Let’s Kill Our Personal Brands
Like, right now.
There was an account I should follow… let’s call it @GIRLIALREADYFOLLOWED. Gosh, I thought churlishly, didn’t I already follow her??
For this week’s edition of Kyle Chayka’s very good New Yorker column Infinite Scroll, Chayka identified one of the unspoken truths about social media: We’re all trying to get off of it. In fact, wanting to stop posting is the thing that separates the wheat from the influencers. Chayka spoke to FeedMe’s Emily Sundberg and Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner about the perks of having a low follower count:
“Sundberg told me, ‘In a time when people are posting everything about their lives online constantly for attention, you almost get a little frustrated that someone can be successful without doing that.’ One’s own overexposure comes to feel shameful by contrast. Weiner, who maintains a personal Instagram account with around three hundred followers, told me, ‘If you feel like not just your ego but your livelihood, too, depends on these platforms, then you might also project an enviable financial stability, along with an enviable emotional stability, onto someone who doesn’t use them at all.”’
Currently we’re in the midst of a reckoning, watching early posters become the cultural vanguard, segueing internet fame for true power. From our very own Steff Yotka (formerly Vogue’s Global Director of Social Media) and Emily Sundberg (who had her start leading Great Jones’ social team), to Rachel Sennott going from Twitter comedian to bonafide star. Adam Friedland is becoming the next Jon Stewart, and Addison Rae, the next Britney Spears. The new way to actually make friends and influence people is to post and post and post until you become relevant enough that you can delete your Letterbox’d. (Looking at you, Ayo Edebiri). Posting is the golden ticket that one day will free you from posting; you post so that your kids don’t have to.
You have to post to get your work out there, to gain credibility through following. You post unselfconsciously because nobody cares.
Oops, we all turned ourselves into personal brands. People start watching. Now, everything you post suddenly must adhere to whatever codes you’ve created. You are boxed in by being an advertisement for a brand you didn’t realize you were creating until it’s too late.
Do you accept your own “personal brand?” Or do you delete social media and never post again?
We’ve hit brand oversaturation, personal and professional. Matcha is branded. Vacations are branded. It’s infinitely harder to post your way into a “real job” because people are fatigued by posting! Having a personal brand is kind of annoying, anyway.
A rejection of personal branding and a return to shit-posting, something that recalls the early Tumblr-esque days of Instagram. Not posting at all is the coolest thing you can do, but the second, if you must, is this. Unlike the adolescent finsta or the anonymous gossipy finsta—both ways of protecting your bad behavior from prying eyes—this new crop of finstas are screechingly normal. Some are even public. Of the finstas I follow: a celebrity photographer who posts photos of her friends and boyfriend, a dance vixen who delights in mirror selfies and inspiring quotes, a writer who does exclusively throwbacks. These accounts are boring, monotonous, antibrand, anticonsumption, nobody is tagged, nobody comments. They are RANDOM!
To circle back to my Instagram friend. She’s a woman in her twenties in a creative field, who already posts a healthy mix of work, her body, and whatever’s in front of her. She’s created a private finsta using her government name. The main account is now the finsta, and the finsta is the rinsta (real insta).
In Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, Timothée Chalamet is taught how to “sandwalk.” It’s an arrhythmic, bordering on nonsensical, way of moving to avoid detection by the sand worms. While it looks awkward and feels silly to relearn something you