is a section in the book titled Body Doubles, which I read over and over again because Klein names a phenomenon which is uncomfortably familiar. She says that most people identify with two different bodies: their bodies as they are (unacceptable) and also an idealised vision of their bodies (desirable).
In an attempt to attain our idealised ‘body double’, we go to the gym, diet, pay big bucks for supplements, treatments and surgeries or, fall down the ‘looksmaxxing’ rabbit hole. Our ideal body is the rebrand that is forever out of reach.
However, it is unsurprising that we spend so much time reaching for it. For our whole lives, we have been conditioned to believe that there are “good bodies” and “bad bodies”. We live in a culture where there is an implicit assumption that people with “good bodies” are good, morally upstanding citizens whereas people with “bad bodies” must have a flaw in their moral character. They are lazy, indulgent and have no impulse control. Therefore a “bad body” is bad for our brand. A “bad body” will cause us to lose social capital, or to be “left on the shelf” like a defective commodity.
Consumer capitalism benefits from our fear of “bad bodies” in a myriad of ways. First and most obviously, people will endlessly consume “wellness” products and services in an attempt to become influencer-level hot. The global wellness market is a multi-trillion dollar industry. (Sidebar: people are often sceptical of the profit motives of “Big Pharma” but fail to apply the same level of scepticism to “Big Wellness.”)
Secondly, the fear of having a “bad body” makes us vulnerable to propaganda that scapegoats other people’s bodies. It’s obvious which bodies serve as the scapegoats in the current climate: disabled bodies, trans bodies, racialized bodies, and fat bodies.
As Aubrey Gordon writes in “You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People:
The fear of being fat is the fear of joining an underclass that you have so readily dismissed, looked down on, looked past, or found yourself grateful not to be a part of. It is a fear of being seen as slothful, gluttonous, greedy, unambitious, unwanted, and, worst of all, unlovable. Fat has largely been weaponized by straight-size people — the very people it seems to hurt most deeply. And ultimately, thin people are terrified of being treated the way they have so often seen fat people treated or even the way they’ve treated fat people themselves. In that way, thinness isn’t just a matter of health or beauty or happiness. It is a cultural structure of power and dominance.
Body fascism, which is the idea that there are good/moral bodies and bad/immoral bodies, is a feature of all nationalist and fascist projects. They need to dehumanise and objectify entire groups of people. They need to manufacture an enemy to justify mistreatment, abuse, war and even genocide. Violence is okay if it is enacted on bodies if they are not white, able, thin, gender-conforming, fertile, and attractive. It’s okay to violate someone’s human rights if their body is bad.
So yes, we strive towards our ideal bodies in an attempt to increase the market value of our body object – but we are also striving to distance ourselves from the “bad bodies”. We seek to become a body object that is “good” and therefore safe from the atrocities that “bad bodies” are subject to.
The Aspirational Self: The commodification of the human subject
It’s not just our bodies that need to have a high market value. Our inner world needs to be marketable too.
Matthew Remski describes the aspirational self as, “the self-one-wants-to-be. Or: the self-one-wants-to-be-seen-as. Or: the self-that-does-not-yet-and-may-never-exist…the aspirational self can be visualized in many forms: spiritual gymnast, mindful citizen, paragon of natural health, guardian of culture, or warrior of religious truth. These forms share the challenge of all forms: they attempt to represent an internal state or intention. But for these forms to socially embody or professionalize the aspirational self, they must be on display. So: if the product of the yoga industry is the aspirational self, the site of its purchase and consumption is performance.”
Depending on the circles you run in, the performance of the aspirational self might mean appearing more feminine, masculine, queer, purposeful, selfish, selfless, assertive, humble, entrepreneurial, embodied, equanimous, sexy or enlightened.
The spiritual marketplace and the hamster wheel of self-development may be the biggest grift of all. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve or grow. However, the aspirational self has us buying into the belief that we can consume our way to wholeness. Becoming who we truly are is always one more yoga class, workshop, festival, or ayahuasca circle away.
Meanwhile, these events must be documented on social media. The spectacle must be fed. In the same way we display our aesthetic selves and attempt to distance ourselves from the “bad bodies”, we must showcase our aspiration selves. We must advertise the cultural, moral and spiritual virtue of our internal state.
The processes of self-branding do not switch off during savasana or a meditation retreat.
Dissatisfaction, Distraction and Alienation
The truth is obvious but also slippery: our consumer habits and self-branding processes will not liberate us from unsatisfying lives or relationships. The individual project of trying to become more marketable is fucking lonely. Not only have we become consumer-citizens, we are also full-time brand managers of ourselves. Worse still, the images we produce and performances we project have become severed from the profound reality of ourselves. Just as we are alienated from others, we have become alienated from ourselves.
Finally, the interminable project of self-branding keeps us distracted from the consequences of predatory capitalism and its mandates of exploitation, commodification and continuous consumption. We are so engaged in our own self-commodification that we fail to consider the human and non-human bodies that are being scapegoated, exploited, polluted, and sucked dry to perpetuate our all-consuming culture.
Of course, I am not immune from the project of self-branding. Even this article will form a part of my online brand and act as a performance of my politics. Undoubtedly, I will continue to consume products and services in an attempt to become a more attractive human object and a more virtuous human subject.
The material and ideological traps of consumer capitalism are well-fortified. The spectacle is entrancing and we can’t buy our way out of it. We need to grapple with the false promises and real consequences of this global system and culture of commodification and consumption.
In the words of Naomi Klein,
What aren’t we building when we are building our brands?
References and Resources
Simulacra and Simulation – book by Jean Baudrillard
The Century of the Self – documentary series by Adam Curtis
The Society of the Spectacle – book by Guy Debord
‘All the better to eat you with!’ The contribution of consumer culture to the rise of predatory capitalism – article by Paul Kennedy
Doppelganger – book by Naomi Klein
You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People – book by Aubrey Gordon
Yogaland is anxious because it is an industry with a product that may not exist – article by Matthew Remski