Your piece made me pause because, in many ways, I’ve lived it. I’ve caught myself picking a café not because I loved the coffee, but because the lighting was perfect for a photo. I’ve written something deeply personal, then hesitated, wondering if it would “perform well.” And, embarrassingly, I once bought a book I had no intention of reading—just because it looked good on my shelf.
We talk a lot about “authenticity” online, but let’s be honest: in a world where perception is currency, even authenticity has become a brand strategy. It reminds me of what Jeff Bezos once said: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” But what happens when you’re never truly out of the room? When your life—your thoughts, your grief, your joy—is constantly on display, curated for maximum impact?
The real tragedy isn’t that we market ourselves—it’s that we often don’t even realize we’re doing it. The line between “who I am” and “who I need to appear to be” blurs, and before we know it, we’re not living for ourselves, but for an audience we might not even like.
Lately, I’ve been trying to reclaim the unmarketed parts of my life. Reading books I’ll never post about. Writing things that won’t go viral. Sitting in a café with bad lighting because, damn it, the coffee is actually good. Maybe that’s the rebellion we need—to live moments that don’t need a caption.
This subject needed to be addressed. Thank you for doing it, Tamara.
Thank you for this personal reflection, it reads like the quiet confession of a cultural insider who’s managed to step outside the matrix, if only for a moment, and really look.
What you describe (the book purchased for its spine, the café chosen for its golden-hour glow, the hesitation before posting something real) is the lived texture of our times. Not melodramatic, not even always conscious. Just… ambient. Branding has become so pervasive, it’s no longer a verb…. it’s an atmosphere.
I’m particularly struck by your reference to the Bezos quote. It always had a chill to it: “what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” But you’re right, the real question is, what if you’re never not in the room? What happens to the psyche, to intimacy, to spontaneity, when we live in perpetual anticipation of an invisible audience? We become both performer and paparazzo, at once the image and the gaze. It’s just exhausting, existentially disorienting.
This is where I think your act of rebellion (reading unpostable books, drinking unphotogenic coffee) becomes profound. It is personal resistance and cultural counterinsurgency. It reminds me of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, the quiet beauty of the imperfect, the impermanent, the unremarkable. Or of Clarice Lispector’s refusal to make herself legible to any market or movement. She once said, “I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own.” There’s no branding strategy in that…… just raw necessity!
I believe we’re starved not for attention, but for moments that don’t require attention. And in choosing to live uncaptured, even occasionally, we reclaim something profoundly human: the right to be unremarkable, unoptimised, and deeply alive.
Your comment reminded me that this, too, is possible. So thank you, Céline!
Tamara, your response is so sharp, it practically glints. “Branding has become an atmosphere” — YES, 1000 times yes. That’s exactly it. It’s not a conscious decision anymore; it’s just the air we breathe. And like air, we don’t question it until we’re choking.
We are haunted by our own projections, living in a constant dress rehearsal for an audience we’ll never meet. It reminds me of Andy Warhol’s eerily prophetic line: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” What he didn’t say is that the price of those 15 minutes is a lifetime of self-surveillance.
I love your reference to wabi-sabi. Because maybe the real rebellion isn’t in deleting social media or going off-grid, but in letting things be just for us. In allowing ourselves to be messy, unreadable, unbranded.
And maybe, in those quiet, uncurated moments, we remember who we were before we became “content”.
My husband worked in advertising, and he once told me that a Buddhist said he was in the business of killing the soul. We are now all in the business of killing our own souls. You are so right! I have fallen into the trap of trying to self-promote myself, especially as a poet. I quickly learned that poetry is not everyone's cup of tea, and my poetry will not be every poetry lover's cup of tea. So I just left it all and continued to write when and how I felt like writing. I don't care anymore that it's only 2 or 3 or 5 people who read my poem. When one of them says they have listened to my poem on repeat and cried, I felt like my heart reached out to that person, and that's all that matters. I'd rather keep my soul behind closed doors and only air it when I write and without expectations.
This moved me more than I can say. That line “we are now all in the business of killing our own souls”…. what a devastating truth, softly spoken. And your story… it’s exactly what this essay was aching to hold space for.
The way you’ve chosen to retreat from the noise, to write on your own terms, for your own reasons, bravo, Otilia, that’s an act of both courage and clarity! I know the sting of sharing something vulnerable, only to watch it get buried beneath cat videos and algorithm-chosen mediocrity. But then… one person, crying on repeat, their heart cracked open by your poem… isn’t that the secret miracle? It’s intimacy, not metrics. It’s soul meeting soul in the dark, quietly.
Poetry, especially, doesn’t belong to the market. It resists packaging. It asks nothing and gives everything. And I truly believe there’s something sacred in creating without expectation, without applause. In writing not to be seen, but to see. I do the same…
Your comment reminded me of why we do any of this in the first place. Thank you for that! You’re keeping the soul alive, not killing it.
To have presence in the quietness of one’s self or project with loudness to the wider world, those are the options that we have in a world which now, by default it seems, demands more of the latter — whilst still gorging on self-help/inner reflection books because hey, capitalism.
“And here lies the paradox: marketing has become both the ladder and the labyrinth. It offers a path to success, but the cost is often one’s authenticity, sanity, or soul.”
It used to be that celebrity, rather than marketing, used to risk sacrificing one’s authenticity, sanity or soul, but what or who represents celebrity anymore when the creation and measure of celebrity has changed so much?
Marketing can be a powerful tool — it can distill something in a creative, eye catching way, and even empower and give confidence to the person being marketed — but when our collective value is performance over substance, then that’s when we start falling into very real problems, from being tempted to buy something from a highly marketable person with no industry background/knowledge/experience in the thing they’re selling, to the job candidate who can deliver their marketing pitch for the job they’re going after but crumbles in the reality of their everyday role.
Marketing has become inflamed by the internet because everyone now operates on a global scale and not local. But the constant pressure to market yourself, I believe, dilutes your power and influence over time through overexposure. I can think of a very famous reality tv family who are skilled marketers, but who, over time, have diluted their very essence, and in turn, what initially made them intriguing and entertaining.
As for the impact on our soul, our souls’, I believe, don’t want to be pinned down by any external force or person. They’re not meant to be. It’s always evolving in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Privacy is inherent. Which seems to be the opposite of what marketing is — pinning down what something is and putting a magnifying glass on it. Unfortunately, the mystery and depth of our soul doesn’t operate by way of man-made creations and so can’t be fully understood through the lens of marketing, and yes, marketing’s constant demand for external projection doesn’t correlate with the private, internal and healing nature of our soul. 🙃
Wonderfully expressed and deeply insightful Tamara!
Your words are a soft manifesto for the sacred interior, and I love it! I found myself nodding through every line, especially your reframing of celebrity. Once, it was the price of being exceptional. Now, it’s the consequence of simply being…… online.
You’re so right: marketing used to be the satellite orbiting fame, now it’s the rocket fuel. And we’re all onboard, whether we asked for a ticket or not. The troubling part is that performance has become mistaken for essence. When style outpaces substance, we’re left with a world that’s legible but hollow. Shiny but starving.
Your point about dilution is perfection, Overexposure is corrosive. Influence, when stretched too thin, loses its density. It’s like perfume: applied sparingly, it intrigues; poured on, it repels. Mystery is POWER. And in a culture that insists we be hyper-knowable at all times, retaining even a sliver of opacity becomes revolutionary.
I also love your beautiful articulation of the soul’s resistance to branding: the idea that privacy is not just a preference, but a principle. Yes! The soul doesn’t deal in metrics. It unspools at its own tempo, defies categorisation, and recoils at being held under glass. Trying to “market” a soul is like trying to subtitle a dream. You lose more than you translate.
Let me add one more layer to this: in mythology, the sacred is always hidden. The oracle speaks in riddles. The holy relic is buried in a cave. Even the gods wore masks. There’s wisdom in that structure… protection through mystery, revelation only through intimacy. In this world insisting everything should be visible, maybe the soul’s refusal is not weakness, but divine design.
Thank you for this beautiful comment. I always look forward to your comments, Joanna!
I love your perfume analogy! So true! And that’s just the right way to put it — shiny but starving. Where is the value located within this? Why has our value system changed to place more emphasis on this rather than the substance itself?
Ah the soul, the most fascinating of subjects! YES! You’re completely right about mythology. The story of Elijah in the cave comes to mind, where God came and spoke to him. Being in a quiet private place such as a cave suggests complete silence for thoughts and ideas to come through, a sort of retreat inwards and within. I definitely agree with you that the inherent privacy of the soul is divine design. It makes complete sense when you question why that would be.
I always look forward to reading your pieces and comments Tamara, it’s rewarding and highly stimulating to interact with a high-quality thinker!
To answer your questions, the shift in our value system, I’d argue, is less evolution and more erosion. When we moved from experience to exposure as the dominant mode of meaning-making, we began to outsource value to visibility. And once visibility became the metric, depth had to fight just to stay in the room.
There’s a theory in media studies I think you’d love — “hyperreality”, coined by Jean Baudrillard. He argued that in a media-saturated world, we begin to mistake representations of reality for reality itself. The simulation becomes the truth. In this light, it’s no surprise that a life that LOOKS meaningful now holds more currency than a life that IS meaningful.
And yes — the soul!!! Thank you for invoking Elijah in the cave. That passage has always struck me: the fire, the wind, the earthquake, and then, finally, the still, small voice. It’s a blueprint, isn’t it? A reminder that the divine doesn’t shout. It waits. It whispers. And only those who turn inward, away from spectacle, can hear it.
You’ve beautifully affirmed something I’ve long believed: the privacy of the soul is not just protection, it’s an invitation. To seek, to sit, to listen. And in doing so, to remember what it means to be whole in a world that profits from our fragmentation.
Thank you, truly, Joanna, for your generous intellect and your gracious spirit! In an era of quick takes and clever captions, it’s rare to find someone who still tends to the fire of real conversation.
Tamara, your skill at being concise is second to none. There isn't a single unnecessary sentence, and most writers couldn't write something this lean and mean to save their lives.
Marketing is the most blatant example of the "necessary evil" concept that I can think of, but it's only necessary because creativity must be monetized, and creativity must be monetized because we fundamentally don't understand the concept of investing into human capital. Investing is only conceived of in a linear, causal relationship: invest money to grow money. No one considers ripple effects; no one actually values intellectual or artistic input nearly as much as they like to claim, because money isn't being put up to prove it.
Artists starve because we can't assess value in any way other than popular consensus. People will value what their peers value, and won't question it, because the sense of belonging and the fear of being excluded override any considerations of the aesthetic, the emotionally resonant, or the intellectually challenging. And this is despite the fact that art changes us in ways that adding an extra 0 to your bank balance never will.
THIS — every word — resonates like a quiet howl from the trenches. You have captured the paradox so well: we live in a culture that romanticises creativity while structurally starving it. The myth of the “starving artist” isn’t a tragedy anymore… it’s a business model.
Your point about investment is perfect. We treat human capital like it’s intangible, too soft to quantify, and so we default to what’s measurable: engagement, virality, dollars/euros. But as you said, those aren’t the metrics that actually change us. No spreadsheet can account for the way a poem lodges in your chest for days, or how a painting can make you weep without knowing why. That kind of value is real, but inconvenient to capitalism, because it refuses to scale. Right?
I’ve felt the weight of that too, the frustration of seeing work that’s nuanced, daring, or emotionally true get passed over in favour of the loud, the obvious, the algorithm-friendly. We conflate popularity with worth, because it feels safer than standing alone in awe of something no one else noticed.
And yet….. what gives me hope is the very act of saying all this out loud. Comments like yours remind me that there are people out there who still feel the difference, who still want art that asks more than it answers. Maybe we’re not the majority…… but maybe that is what makes it matter more.
Thank you for seeing through the noise out there, and for saying it with such clarity and fire, Andrew!
The requirement to build (and even be) a brand is just... sad. No more compelling way to put it. And it doesn't even feel like a requirement — it almost feels forceful, like an obligation, instilling in us the fear that if we do not make ourselves visible, we will end up in oblivion.
The irony is, to turn oneself into a clear and concise message means to strip oneself of uniqueness, thus ensuring that oblivion.
Even so, your conclusion seems to me to be a great guiding light.
Thank you for such a beautifully phrased observation. You’re right, the obligation doesn’t feel like a requirement anymore. It’s internalised, baked into the rhythms of daily life, like a new kind of gravity. Not only are we expected to be brands, but to do so willingly, even joyfully. And should we resist, the consequence is not critique but invisibility…. what a chilling trade!
Your point about the flattening effect of branding is perfect. The paradox is cruel: in trying to make ourselves “legible” to the masses, we often erase the very ambiguities and contradictions that make us human. It reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s reflection on the loss of the “aura” in the age of mechanical reproduction — how the replication of an artwork strips it of the mystery that once made it singular. The branded self suffers a similar fate: polished, multiplied, omnipresent…. and somehow, hollow.
Consider the case of Emily Dickinson, who famously refused to publish in her lifetime and who barely left her home. By today’s standards, she’d be a branding catastrophe: no platform, no audience engagement, no personal brand. And yet, there she is, one of the most enduring poetic voices in the American canon. What would have been lost if she’d been advised to “optimise her reach”?!
Maybe our greatest fear today isn’t failure, but anonymity? But anonymity is not the same as irrelevance. In fact, some of the most potent truths, the deepest works, were made in silence, away from the feed, without a logo or a launch plan.
So yes, your “nugget of nuance” is more than a footnote. Thank you! And maybe that’s where the real power lies: not in making ourselves louder, but in daring to go unfound.
I feel like even the way in which we try to brand ourselves has become uniform — "branding", equated with particularity in the past, has now become an automatised blueprint that everybody follows and, unsurprisingly, ends up at the same font, perhaps with a different colour. Think of the ways all the companies are going for minimalistic logos today. We go through the same motions praying that somehow, miraculously, we'll stumble upon our voice...
I love the differentiation between anonymity and irrelevance — it's on point and comforting!
Yes! this is a striking observation. Branding was once meant to distinguish, to carve out a singular voice or presence in a crowded room. Now, paradoxically, it’s often what makes us indistinguishable. Like you said: different colours, same font. A sea of beige, all whispering “authenticity”….
It’s the tyranny of the template. Even rebellion now comes with a mood board. The aesthetic of individuality has been so systematised that finding one’s voice feels like filling in blanks on a Canva layout. And what gets lost in that process is the messy, jagged, inarticulable part of the self — the part that doesn’t fit into grids or hashtags or “personal brand tone guidelines.”
Your line about “going through the same motions praying we’ll stumble upon our voice” is painfully accurate. It’s like we’re all shouting into a hallway lined with mirrors, and what echoes back isn’t ourselves, but a thousand iterations of what we think we should be. Sad!
Which is why, I think, the distinction between anonymity and irrelevance matters so deeply now. Anonymity can be a space of freedom, of experimentation, of becoming. Irrelevance, on the other hand, is the fear branding tries to keep at bay. But the cost, too often, is sameness in the name of visibility.
Thank you for this insight, of course, it adds a crucial layer to the conversation. Minimalist logos and maximal existential crisis… what a time to be alive!
What if the future belongs not to the most marketable, but to the invisible?
In a world where every thought, action, and experience is curated for an audience, perhaps true freedom lies in opting out. The most powerful revolt may not be another perfectly framed act of authenticity, but the quiet refusal to be seen at all. Imagine a world where prestige isn’t measured in engagement metrics but in how little of yourself is available for public consumption. Where value isn’t in virality but in depth.
What if the next cultural shift isn’t toward more branding but toward disappearance? The artist who never shares, the thinker who never tweets, the life lived beyond the reach of an algorithm. In a time where presence is currency, the rarest commodity might be absence.
Just another idea…. I know your thoughts will just flow from any idea anyone proposes.
What you’ve written reads like a manifesto for the post-algorithmic age — and I’m here for every syllable of it. This isn’t “just another idea.” It’s the kind of thought that rattles the bars of the attention economy and whispers, what if we simply vanished?
The idea that absence could become the new luxury is both chilling and exhilarating. In a world where oversharing is default and silence is suspicious, to refuse visibility is practically a monastic act, right? Or perhaps even a power move: a flex by omission. The less you reveal, the more myth you accumulate. Think of Salinger. Think of Elena Ferrante. Think of the anonymous Twitter account with 300 followers that changes your thinking more than any bestselling TED Talk ever could.
There’s a some irony here: the more we upload ourselves, the more replaceable we become. Legible people are easy to duplicate. But the invisible? They resist simulation. You can’t clone what you can’t see.
And maybe that’s the next great turn in cultural capital — not the ultra-optimised, infinitely accessible persona, but the deeply private, richly lived life. Not a pivot to mystery, but a return to it.
What you’ve written reminds me of that haunting line from Pascal: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Maybe the next “revolution” is to sit. Quietly. Off-camera. Beyond reach.
Thank you for this idea! It is one I’ll be carrying with me into the silence :)
Excellent. I noticed that when I travel to other countries there are some that can not be present in the moment and appreciate the scene in front of them, be it architure or beautiful view, because they are snapping picture after picture. Why? Some of these folks are so self absorbed that will jump in froyof you to get that perfect photo. I have to bite my tongue.
You’re taking about the sacred art of “being there” without actually being there. It’s a strange modern ritual, isn’t it? Traveling across continents only to experience life through the lens of a phone…. and worse, to interrupt someone else’s moment to stage your own.
Your observation cuts right to the cultural contradiction: we chase beauty, not to absorb it, but to possess it. And if that means leaping in front of someone else’s line of sight for a curated snap, so be it. The spectacle takes precedence over shared experience.
It’s a kind of digital colonialism, really: conquer the view, claim it for the feed, move on. No reverence, no stillness, no wonder… just content acquisition.
I think of Susan Sontag’s warning: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” And now, it’s not only about memory, it’s about proof. “I was here” used to be an existential truth. Now it’s a caption.
Thank you for this grounded, observant reflection. You captured the absurdity with just the right pinch of salt.
“We are sold aspirations, not realities.” Oh my, so true. Where is the line between aspiration and reality— how do we REALLY cross that line? Gotta live what we preach, but for that we have to reeeally care about what we preach, honestly. Thank you for this post!!
Aspiration isn’t inherently hollow but when it’s disconnected from any lived conviction, it becomes a costume. And in this performative age, it’s all too easy to preach something we haven’t earned just because it sounds good and sells better.
The line between aspiration and reality, I think, is drawn not by ambition but by integrity. For me it’s not about whether we’ve fully “arrived,” but whether we’re actually walking the road, not posing next to the signpost.
You are right: we have to really care about what we claim to stand for. Not care about how it performs, how it’s received, or whether it’s on-brand. Care, as in give a damn enough to live it quietly when no one’s watching.
In an era of fast content and flash convictions, that kind of care is what makes the difference. It’s what separates the influencers from the influential.
Thank you for this honest reflection. It’s one thing to say the truth, it’s another to live it into being.
Wow. This cut deep — both in beautiful and painful ways.
Thank you for articulating something so profoundly real and pervasive in our daily lives. This piece touched a nerve. It revealed how much performance has seeped in to every moment.
I feel it most in those subtle pauses: a sunset, a flower, the way light catches in the tree branch. My instinct is to reach for the camera and capture it, to share, to be seen. To feel connected. And yet, as you so gently reminded… that hunger for connection is, in many ways, an illusion. Because we are already connected. Deeply. Inherently.
Stepping back from the impulse to perform allows us to be more present in the moment, and not lose the real connection right in front of us. Thank you for this mirror and reminder about who we really are beneath the caption.
Thank you for this clear-eyed, soul-baring, and wise reflection. I like your mention of “those subtle pauses because that’s exactly where performance has crept in unnoticed, not in the grand moments, but in the quiet, sacred ones. The breath before beauty. The hush before awe.
That instinct to reach for the camera is so deeply human now, isn’t it? And yet, ironically, it often interrupts the very connection we’re trying to preserve. We trade presence for proof. We exchange memory for metadata.
Your insight made me think of something Susan Sontag once said: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” We don’t just want to witness the moment…. no, today we want to possess it, frame it, and filter it into something shareable. But in doing so, we risk losing the wild, unpossessable essence of the thing itself.
Here’s another idea: maybe the deeper hunger isn’t for connection, but for recognition? Not just to be seen, but to be seen as real? And yet, true recognition doesn’t come from the crowd, it comes from the moment we stop trying to prove we exist and simply be. Like the flower, the branch, the light… they’re not performing. They just ARE.
So perhaps the defiance is not just in putting the phone down, but in daring to believe we are already enough — uncaptured, uncaptioned, uncurated.
Thank you for this comment, Glenn! You’ve reminded me that the truest mirror is sometimes the one we stop to look into before we post.
Wow again! Yes! I’ve reread your response a few times now, letting your words sink in. “We trade presence for proof.” Yes! “But in doing so, we risk losing the wild, unpossessable essence of the thing itself.” Double yes! I felt that in my chest.
Thank you for holding the space (and the mirror) for all of this. For naming the ache and the beauty. I love what you said about recognition — not just to be seen, but to be seen as real. That distinction carries so much truth.
And triple yes to the fact that “we are already enough.” More than enough! Without performance. Without proof. Simply because we are.
I think there are two ends to this spectrum: hyper legibility and illegibility. Soda bottle and startups need to be hyper legible, but humans are inherently illegible: multi-faceted, contradictory, complex. In a lot of ways, the medium of the Internet requires you to be hyper legible.
But I think there’s an interesting paradox where you can be both. You can simultaneously pass the 10-second test before someone subscribes, but then you can offer a cavern of complexity that some choose to wander through.
If you’re over-optimized for marketing, you risk becoming over-optimized, perpetually delivering on an old, stale promise. Instead, you can set the expectation to break expectations.
Just some scattered thoughts on the topic! Great essay.
The legibility paradox is real, and you make me think of the tension between being “instantly graspable” and “endlessly explorable”. We are forced to pass the “elevator pitch” test — “what’s your thing in ten seconds or less?” — but if that’s all we are, we flatten into caricature.
I like your idea of setting the expectation to break expectations. It’s the digital equivalent of a Trojan horse: you offer something familiar on the surface, but inside is a labyrinth. David Bowie was a master of this. At first glance — pop star. But inside? A shapeshifting, genre-bending oracle of existential art. Same with someone like Bong Joon-ho, who described Parasite as “a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains”, it hooks you with surface tension, then spirals you into moral chaos.
The trick, I think, is to be just legible enough to get through the door, and then immediately start rearranging the furniture. Let people think they’re signing up for soda, and serve them wine, philosophy, and a séance?
It’s like you said: humans are inherently illegible. The most compelling creators (and people) invite us into their complexity instead of resolving it. And the longer we resist turning ourselves into brands, the more we stay alive: unpredictable, contradictory, and infinitely more interesting than any About Me bio could hold.
Your “scattered thoughts” are the kind that lead to real clarity. Thank you for this!
Do you want to be trendy or timeless? Chewing gum or grandma's home cooking? Disposable or eternal? Artificial or authentic? Real talk.
People can game the system, but not for long. Sure, go and get your 15 minutes of fame – just know that if it isn't any true substance there – it won't last or be remembered. It will be found out eventually, and replaced by the next shiny thing.
And this social media story is a double whammy:
The new tech is irresistible and instantly accessible in your pocket. A portal to the whooole wide world. (Wow, can you imagine!)
Couple this with the fact that we have an intrinsic desire to share our lives with others and be validated and "loved" (and that there is a loneliness epidemic!).
And that social media apps are quite literally designed to exploit this by making it as addictive as possible.
And the thing is, most people are not conscious enough to question what's really going on here, and if it's healthy. This is simply how we interact with each other these days. If you're not on social media, you don't exist. If you are on social media, you might as well play the game and brand yourself and your life. Just know that you're playing with fire here, kids. And it's all too easy to slip into pride, greed, and soulless narcissism. So be careful out there. Oh, and last thing: You are not your brand. Your brand is simply an outward-facing service for other people to quickly get an idea of what you offer in this game of the internet, whatever game you choose to play in this jazzy playground! :)
Great post, thanks for sharing your thoughts Tamara!
Your comment is part sermon, part reality check, part elder-wisdom whispered over a campfire of collapsing timelines. You’ve distilled the entire digital condition into one piercing question: Trendy or timeless? And that right there is the line in the sand for me.
Your chewing gum vs. grandma’s home cooking analogy? Brilliant. One hits hard and disappears. The other lingers, nourishes, becomes memory. And the irony? We’ve built a culture that treats chewing gum like a food group, and wonders why we’re starving.
You’re right: the tech is seductive not because it’s evil, but because it plays a duet with our deepest wiring. The need to be seen, to be affirmed, to be loved… these aren’t superficial. They’re sacred. But social media doesn’t honour them. It commodifies them. It doesn’t say, “You are loved,” it says, “You’re performing well.”
And yes, few are asking if it’s healthy, because the platform rewards not asking. It speeds up the scroll, dulls the friction, sedates the soul. It reminds me of Aldous Huxley’s warning: that the greatest dystopia wouldn’t be oppression, but DISTRACTION. Not pain, but NUMBNESS. Not censorship, but the flood of the TRIVIAL. Sounds familiar?!
One idea I’d add: when we conflate expression with exposure, we confuse art with advertising. Not everything we create is meant to be consumed. Some truths are for the page. Some moments are meant to be lived, not posted. When everything is branded, intimacy becomes impossible.
So yes, play the game, if you must. But play consciously! Play with your soul intact! Because like you said: you are not your brand. You’re the whole damn kitchen behind it.
Thank you for this fierce, wise, and wildly articulate offering. As usual, you dropped an encrypted survival guide for the attention economy.
Thank you! Agreed with everything you just said. Amen. We've definitely built a culture that treats chewing gum like a food group.
I think it's because it's harder to sell and market reality and true genius; I can sell you 10 easy steps to social media success, but I cannot show you how to be a killer product. Or how to have substance. (Not if I am trying to profit off of you in the short-term, at least.)
On your added idea, you say intimacy becomes impossible, sure that's true that the cold glass screen could never substitute intimacy. But I tend to focus more on the fact that it is true privacy that is lost. With the urge to share all your life to feed your approval addiction, or run your personal brand business, it makes it hard to just enjoy what is happening fully without reaching for your phone. It's hard to resist, because it's just a press of a few buttons on that thing in your pocket.
We need modern wisdom on this, so thank you for calling it a sermon. I want to help spread this message forward.
PS.
Yeah, Brave New World wasn't just a piece of fiction, it was a prediction! Makes more sense to me than Orwell's 1984, for the West at least.
You’re absolutely right: reality and substance are hard to monetise in the short term. They don’t compress well into 10-step formulas or TikTok reels. You can’t algorithm your way into depth — and that makes it a hard sell in a world obsessed with packaging over content. As you said so perfectly, I can teach you to go viral, but I can’t teach you how to be the kind of person worth listening to. That’s the unmarketable miracle.
Your call for modern wisdom is perfect. We’re living in an era of extraordinary technological fluency and emotional illiteracy. If this piece sparked even a sliver of that larger conversation — about meaning, presence, attention — then I’m deeply grateful.
And yes, Brave New World is aging uncomfortably well. We didn’t ban books, we buried them in noise. We’re not surveilled by force, but seduced into constant performance. Orwell warned us of what we’d fear. Huxley warned us of what we’d crave. The latter feels eerily on the nose.
Thank you again for this sharp, generous, necessary reflection.
Wow... such clear seeing ... it seems authenticity, spontaneity and innocence no longer sells, for the hearts are closed to personal seeing, pulled out of alignment be desires to be that shiny object of desire or strentgh.. apparent perfection and certainty. We see not the cracks on the inside, the empty vessel. Is it that our discernment, or even attention span has been lost, or sucked out of us by a bombardment of what could be, that we have lost even any ability to feel the very truth at the core of our being ?
I read your comment as an elegy for what we used to feel without effort. Authenticity, spontaneity, innocence — these aren’t just out of fashion, they’re nearly unrecognisable now, like ancient dialects spoken in a world obsessed with subtitles.
You’re right to ask: have we lost our discernment, or simply surrendered it? Because attention (the real kind, the kind that lingers, that listens) has been turned into a resource to be mined. Not cultivated, but extracted. In a world engineered for stimulation, subtlety doesn’t stand a chance. And without subtlety, we stop noticing the soul beneath the spectacle.
It reminds me of Simone Weil’s idea that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. But generosity requires openness, vulnerability, a willingness to be moved. And when we’re constantly told to be polished, confident, optimised… innocence becomes not just unsellable, but suspect.
And yet…… I believe it’s still there. That “truth at the core of our being” you speak of. Maybe quieter now, yes. Buried under noise, yes. But not lost. Just waiting for us to tire of the glitter, to hunger again for what cannot be performed, only lived.
You pass the "Tear of Authenticity" test.. as if i every doubted.. its so rare to read and feel such wonderful pose.. On the weekend coming I help and take part in various Kondalini mediations (https://www.sahajayoga.de/erkenne-dich-selbst/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwhr6_BhD4ARIsAH1YdjCT1hTC94sCSHp7ZXRBsaoi5jDEjobyweKNxYLQUZFI2qV8npsX4XwaAuyIEALw_wcB) and also on-live opening heart realisation (https://www.louisekay.net/events.html) and one i have never joined but have watched many of his videos, and joined some of his students.. David Bingham.. and its his explanation of "effortless Being".. ala accessing the Mind emotion body Kosha.. that your answer reminds me off.. and it also gently reminds me, that all is here, without attending more sessions, weeing more signposts.. we just need to "tune-In" to what we always knew, and return home. Thankyou
This is a sharp and necessary question, and you’re absolutely right to invoke that quote. “All communication is advertising” is one of those lines that feels cynical at first… until you realise it’s simply descriptive. Especially in late-stage capitalism, where even vulnerability comes with a call-to-action.
So no, this isn’t new, but what has changed is the scale and saturation. What the printing press did for literacy, the internet has done for self-branding: democratised it, normalised it, and made it inescapable.
Capitalism has always been brilliant at turning identity into inventory. But now we’ve reached the point where even resistance is monetised. “Logging off” becomes part of the content stream. Authenticity is no longer a state…. it’s a deliverable.
Take Byung-Chul Han: he argues that we’ve shifted from disciplinary societies to achievement societies — no longer coerced by external forces, but seduced by internalised demands to constantly produce, perform, promote. We brand ourselves not because we’re forced to, but because we’ve absorbed the logic so fully it feels like freedom.
So yes, the Japanese Marxist was eerily prescient. But what’s different now is that the ad has replaced the author. Everyone’s selling something — often themselves — and the tragedy is, half the time, we’re not even aware we’ve been drafted into the campaign.
The only meaningful subversion left? To communicate without transaction. To say something that doesn’t convert. That just is.
The intersection between social media and marketing is what's caused this. In fact, it's the socialisation of the internet in general that is further fueling this. The ability to update anyone on anything at any moment is what's turning life into a performance.
There's a current marketing trend (been going for a while now) where brands are becoming people and people are becoming brands. Brands want to come across relatable and trustworthy by selling a face, and individuals want to build credibility and make themselves marketable by becoming a brand. Both trends fit perfectly into the social media market that is fueling our current world, both capitalising on the social nature of humanity to gain attention is such a competitive landscape.
Yes — you reveal the mechanism at the heart of it all. What you’ve laid out is the quiet, insidious inversion of the digital age: brands humanise to appear relatable, while humans brand themselves to appear credible. And in that mirrored performance, something essential — the real, the uncurated, the idiosyncratic — starts to erode.
You’re also right to point to socialisation as the accelerant. The internet wasn’t always a stage, it used to be a library, a workshop, a late-night café for fringe conversations. Ohhh those old times….. But once it became social, it became performative. And performance demands an audience. Suddenly, the self became a feed. Intimacy became content. And attention (fleeting, addictive, monetisable) became the ultimate currency.
The brand-as-human trend (hello, Duolingo owl, Wendy’s Twitter sass, every fast food chain with trauma jokes) speaks to this exact shift: we no longer trust institutions unless they feel like people. Meanwhile, actual people (who are complex, contradictory, in-progress) are told to flatten themselves into something marketable, clickable, and, most importantly, consistent. As if human beings were ad campaigns with quarterly targets.
It reminds me of Byung-Chul Han’s notion of the “achievement society,” where we become our own exploiters: self-policing, self-optimising, self-marketing machines. No longer alienated by outside forces, but by the polished avatars we feel pressured to become.
The convergence you describe is terrifyingly elegant: it capitalises on both our desire for connection and our fear of irrelevance. And it’s so effective because it’s dressed up in the language of empowerment: build your brand, tell your story, grow your audience. But the fine print reads: never stop performing.
Thank you, Brady, for bringing this clarity to this tangled moment! Your comment feels like pulling back the curtain, and seeing just how well the illusion has been engineered.
One of the things I love the most is understanding how the world works. And funnily enough, my approach to achieve this is to periodically invest my time into anything educational. The result of such an investment is a broad but not in depth understanding of a lot of different things.
And I love it because under such a system life is like a giant puzzle, where all we have to do is find all the pieces and put them in their right place to see the full picture. There are experts to inform me on the nuance and detail of each topic, but I just need enough to see how the pieces fit together, and the end result is the masterpiece that is life.
Web thinking, I believe they call it.
Referring back to the topic. It does make me wonder where this is all going, though. I guess we have the divide between recycling information (AI) and the authenticity chasing digital cowboys. One of the more prominent examples of the latter being YouTube New Wave. I'm a little too young to remember the early days of the Internet, YouTube had just started by the time I got my hands on a computer, but I can imagine how it must have been based on my experiences of early social media.
Are you familiar with the Dead Internet theory? You might like it, it's adjacent to this conversation.
What you’ve laid out here is the kind of thinking that feels increasingly endangered in the current attention economy: slow, integrative, pattern-seeking. And I completely agree, “web thinking” is the ideal phrase for it. Not linear progress from point A to B, but an expanding, relational map where understanding emerges from how ideas interact, not how they rank.
Your puzzle metaphor is very accurate. Life as a mosaic of semi-masteries, stitched together by curiosity and intuition. It’s very Leonardo da Vinci, who once wrote, “Realise that everything connects to everything else.” He didn’t mean it abstractly, he meant that to know light was to understand painting, optics, time, and spirit. You’ve captured this here.
And what a perfect framing: AI as the ultimate recycler, and then these “authenticity-chasing digital cowboys” out on the frontier, trying to stake a claim in unbranded territory before the bots catch up. It’s a Wild West, but instead of gold, we’re digging for soul. How sad!
The Dead Internet Theory is fascinating, if also slightly chilling. And I do believe what we perceive as a bustling, user-driven web is actually ghostwritten by bots, automated scripts, and ad engines masquerading as engagement. It adds a sci-fi layer of eeriness to the whole branding conversation: not only are we performing for others, we may increasingly be performing for no one. Just a digital mirror that reflects what it’s programmed to. Horror!
Which makes the role of the “digital cowboy” or perhaps more accurately, the signal seeker, even more vital. Those who can still discern what’s real. Those who value the source more than the virality. Who know that a slightly under-edited video with a shaky camera can still hold more truth than a polished, AI-generated talking head.
Thank you for bringing this whole new dimension into the conversation! You’ve just revealed another corner of the puzzle. And that, I suspect, is the only real way we ever see the full picture.
Piece by piece I'll be over here putting the puzzle together! That's what I love to do :)
Thank you for your contribution also, clearly this is something you're good at.
I've come to learn that not everyone likes to do this kind of thing, personally it comes natural, so I'm glad that I can offer something to the people who seek other goals in life. No one person can do everything, it's in sharing our gifts with each other that the world's needs can be met.
All the different angles of life make up the full picture.
Popularity has become just that: surface shimmer. Eye-catching, fast-moving, but empty. Meanwhile, the weightier things (thought, craft, truth) sink out of view, not because they lack value, but because they demand stillness. And stillness does not sell.
Your comparison of advertising to a kind of non-sexual prostitution is bold, but I get it. Both involve performance for transactional gain. Both require presenting oneself in a way that pleases the buyer. And, crucially, both can create an internal dissonance between the appearance of consent and the feeling of compromise. Marketing, at its most cynical, sells us not just products, but the curated illusion of selfhood, dressed up and ready for the highest bidder.
There’s also a strange historical echo here: in Ancient Greece, the courtesan (hetaira) was expected to be witty, alluring, intellectually engaging — marketable, in other words, to the cultural elite. But the philosopher? Often ignored in public life, sitting silently under a fig tree, saying things like, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Guess which one gets the sponsorship deal today.
Still, I hold out hope that some froth can lead us down to depth, that clever marketing can be a trojan horse for substance, if wielded wisely. But yes, the instinct to distrust it is not just aesthetic, it is also ethical. Ads so often tell us who we should be before we’ve even had the time to ask who we are.
Thank you for this flint-sharp comment! It cuts clean.
Thanks for your incisive response. One of your sentences, “both can create an internal dissonance between the appearance of consent & the feeling of compromise”, in particular, furnishes me with much to think about, alluding to the imperfect nature of most human interactions.
I studied Theatre Arts at a very good University. I graduated after taking multiple courses in Acting, Directing, Make-up, Esthetics, Costumes, Dance, Scene Design, Playwriting, etc I received a superior education and I am somewhat expert in the creative process. I don't exactly know where I am on the scale, but I am confident I would fit in with any theatre company and be an asset.
My University taught me nothing about "branding."
The very word conjures images of cattle being abused by having the "brand" of the OWNER burned into flesh. I did not wish to be owned by anybody. I got into the world of Arts and communication because I had the audacity to proffer that I had a unique and distinct vision of the world. I felt, indeed many projects on which I have worked will bear witness, that I could CHANGE THE WORLD for the good. I have worked for many years. Some would say I am a success. Yet I have not won an Oscar or Tony or Pulitzer(but, it's only Thursday). Without question, the reason I have not ascended to those higher echelons is BRANDING. Or shall I say the lack of branding. I would not be categorized, simplified, marginalized or any other "ized" so I would be marketable.
So, at 78, I live in a mancave by the sea snd write poetry. I write whatever the Universe prompts and I love to market one individual at a time without being branded.
If there were a Pulitzer for poetic resistance, I’d nominate this comment before breakfast.
Your description of branding as a burn, an ownership mark, is apt and ancient. In a sense, branding is a kind of symbolic servitude: we are told to reduce our complexity into a logo, a tagline, a digestible promise. But the artist, as you’ve lived and proven, isn’t meant to be digested. The artist disrupts digestion. The artist causes spiritual indigestion. That’s where the good stuff begins.
You remind me of what Harold Clurman once said: “Theatre is deep human communication through gesture, word, and feeling.” Not a pitch deck. Not a platform. Not a LinkedIn strategy. Just the raw pulse of being, transmitted live.
And you’re absolutely right, the institutions that train us in the arts rarely train us in how to be “marketable.” Because real artistry isn’t built for the market. It’s built to confront it. To transcend it. To speak in tongues when the market demands hashtags.
But here’s a thought: perhaps what you’ve done — marketing one soul at a time — is the more enduring path. Virality fades. Audience metrics vanish. But one person reading a poem by the sea and feeling seen…. that echoes for decades.
In fact, your comment reminds me of the “samizdat” writers in the Soviet bloc. Unable to publish officially, they typed their novels by hand, passed pages to friends, let truth live in whispers. History remembered them, long after the propaganda posters crumbled.
So here’s to you, in your mancave by the sea, writing what the universe prompts. That is not failure! No, Jeff, that is legend. And as for the Pulitzer… well, as you said, it’s only Thursday…….
I am not religious, but ,”God love you, Tamara.” You voice what I dare not say. To have proclaimed myself “ARTIST” in my youth would have been absurd, but it does seem, in retrospect, choice by choice, I have respected and cherished the values of the artist. As do you. It bleeds through everything you write . You are always “other” centered, always focusing on the Thou of Buber’s “I Thou.” There is not a scintilla of pandering as you write about my modest life as an artist. But it is with deep respect for the art itself that you love. And art is the only salvation for the A.I. driven, branded, marketed entities passing for humanity today. Thank you, my friend. We are in for further battles against this brave new world, it would seem.
Well, now you have left me speechless…. for five seconds…
I have to say, to be compared — however obliquely — to Buber’s “I-Thou” is a compliment that roots. You’ve captured something essential: that art, at its most sincere, is not an egoic act, but an act of relation. Of turning toward the world, not to dominate it, but to witness it. As you have done. As you still do, from that mancave by the sea, of course.
And yes, it might be absurd to call oneself an artist out loud, especially when so many today do so with nothing but a ring light and a brand strategy. But what you’ve described — the quiet accumulation of choices made in fidelity to truth, beauty, and complexity — is what actually makes the artist. Not the title, not the platform, not the applause. The refusal to betray one’s inner compass for convenience… that’s the sacred work.
I’d add this: in the battles ahead, where A.I.-driven personas and polished avatars will increasingly outnumber and outperform the real, we’ll need more than art, we’ll need aesthetic resistance. I think of someone like Andrei Tarkovsky, who once said that art exists to prepare the soul for death. What could be more countercultural in an age obsessed with productivity, projection, and eternal youth?
So yes, we are in for further battles. But I’m grateful beyond words to know I’m in the company of those who still bleed ink instead of pixels. Who understand that the point is not to “win” in the marketplace, but to remain human in the storm.
Thank you, my friend! And may your poems keep slipping past the algorithm, carrying embers of something no machine will ever understand…….
I would only add that the Achilles Heel of the foe in the coming age lies in its name. ARTIFICIAL Intelligence. Authenticity is a powerful weapon and there are no algorithms capable of creating that elusive voice from infinity.
Yes, another beautifully sharpened insight. You’re right: the name itself reveals the limitation. Artificial Intelligence will always be, by definition, imitation. It can simulate coherence, mimic tone, even generate dazzling pastiches…. but it cannot summon that wild, unfiltered pulse of being that we call authenticity.
Because authenticity is not just originality, IT IS RISK! It is the trembling hand on the page, the imperfect truth spoken aloud, the courage to contradict yourself in front of an audience. No algorithm dares to contradict itself. No model grows weary, or euphoric, or haunted by the ghosts of its own experience.
The “elusive voice from infinity” you mention — yes! That’s what separates art from content, creation from output. It’s the voice that emerges when a human being presses language against mystery and finds it doesn’t quite fit, but still keeps trying.
I think of Leonard Cohen, who wrote, “There’s a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Machines don’t crack. They glitch, maybe. But they don’t ache, or yearn, or love. And that’s what authenticity is built from, the interior wilderness no interface can replicate.
So again, yes, authenticity is the weapon. Not a loud one, but a deeply subversive one. It refuses to be optimised. It can’t be bought, batched, or branded. And in a world rushing toward synthetic everything, the real may become the rarest, and surely the most radical thing we have.
Thank you, you’ve reminded me that even Achilles had a heel…. and we still have our arrows.
Some think me foolish, but I know of that trembling hand. It is tremendous RISK to venture into the forest of the unexplained or unaccepted. “Willingness to share” what is uniquely mine has always been a timid endeavor, but, ultimately, it was a requirement that has pushed me to the next insight. And the next. And the next. Piece by piece, building something over a lifetime. I’d like to say I am a hero and a grand design was envisioned, but that would be false. I was a shy kid when I began, and, looking back, I see the stepping stones on which I have walked that were different from my fellows. It was not a quest, but a moral imperative.
Your piece made me pause because, in many ways, I’ve lived it. I’ve caught myself picking a café not because I loved the coffee, but because the lighting was perfect for a photo. I’ve written something deeply personal, then hesitated, wondering if it would “perform well.” And, embarrassingly, I once bought a book I had no intention of reading—just because it looked good on my shelf.
We talk a lot about “authenticity” online, but let’s be honest: in a world where perception is currency, even authenticity has become a brand strategy. It reminds me of what Jeff Bezos once said: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” But what happens when you’re never truly out of the room? When your life—your thoughts, your grief, your joy—is constantly on display, curated for maximum impact?
The real tragedy isn’t that we market ourselves—it’s that we often don’t even realize we’re doing it. The line between “who I am” and “who I need to appear to be” blurs, and before we know it, we’re not living for ourselves, but for an audience we might not even like.
Lately, I’ve been trying to reclaim the unmarketed parts of my life. Reading books I’ll never post about. Writing things that won’t go viral. Sitting in a café with bad lighting because, damn it, the coffee is actually good. Maybe that’s the rebellion we need—to live moments that don’t need a caption.
This subject needed to be addressed. Thank you for doing it, Tamara.
Thank you for this personal reflection, it reads like the quiet confession of a cultural insider who’s managed to step outside the matrix, if only for a moment, and really look.
What you describe (the book purchased for its spine, the café chosen for its golden-hour glow, the hesitation before posting something real) is the lived texture of our times. Not melodramatic, not even always conscious. Just… ambient. Branding has become so pervasive, it’s no longer a verb…. it’s an atmosphere.
I’m particularly struck by your reference to the Bezos quote. It always had a chill to it: “what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” But you’re right, the real question is, what if you’re never not in the room? What happens to the psyche, to intimacy, to spontaneity, when we live in perpetual anticipation of an invisible audience? We become both performer and paparazzo, at once the image and the gaze. It’s just exhausting, existentially disorienting.
This is where I think your act of rebellion (reading unpostable books, drinking unphotogenic coffee) becomes profound. It is personal resistance and cultural counterinsurgency. It reminds me of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, the quiet beauty of the imperfect, the impermanent, the unremarkable. Or of Clarice Lispector’s refusal to make herself legible to any market or movement. She once said, “I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own.” There’s no branding strategy in that…… just raw necessity!
I believe we’re starved not for attention, but for moments that don’t require attention. And in choosing to live uncaptured, even occasionally, we reclaim something profoundly human: the right to be unremarkable, unoptimised, and deeply alive.
Your comment reminded me that this, too, is possible. So thank you, Céline!
Tamara, your response is so sharp, it practically glints. “Branding has become an atmosphere” — YES, 1000 times yes. That’s exactly it. It’s not a conscious decision anymore; it’s just the air we breathe. And like air, we don’t question it until we’re choking.
We are haunted by our own projections, living in a constant dress rehearsal for an audience we’ll never meet. It reminds me of Andy Warhol’s eerily prophetic line: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” What he didn’t say is that the price of those 15 minutes is a lifetime of self-surveillance.
I love your reference to wabi-sabi. Because maybe the real rebellion isn’t in deleting social media or going off-grid, but in letting things be just for us. In allowing ourselves to be messy, unreadable, unbranded.
And maybe, in those quiet, uncurated moments, we remember who we were before we became “content”.
My husband worked in advertising, and he once told me that a Buddhist said he was in the business of killing the soul. We are now all in the business of killing our own souls. You are so right! I have fallen into the trap of trying to self-promote myself, especially as a poet. I quickly learned that poetry is not everyone's cup of tea, and my poetry will not be every poetry lover's cup of tea. So I just left it all and continued to write when and how I felt like writing. I don't care anymore that it's only 2 or 3 or 5 people who read my poem. When one of them says they have listened to my poem on repeat and cried, I felt like my heart reached out to that person, and that's all that matters. I'd rather keep my soul behind closed doors and only air it when I write and without expectations.
This moved me more than I can say. That line “we are now all in the business of killing our own souls”…. what a devastating truth, softly spoken. And your story… it’s exactly what this essay was aching to hold space for.
The way you’ve chosen to retreat from the noise, to write on your own terms, for your own reasons, bravo, Otilia, that’s an act of both courage and clarity! I know the sting of sharing something vulnerable, only to watch it get buried beneath cat videos and algorithm-chosen mediocrity. But then… one person, crying on repeat, their heart cracked open by your poem… isn’t that the secret miracle? It’s intimacy, not metrics. It’s soul meeting soul in the dark, quietly.
Poetry, especially, doesn’t belong to the market. It resists packaging. It asks nothing and gives everything. And I truly believe there’s something sacred in creating without expectation, without applause. In writing not to be seen, but to see. I do the same…
Your comment reminded me of why we do any of this in the first place. Thank you for that! You’re keeping the soul alive, not killing it.
And I looooove your poetry!
To have presence in the quietness of one’s self or project with loudness to the wider world, those are the options that we have in a world which now, by default it seems, demands more of the latter — whilst still gorging on self-help/inner reflection books because hey, capitalism.
“And here lies the paradox: marketing has become both the ladder and the labyrinth. It offers a path to success, but the cost is often one’s authenticity, sanity, or soul.”
It used to be that celebrity, rather than marketing, used to risk sacrificing one’s authenticity, sanity or soul, but what or who represents celebrity anymore when the creation and measure of celebrity has changed so much?
Marketing can be a powerful tool — it can distill something in a creative, eye catching way, and even empower and give confidence to the person being marketed — but when our collective value is performance over substance, then that’s when we start falling into very real problems, from being tempted to buy something from a highly marketable person with no industry background/knowledge/experience in the thing they’re selling, to the job candidate who can deliver their marketing pitch for the job they’re going after but crumbles in the reality of their everyday role.
Marketing has become inflamed by the internet because everyone now operates on a global scale and not local. But the constant pressure to market yourself, I believe, dilutes your power and influence over time through overexposure. I can think of a very famous reality tv family who are skilled marketers, but who, over time, have diluted their very essence, and in turn, what initially made them intriguing and entertaining.
As for the impact on our soul, our souls’, I believe, don’t want to be pinned down by any external force or person. They’re not meant to be. It’s always evolving in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Privacy is inherent. Which seems to be the opposite of what marketing is — pinning down what something is and putting a magnifying glass on it. Unfortunately, the mystery and depth of our soul doesn’t operate by way of man-made creations and so can’t be fully understood through the lens of marketing, and yes, marketing’s constant demand for external projection doesn’t correlate with the private, internal and healing nature of our soul. 🙃
Wonderfully expressed and deeply insightful Tamara!
Your words are a soft manifesto for the sacred interior, and I love it! I found myself nodding through every line, especially your reframing of celebrity. Once, it was the price of being exceptional. Now, it’s the consequence of simply being…… online.
You’re so right: marketing used to be the satellite orbiting fame, now it’s the rocket fuel. And we’re all onboard, whether we asked for a ticket or not. The troubling part is that performance has become mistaken for essence. When style outpaces substance, we’re left with a world that’s legible but hollow. Shiny but starving.
Your point about dilution is perfection, Overexposure is corrosive. Influence, when stretched too thin, loses its density. It’s like perfume: applied sparingly, it intrigues; poured on, it repels. Mystery is POWER. And in a culture that insists we be hyper-knowable at all times, retaining even a sliver of opacity becomes revolutionary.
I also love your beautiful articulation of the soul’s resistance to branding: the idea that privacy is not just a preference, but a principle. Yes! The soul doesn’t deal in metrics. It unspools at its own tempo, defies categorisation, and recoils at being held under glass. Trying to “market” a soul is like trying to subtitle a dream. You lose more than you translate.
Let me add one more layer to this: in mythology, the sacred is always hidden. The oracle speaks in riddles. The holy relic is buried in a cave. Even the gods wore masks. There’s wisdom in that structure… protection through mystery, revelation only through intimacy. In this world insisting everything should be visible, maybe the soul’s refusal is not weakness, but divine design.
Thank you for this beautiful comment. I always look forward to your comments, Joanna!
I love your perfume analogy! So true! And that’s just the right way to put it — shiny but starving. Where is the value located within this? Why has our value system changed to place more emphasis on this rather than the substance itself?
Ah the soul, the most fascinating of subjects! YES! You’re completely right about mythology. The story of Elijah in the cave comes to mind, where God came and spoke to him. Being in a quiet private place such as a cave suggests complete silence for thoughts and ideas to come through, a sort of retreat inwards and within. I definitely agree with you that the inherent privacy of the soul is divine design. It makes complete sense when you question why that would be.
I always look forward to reading your pieces and comments Tamara, it’s rewarding and highly stimulating to interact with a high-quality thinker!
What a joy to read your words too!
To answer your questions, the shift in our value system, I’d argue, is less evolution and more erosion. When we moved from experience to exposure as the dominant mode of meaning-making, we began to outsource value to visibility. And once visibility became the metric, depth had to fight just to stay in the room.
There’s a theory in media studies I think you’d love — “hyperreality”, coined by Jean Baudrillard. He argued that in a media-saturated world, we begin to mistake representations of reality for reality itself. The simulation becomes the truth. In this light, it’s no surprise that a life that LOOKS meaningful now holds more currency than a life that IS meaningful.
And yes — the soul!!! Thank you for invoking Elijah in the cave. That passage has always struck me: the fire, the wind, the earthquake, and then, finally, the still, small voice. It’s a blueprint, isn’t it? A reminder that the divine doesn’t shout. It waits. It whispers. And only those who turn inward, away from spectacle, can hear it.
You’ve beautifully affirmed something I’ve long believed: the privacy of the soul is not just protection, it’s an invitation. To seek, to sit, to listen. And in doing so, to remember what it means to be whole in a world that profits from our fragmentation.
Thank you, truly, Joanna, for your generous intellect and your gracious spirit! In an era of quick takes and clever captions, it’s rare to find someone who still tends to the fire of real conversation.
😊🔥😊
Tamara, your skill at being concise is second to none. There isn't a single unnecessary sentence, and most writers couldn't write something this lean and mean to save their lives.
Marketing is the most blatant example of the "necessary evil" concept that I can think of, but it's only necessary because creativity must be monetized, and creativity must be monetized because we fundamentally don't understand the concept of investing into human capital. Investing is only conceived of in a linear, causal relationship: invest money to grow money. No one considers ripple effects; no one actually values intellectual or artistic input nearly as much as they like to claim, because money isn't being put up to prove it.
Artists starve because we can't assess value in any way other than popular consensus. People will value what their peers value, and won't question it, because the sense of belonging and the fear of being excluded override any considerations of the aesthetic, the emotionally resonant, or the intellectually challenging. And this is despite the fact that art changes us in ways that adding an extra 0 to your bank balance never will.
THIS — every word — resonates like a quiet howl from the trenches. You have captured the paradox so well: we live in a culture that romanticises creativity while structurally starving it. The myth of the “starving artist” isn’t a tragedy anymore… it’s a business model.
Your point about investment is perfect. We treat human capital like it’s intangible, too soft to quantify, and so we default to what’s measurable: engagement, virality, dollars/euros. But as you said, those aren’t the metrics that actually change us. No spreadsheet can account for the way a poem lodges in your chest for days, or how a painting can make you weep without knowing why. That kind of value is real, but inconvenient to capitalism, because it refuses to scale. Right?
I’ve felt the weight of that too, the frustration of seeing work that’s nuanced, daring, or emotionally true get passed over in favour of the loud, the obvious, the algorithm-friendly. We conflate popularity with worth, because it feels safer than standing alone in awe of something no one else noticed.
And yet….. what gives me hope is the very act of saying all this out loud. Comments like yours remind me that there are people out there who still feel the difference, who still want art that asks more than it answers. Maybe we’re not the majority…… but maybe that is what makes it matter more.
Thank you for seeing through the noise out there, and for saying it with such clarity and fire, Andrew!
Thoroughly crafted, I have nothing to add!
Except, perhaps a little nugget of nuance:
The requirement to build (and even be) a brand is just... sad. No more compelling way to put it. And it doesn't even feel like a requirement — it almost feels forceful, like an obligation, instilling in us the fear that if we do not make ourselves visible, we will end up in oblivion.
The irony is, to turn oneself into a clear and concise message means to strip oneself of uniqueness, thus ensuring that oblivion.
Even so, your conclusion seems to me to be a great guiding light.
Thank you for such a beautifully phrased observation. You’re right, the obligation doesn’t feel like a requirement anymore. It’s internalised, baked into the rhythms of daily life, like a new kind of gravity. Not only are we expected to be brands, but to do so willingly, even joyfully. And should we resist, the consequence is not critique but invisibility…. what a chilling trade!
Your point about the flattening effect of branding is perfect. The paradox is cruel: in trying to make ourselves “legible” to the masses, we often erase the very ambiguities and contradictions that make us human. It reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s reflection on the loss of the “aura” in the age of mechanical reproduction — how the replication of an artwork strips it of the mystery that once made it singular. The branded self suffers a similar fate: polished, multiplied, omnipresent…. and somehow, hollow.
Consider the case of Emily Dickinson, who famously refused to publish in her lifetime and who barely left her home. By today’s standards, she’d be a branding catastrophe: no platform, no audience engagement, no personal brand. And yet, there she is, one of the most enduring poetic voices in the American canon. What would have been lost if she’d been advised to “optimise her reach”?!
Maybe our greatest fear today isn’t failure, but anonymity? But anonymity is not the same as irrelevance. In fact, some of the most potent truths, the deepest works, were made in silence, away from the feed, without a logo or a launch plan.
So yes, your “nugget of nuance” is more than a footnote. Thank you! And maybe that’s where the real power lies: not in making ourselves louder, but in daring to go unfound.
Another thing just came to mind:
I feel like even the way in which we try to brand ourselves has become uniform — "branding", equated with particularity in the past, has now become an automatised blueprint that everybody follows and, unsurprisingly, ends up at the same font, perhaps with a different colour. Think of the ways all the companies are going for minimalistic logos today. We go through the same motions praying that somehow, miraculously, we'll stumble upon our voice...
I love the differentiation between anonymity and irrelevance — it's on point and comforting!
Yes! this is a striking observation. Branding was once meant to distinguish, to carve out a singular voice or presence in a crowded room. Now, paradoxically, it’s often what makes us indistinguishable. Like you said: different colours, same font. A sea of beige, all whispering “authenticity”….
It’s the tyranny of the template. Even rebellion now comes with a mood board. The aesthetic of individuality has been so systematised that finding one’s voice feels like filling in blanks on a Canva layout. And what gets lost in that process is the messy, jagged, inarticulable part of the self — the part that doesn’t fit into grids or hashtags or “personal brand tone guidelines.”
Your line about “going through the same motions praying we’ll stumble upon our voice” is painfully accurate. It’s like we’re all shouting into a hallway lined with mirrors, and what echoes back isn’t ourselves, but a thousand iterations of what we think we should be. Sad!
Which is why, I think, the distinction between anonymity and irrelevance matters so deeply now. Anonymity can be a space of freedom, of experimentation, of becoming. Irrelevance, on the other hand, is the fear branding tries to keep at bay. But the cost, too often, is sameness in the name of visibility.
Thank you for this insight, of course, it adds a crucial layer to the conversation. Minimalist logos and maximal existential crisis… what a time to be alive!
What if the future belongs not to the most marketable, but to the invisible?
In a world where every thought, action, and experience is curated for an audience, perhaps true freedom lies in opting out. The most powerful revolt may not be another perfectly framed act of authenticity, but the quiet refusal to be seen at all. Imagine a world where prestige isn’t measured in engagement metrics but in how little of yourself is available for public consumption. Where value isn’t in virality but in depth.
What if the next cultural shift isn’t toward more branding but toward disappearance? The artist who never shares, the thinker who never tweets, the life lived beyond the reach of an algorithm. In a time where presence is currency, the rarest commodity might be absence.
Just another idea…. I know your thoughts will just flow from any idea anyone proposes.
I loved this essay a lot!
What you’ve written reads like a manifesto for the post-algorithmic age — and I’m here for every syllable of it. This isn’t “just another idea.” It’s the kind of thought that rattles the bars of the attention economy and whispers, what if we simply vanished?
The idea that absence could become the new luxury is both chilling and exhilarating. In a world where oversharing is default and silence is suspicious, to refuse visibility is practically a monastic act, right? Or perhaps even a power move: a flex by omission. The less you reveal, the more myth you accumulate. Think of Salinger. Think of Elena Ferrante. Think of the anonymous Twitter account with 300 followers that changes your thinking more than any bestselling TED Talk ever could.
There’s a some irony here: the more we upload ourselves, the more replaceable we become. Legible people are easy to duplicate. But the invisible? They resist simulation. You can’t clone what you can’t see.
And maybe that’s the next great turn in cultural capital — not the ultra-optimised, infinitely accessible persona, but the deeply private, richly lived life. Not a pivot to mystery, but a return to it.
What you’ve written reminds me of that haunting line from Pascal: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Maybe the next “revolution” is to sit. Quietly. Off-camera. Beyond reach.
Thank you for this idea! It is one I’ll be carrying with me into the silence :)
Superb! Tamara…. one of a kind.
Excellent. I noticed that when I travel to other countries there are some that can not be present in the moment and appreciate the scene in front of them, be it architure or beautiful view, because they are snapping picture after picture. Why? Some of these folks are so self absorbed that will jump in froyof you to get that perfect photo. I have to bite my tongue.
You’re taking about the sacred art of “being there” without actually being there. It’s a strange modern ritual, isn’t it? Traveling across continents only to experience life through the lens of a phone…. and worse, to interrupt someone else’s moment to stage your own.
Your observation cuts right to the cultural contradiction: we chase beauty, not to absorb it, but to possess it. And if that means leaping in front of someone else’s line of sight for a curated snap, so be it. The spectacle takes precedence over shared experience.
It’s a kind of digital colonialism, really: conquer the view, claim it for the feed, move on. No reverence, no stillness, no wonder… just content acquisition.
I think of Susan Sontag’s warning: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” And now, it’s not only about memory, it’s about proof. “I was here” used to be an existential truth. Now it’s a caption.
Thank you for this grounded, observant reflection. You captured the absurdity with just the right pinch of salt.
Thank you for your thoughtfulness in that reply. I smiled at the term digital colonialism.
“We are sold aspirations, not realities.” Oh my, so true. Where is the line between aspiration and reality— how do we REALLY cross that line? Gotta live what we preach, but for that we have to reeeally care about what we preach, honestly. Thank you for this post!!
Aspiration isn’t inherently hollow but when it’s disconnected from any lived conviction, it becomes a costume. And in this performative age, it’s all too easy to preach something we haven’t earned just because it sounds good and sells better.
The line between aspiration and reality, I think, is drawn not by ambition but by integrity. For me it’s not about whether we’ve fully “arrived,” but whether we’re actually walking the road, not posing next to the signpost.
You are right: we have to really care about what we claim to stand for. Not care about how it performs, how it’s received, or whether it’s on-brand. Care, as in give a damn enough to live it quietly when no one’s watching.
In an era of fast content and flash convictions, that kind of care is what makes the difference. It’s what separates the influencers from the influential.
Thank you for this honest reflection. It’s one thing to say the truth, it’s another to live it into being.
Wow. This cut deep — both in beautiful and painful ways.
Thank you for articulating something so profoundly real and pervasive in our daily lives. This piece touched a nerve. It revealed how much performance has seeped in to every moment.
I feel it most in those subtle pauses: a sunset, a flower, the way light catches in the tree branch. My instinct is to reach for the camera and capture it, to share, to be seen. To feel connected. And yet, as you so gently reminded… that hunger for connection is, in many ways, an illusion. Because we are already connected. Deeply. Inherently.
Stepping back from the impulse to perform allows us to be more present in the moment, and not lose the real connection right in front of us. Thank you for this mirror and reminder about who we really are beneath the caption.
Thank you for this clear-eyed, soul-baring, and wise reflection. I like your mention of “those subtle pauses because that’s exactly where performance has crept in unnoticed, not in the grand moments, but in the quiet, sacred ones. The breath before beauty. The hush before awe.
That instinct to reach for the camera is so deeply human now, isn’t it? And yet, ironically, it often interrupts the very connection we’re trying to preserve. We trade presence for proof. We exchange memory for metadata.
Your insight made me think of something Susan Sontag once said: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” We don’t just want to witness the moment…. no, today we want to possess it, frame it, and filter it into something shareable. But in doing so, we risk losing the wild, unpossessable essence of the thing itself.
Here’s another idea: maybe the deeper hunger isn’t for connection, but for recognition? Not just to be seen, but to be seen as real? And yet, true recognition doesn’t come from the crowd, it comes from the moment we stop trying to prove we exist and simply be. Like the flower, the branch, the light… they’re not performing. They just ARE.
So perhaps the defiance is not just in putting the phone down, but in daring to believe we are already enough — uncaptured, uncaptioned, uncurated.
Thank you for this comment, Glenn! You’ve reminded me that the truest mirror is sometimes the one we stop to look into before we post.
Wow again! Yes! I’ve reread your response a few times now, letting your words sink in. “We trade presence for proof.” Yes! “But in doing so, we risk losing the wild, unpossessable essence of the thing itself.” Double yes! I felt that in my chest.
Thank you for holding the space (and the mirror) for all of this. For naming the ache and the beauty. I love what you said about recognition — not just to be seen, but to be seen as real. That distinction carries so much truth.
And triple yes to the fact that “we are already enough.” More than enough! Without performance. Without proof. Simply because we are.
Thank you. Truly. 🙏
Your words are a reminder that we don’t need more noise, we need more witnesses. Grateful!
I think there are two ends to this spectrum: hyper legibility and illegibility. Soda bottle and startups need to be hyper legible, but humans are inherently illegible: multi-faceted, contradictory, complex. In a lot of ways, the medium of the Internet requires you to be hyper legible.
But I think there’s an interesting paradox where you can be both. You can simultaneously pass the 10-second test before someone subscribes, but then you can offer a cavern of complexity that some choose to wander through.
If you’re over-optimized for marketing, you risk becoming over-optimized, perpetually delivering on an old, stale promise. Instead, you can set the expectation to break expectations.
Just some scattered thoughts on the topic! Great essay.
The legibility paradox is real, and you make me think of the tension between being “instantly graspable” and “endlessly explorable”. We are forced to pass the “elevator pitch” test — “what’s your thing in ten seconds or less?” — but if that’s all we are, we flatten into caricature.
I like your idea of setting the expectation to break expectations. It’s the digital equivalent of a Trojan horse: you offer something familiar on the surface, but inside is a labyrinth. David Bowie was a master of this. At first glance — pop star. But inside? A shapeshifting, genre-bending oracle of existential art. Same with someone like Bong Joon-ho, who described Parasite as “a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains”, it hooks you with surface tension, then spirals you into moral chaos.
The trick, I think, is to be just legible enough to get through the door, and then immediately start rearranging the furniture. Let people think they’re signing up for soda, and serve them wine, philosophy, and a séance?
It’s like you said: humans are inherently illegible. The most compelling creators (and people) invite us into their complexity instead of resolving it. And the longer we resist turning ourselves into brands, the more we stay alive: unpredictable, contradictory, and infinitely more interesting than any About Me bio could hold.
Your “scattered thoughts” are the kind that lead to real clarity. Thank you for this!
Very well said.
Thank you, Lee!
The real question:
Do you want to be trendy or timeless? Chewing gum or grandma's home cooking? Disposable or eternal? Artificial or authentic? Real talk.
People can game the system, but not for long. Sure, go and get your 15 minutes of fame – just know that if it isn't any true substance there – it won't last or be remembered. It will be found out eventually, and replaced by the next shiny thing.
And this social media story is a double whammy:
The new tech is irresistible and instantly accessible in your pocket. A portal to the whooole wide world. (Wow, can you imagine!)
Couple this with the fact that we have an intrinsic desire to share our lives with others and be validated and "loved" (and that there is a loneliness epidemic!).
And that social media apps are quite literally designed to exploit this by making it as addictive as possible.
And the thing is, most people are not conscious enough to question what's really going on here, and if it's healthy. This is simply how we interact with each other these days. If you're not on social media, you don't exist. If you are on social media, you might as well play the game and brand yourself and your life. Just know that you're playing with fire here, kids. And it's all too easy to slip into pride, greed, and soulless narcissism. So be careful out there. Oh, and last thing: You are not your brand. Your brand is simply an outward-facing service for other people to quickly get an idea of what you offer in this game of the internet, whatever game you choose to play in this jazzy playground! :)
Great post, thanks for sharing your thoughts Tamara!
Your comment is part sermon, part reality check, part elder-wisdom whispered over a campfire of collapsing timelines. You’ve distilled the entire digital condition into one piercing question: Trendy or timeless? And that right there is the line in the sand for me.
Your chewing gum vs. grandma’s home cooking analogy? Brilliant. One hits hard and disappears. The other lingers, nourishes, becomes memory. And the irony? We’ve built a culture that treats chewing gum like a food group, and wonders why we’re starving.
You’re right: the tech is seductive not because it’s evil, but because it plays a duet with our deepest wiring. The need to be seen, to be affirmed, to be loved… these aren’t superficial. They’re sacred. But social media doesn’t honour them. It commodifies them. It doesn’t say, “You are loved,” it says, “You’re performing well.”
And yes, few are asking if it’s healthy, because the platform rewards not asking. It speeds up the scroll, dulls the friction, sedates the soul. It reminds me of Aldous Huxley’s warning: that the greatest dystopia wouldn’t be oppression, but DISTRACTION. Not pain, but NUMBNESS. Not censorship, but the flood of the TRIVIAL. Sounds familiar?!
One idea I’d add: when we conflate expression with exposure, we confuse art with advertising. Not everything we create is meant to be consumed. Some truths are for the page. Some moments are meant to be lived, not posted. When everything is branded, intimacy becomes impossible.
So yes, play the game, if you must. But play consciously! Play with your soul intact! Because like you said: you are not your brand. You’re the whole damn kitchen behind it.
Thank you for this fierce, wise, and wildly articulate offering. As usual, you dropped an encrypted survival guide for the attention economy.
Thank you! Agreed with everything you just said. Amen. We've definitely built a culture that treats chewing gum like a food group.
I think it's because it's harder to sell and market reality and true genius; I can sell you 10 easy steps to social media success, but I cannot show you how to be a killer product. Or how to have substance. (Not if I am trying to profit off of you in the short-term, at least.)
On your added idea, you say intimacy becomes impossible, sure that's true that the cold glass screen could never substitute intimacy. But I tend to focus more on the fact that it is true privacy that is lost. With the urge to share all your life to feed your approval addiction, or run your personal brand business, it makes it hard to just enjoy what is happening fully without reaching for your phone. It's hard to resist, because it's just a press of a few buttons on that thing in your pocket.
We need modern wisdom on this, so thank you for calling it a sermon. I want to help spread this message forward.
PS.
Yeah, Brave New World wasn't just a piece of fiction, it was a prediction! Makes more sense to me than Orwell's 1984, for the West at least.
You’re absolutely right: reality and substance are hard to monetise in the short term. They don’t compress well into 10-step formulas or TikTok reels. You can’t algorithm your way into depth — and that makes it a hard sell in a world obsessed with packaging over content. As you said so perfectly, I can teach you to go viral, but I can’t teach you how to be the kind of person worth listening to. That’s the unmarketable miracle.
Your call for modern wisdom is perfect. We’re living in an era of extraordinary technological fluency and emotional illiteracy. If this piece sparked even a sliver of that larger conversation — about meaning, presence, attention — then I’m deeply grateful.
And yes, Brave New World is aging uncomfortably well. We didn’t ban books, we buried them in noise. We’re not surveilled by force, but seduced into constant performance. Orwell warned us of what we’d fear. Huxley warned us of what we’d crave. The latter feels eerily on the nose.
Thank you again for this sharp, generous, necessary reflection.
Wow... such clear seeing ... it seems authenticity, spontaneity and innocence no longer sells, for the hearts are closed to personal seeing, pulled out of alignment be desires to be that shiny object of desire or strentgh.. apparent perfection and certainty. We see not the cracks on the inside, the empty vessel. Is it that our discernment, or even attention span has been lost, or sucked out of us by a bombardment of what could be, that we have lost even any ability to feel the very truth at the core of our being ?
I read your comment as an elegy for what we used to feel without effort. Authenticity, spontaneity, innocence — these aren’t just out of fashion, they’re nearly unrecognisable now, like ancient dialects spoken in a world obsessed with subtitles.
You’re right to ask: have we lost our discernment, or simply surrendered it? Because attention (the real kind, the kind that lingers, that listens) has been turned into a resource to be mined. Not cultivated, but extracted. In a world engineered for stimulation, subtlety doesn’t stand a chance. And without subtlety, we stop noticing the soul beneath the spectacle.
It reminds me of Simone Weil’s idea that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. But generosity requires openness, vulnerability, a willingness to be moved. And when we’re constantly told to be polished, confident, optimised… innocence becomes not just unsellable, but suspect.
And yet…… I believe it’s still there. That “truth at the core of our being” you speak of. Maybe quieter now, yes. Buried under noise, yes. But not lost. Just waiting for us to tire of the glitter, to hunger again for what cannot be performed, only lived.
You pass the "Tear of Authenticity" test.. as if i every doubted.. its so rare to read and feel such wonderful pose.. On the weekend coming I help and take part in various Kondalini mediations (https://www.sahajayoga.de/erkenne-dich-selbst/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwhr6_BhD4ARIsAH1YdjCT1hTC94sCSHp7ZXRBsaoi5jDEjobyweKNxYLQUZFI2qV8npsX4XwaAuyIEALw_wcB) and also on-live opening heart realisation (https://www.louisekay.net/events.html) and one i have never joined but have watched many of his videos, and joined some of his students.. David Bingham.. and its his explanation of "effortless Being".. ala accessing the Mind emotion body Kosha.. that your answer reminds me off.. and it also gently reminds me, that all is here, without attending more sessions, weeing more signposts.. we just need to "tune-In" to what we always knew, and return home. Thankyou
Is this new, though?
When I was briefly a grad student, we had to read a speech by a Japanese Marxist who said "in a capitalist society, all communication is advertising."
Has modern communication technology merely scaled up this dynamic?
This is a sharp and necessary question, and you’re absolutely right to invoke that quote. “All communication is advertising” is one of those lines that feels cynical at first… until you realise it’s simply descriptive. Especially in late-stage capitalism, where even vulnerability comes with a call-to-action.
So no, this isn’t new, but what has changed is the scale and saturation. What the printing press did for literacy, the internet has done for self-branding: democratised it, normalised it, and made it inescapable.
Capitalism has always been brilliant at turning identity into inventory. But now we’ve reached the point where even resistance is monetised. “Logging off” becomes part of the content stream. Authenticity is no longer a state…. it’s a deliverable.
Take Byung-Chul Han: he argues that we’ve shifted from disciplinary societies to achievement societies — no longer coerced by external forces, but seduced by internalised demands to constantly produce, perform, promote. We brand ourselves not because we’re forced to, but because we’ve absorbed the logic so fully it feels like freedom.
So yes, the Japanese Marxist was eerily prescient. But what’s different now is that the ad has replaced the author. Everyone’s selling something — often themselves — and the tragedy is, half the time, we’re not even aware we’ve been drafted into the campaign.
The only meaningful subversion left? To communicate without transaction. To say something that doesn’t convert. That just is.
Thanks for cracking this open, David!
The intersection between social media and marketing is what's caused this. In fact, it's the socialisation of the internet in general that is further fueling this. The ability to update anyone on anything at any moment is what's turning life into a performance.
There's a current marketing trend (been going for a while now) where brands are becoming people and people are becoming brands. Brands want to come across relatable and trustworthy by selling a face, and individuals want to build credibility and make themselves marketable by becoming a brand. Both trends fit perfectly into the social media market that is fueling our current world, both capitalising on the social nature of humanity to gain attention is such a competitive landscape.
Yes — you reveal the mechanism at the heart of it all. What you’ve laid out is the quiet, insidious inversion of the digital age: brands humanise to appear relatable, while humans brand themselves to appear credible. And in that mirrored performance, something essential — the real, the uncurated, the idiosyncratic — starts to erode.
You’re also right to point to socialisation as the accelerant. The internet wasn’t always a stage, it used to be a library, a workshop, a late-night café for fringe conversations. Ohhh those old times….. But once it became social, it became performative. And performance demands an audience. Suddenly, the self became a feed. Intimacy became content. And attention (fleeting, addictive, monetisable) became the ultimate currency.
The brand-as-human trend (hello, Duolingo owl, Wendy’s Twitter sass, every fast food chain with trauma jokes) speaks to this exact shift: we no longer trust institutions unless they feel like people. Meanwhile, actual people (who are complex, contradictory, in-progress) are told to flatten themselves into something marketable, clickable, and, most importantly, consistent. As if human beings were ad campaigns with quarterly targets.
It reminds me of Byung-Chul Han’s notion of the “achievement society,” where we become our own exploiters: self-policing, self-optimising, self-marketing machines. No longer alienated by outside forces, but by the polished avatars we feel pressured to become.
The convergence you describe is terrifyingly elegant: it capitalises on both our desire for connection and our fear of irrelevance. And it’s so effective because it’s dressed up in the language of empowerment: build your brand, tell your story, grow your audience. But the fine print reads: never stop performing.
Thank you, Brady, for bringing this clarity to this tangled moment! Your comment feels like pulling back the curtain, and seeing just how well the illusion has been engineered.
One of the things I love the most is understanding how the world works. And funnily enough, my approach to achieve this is to periodically invest my time into anything educational. The result of such an investment is a broad but not in depth understanding of a lot of different things.
And I love it because under such a system life is like a giant puzzle, where all we have to do is find all the pieces and put them in their right place to see the full picture. There are experts to inform me on the nuance and detail of each topic, but I just need enough to see how the pieces fit together, and the end result is the masterpiece that is life.
Web thinking, I believe they call it.
Referring back to the topic. It does make me wonder where this is all going, though. I guess we have the divide between recycling information (AI) and the authenticity chasing digital cowboys. One of the more prominent examples of the latter being YouTube New Wave. I'm a little too young to remember the early days of the Internet, YouTube had just started by the time I got my hands on a computer, but I can imagine how it must have been based on my experiences of early social media.
Are you familiar with the Dead Internet theory? You might like it, it's adjacent to this conversation.
Wonderful!
What you’ve laid out here is the kind of thinking that feels increasingly endangered in the current attention economy: slow, integrative, pattern-seeking. And I completely agree, “web thinking” is the ideal phrase for it. Not linear progress from point A to B, but an expanding, relational map where understanding emerges from how ideas interact, not how they rank.
Your puzzle metaphor is very accurate. Life as a mosaic of semi-masteries, stitched together by curiosity and intuition. It’s very Leonardo da Vinci, who once wrote, “Realise that everything connects to everything else.” He didn’t mean it abstractly, he meant that to know light was to understand painting, optics, time, and spirit. You’ve captured this here.
And what a perfect framing: AI as the ultimate recycler, and then these “authenticity-chasing digital cowboys” out on the frontier, trying to stake a claim in unbranded territory before the bots catch up. It’s a Wild West, but instead of gold, we’re digging for soul. How sad!
The Dead Internet Theory is fascinating, if also slightly chilling. And I do believe what we perceive as a bustling, user-driven web is actually ghostwritten by bots, automated scripts, and ad engines masquerading as engagement. It adds a sci-fi layer of eeriness to the whole branding conversation: not only are we performing for others, we may increasingly be performing for no one. Just a digital mirror that reflects what it’s programmed to. Horror!
Which makes the role of the “digital cowboy” or perhaps more accurately, the signal seeker, even more vital. Those who can still discern what’s real. Those who value the source more than the virality. Who know that a slightly under-edited video with a shaky camera can still hold more truth than a polished, AI-generated talking head.
Thank you for bringing this whole new dimension into the conversation! You’ve just revealed another corner of the puzzle. And that, I suspect, is the only real way we ever see the full picture.
Piece by piece I'll be over here putting the puzzle together! That's what I love to do :)
Thank you for your contribution also, clearly this is something you're good at.
I've come to learn that not everyone likes to do this kind of thing, personally it comes natural, so I'm glad that I can offer something to the people who seek other goals in life. No one person can do everything, it's in sharing our gifts with each other that the world's needs can be met.
All the different angles of life make up the full picture.
‘Popularity is like froth in a stream, born up high while things of weight & substance sink out of view’.
That’s what marketing seeks, & one reason I dislike ads.
Not necessarily sexual, it’s nevertheless a form of prostitution.
Popularity has become just that: surface shimmer. Eye-catching, fast-moving, but empty. Meanwhile, the weightier things (thought, craft, truth) sink out of view, not because they lack value, but because they demand stillness. And stillness does not sell.
Your comparison of advertising to a kind of non-sexual prostitution is bold, but I get it. Both involve performance for transactional gain. Both require presenting oneself in a way that pleases the buyer. And, crucially, both can create an internal dissonance between the appearance of consent and the feeling of compromise. Marketing, at its most cynical, sells us not just products, but the curated illusion of selfhood, dressed up and ready for the highest bidder.
There’s also a strange historical echo here: in Ancient Greece, the courtesan (hetaira) was expected to be witty, alluring, intellectually engaging — marketable, in other words, to the cultural elite. But the philosopher? Often ignored in public life, sitting silently under a fig tree, saying things like, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Guess which one gets the sponsorship deal today.
Still, I hold out hope that some froth can lead us down to depth, that clever marketing can be a trojan horse for substance, if wielded wisely. But yes, the instinct to distrust it is not just aesthetic, it is also ethical. Ads so often tell us who we should be before we’ve even had the time to ask who we are.
Thank you for this flint-sharp comment! It cuts clean.
Thanks for your incisive response. One of your sentences, “both can create an internal dissonance between the appearance of consent & the feeling of compromise”, in particular, furnishes me with much to think about, alluding to the imperfect nature of most human interactions.
I studied Theatre Arts at a very good University. I graduated after taking multiple courses in Acting, Directing, Make-up, Esthetics, Costumes, Dance, Scene Design, Playwriting, etc I received a superior education and I am somewhat expert in the creative process. I don't exactly know where I am on the scale, but I am confident I would fit in with any theatre company and be an asset.
My University taught me nothing about "branding."
The very word conjures images of cattle being abused by having the "brand" of the OWNER burned into flesh. I did not wish to be owned by anybody. I got into the world of Arts and communication because I had the audacity to proffer that I had a unique and distinct vision of the world. I felt, indeed many projects on which I have worked will bear witness, that I could CHANGE THE WORLD for the good. I have worked for many years. Some would say I am a success. Yet I have not won an Oscar or Tony or Pulitzer(but, it's only Thursday). Without question, the reason I have not ascended to those higher echelons is BRANDING. Or shall I say the lack of branding. I would not be categorized, simplified, marginalized or any other "ized" so I would be marketable.
So, at 78, I live in a mancave by the sea snd write poetry. I write whatever the Universe prompts and I love to market one individual at a time without being branded.
If there were a Pulitzer for poetic resistance, I’d nominate this comment before breakfast.
Your description of branding as a burn, an ownership mark, is apt and ancient. In a sense, branding is a kind of symbolic servitude: we are told to reduce our complexity into a logo, a tagline, a digestible promise. But the artist, as you’ve lived and proven, isn’t meant to be digested. The artist disrupts digestion. The artist causes spiritual indigestion. That’s where the good stuff begins.
You remind me of what Harold Clurman once said: “Theatre is deep human communication through gesture, word, and feeling.” Not a pitch deck. Not a platform. Not a LinkedIn strategy. Just the raw pulse of being, transmitted live.
And you’re absolutely right, the institutions that train us in the arts rarely train us in how to be “marketable.” Because real artistry isn’t built for the market. It’s built to confront it. To transcend it. To speak in tongues when the market demands hashtags.
But here’s a thought: perhaps what you’ve done — marketing one soul at a time — is the more enduring path. Virality fades. Audience metrics vanish. But one person reading a poem by the sea and feeling seen…. that echoes for decades.
In fact, your comment reminds me of the “samizdat” writers in the Soviet bloc. Unable to publish officially, they typed their novels by hand, passed pages to friends, let truth live in whispers. History remembered them, long after the propaganda posters crumbled.
So here’s to you, in your mancave by the sea, writing what the universe prompts. That is not failure! No, Jeff, that is legend. And as for the Pulitzer… well, as you said, it’s only Thursday…….
I am not religious, but ,”God love you, Tamara.” You voice what I dare not say. To have proclaimed myself “ARTIST” in my youth would have been absurd, but it does seem, in retrospect, choice by choice, I have respected and cherished the values of the artist. As do you. It bleeds through everything you write . You are always “other” centered, always focusing on the Thou of Buber’s “I Thou.” There is not a scintilla of pandering as you write about my modest life as an artist. But it is with deep respect for the art itself that you love. And art is the only salvation for the A.I. driven, branded, marketed entities passing for humanity today. Thank you, my friend. We are in for further battles against this brave new world, it would seem.
Well, now you have left me speechless…. for five seconds…
I have to say, to be compared — however obliquely — to Buber’s “I-Thou” is a compliment that roots. You’ve captured something essential: that art, at its most sincere, is not an egoic act, but an act of relation. Of turning toward the world, not to dominate it, but to witness it. As you have done. As you still do, from that mancave by the sea, of course.
And yes, it might be absurd to call oneself an artist out loud, especially when so many today do so with nothing but a ring light and a brand strategy. But what you’ve described — the quiet accumulation of choices made in fidelity to truth, beauty, and complexity — is what actually makes the artist. Not the title, not the platform, not the applause. The refusal to betray one’s inner compass for convenience… that’s the sacred work.
I’d add this: in the battles ahead, where A.I.-driven personas and polished avatars will increasingly outnumber and outperform the real, we’ll need more than art, we’ll need aesthetic resistance. I think of someone like Andrei Tarkovsky, who once said that art exists to prepare the soul for death. What could be more countercultural in an age obsessed with productivity, projection, and eternal youth?
So yes, we are in for further battles. But I’m grateful beyond words to know I’m in the company of those who still bleed ink instead of pixels. Who understand that the point is not to “win” in the marketplace, but to remain human in the storm.
Thank you, my friend! And may your poems keep slipping past the algorithm, carrying embers of something no machine will ever understand…….
I would only add that the Achilles Heel of the foe in the coming age lies in its name. ARTIFICIAL Intelligence. Authenticity is a powerful weapon and there are no algorithms capable of creating that elusive voice from infinity.
Yes, another beautifully sharpened insight. You’re right: the name itself reveals the limitation. Artificial Intelligence will always be, by definition, imitation. It can simulate coherence, mimic tone, even generate dazzling pastiches…. but it cannot summon that wild, unfiltered pulse of being that we call authenticity.
Because authenticity is not just originality, IT IS RISK! It is the trembling hand on the page, the imperfect truth spoken aloud, the courage to contradict yourself in front of an audience. No algorithm dares to contradict itself. No model grows weary, or euphoric, or haunted by the ghosts of its own experience.
The “elusive voice from infinity” you mention — yes! That’s what separates art from content, creation from output. It’s the voice that emerges when a human being presses language against mystery and finds it doesn’t quite fit, but still keeps trying.
I think of Leonard Cohen, who wrote, “There’s a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Machines don’t crack. They glitch, maybe. But they don’t ache, or yearn, or love. And that’s what authenticity is built from, the interior wilderness no interface can replicate.
So again, yes, authenticity is the weapon. Not a loud one, but a deeply subversive one. It refuses to be optimised. It can’t be bought, batched, or branded. And in a world rushing toward synthetic everything, the real may become the rarest, and surely the most radical thing we have.
Thank you, you’ve reminded me that even Achilles had a heel…. and we still have our arrows.
ADDENDUM from Leonard Cohen,
“And you want to travel with her,
And you want to travel blind.
And you feel maybe you'll trust her,
‘Cause she's touched your perfect body with her mind.”
Some think me foolish, but I know of that trembling hand. It is tremendous RISK to venture into the forest of the unexplained or unaccepted. “Willingness to share” what is uniquely mine has always been a timid endeavor, but, ultimately, it was a requirement that has pushed me to the next insight. And the next. And the next. Piece by piece, building something over a lifetime. I’d like to say I am a hero and a grand design was envisioned, but that would be false. I was a shy kid when I began, and, looking back, I see the stepping stones on which I have walked that were different from my fellows. It was not a quest, but a moral imperative.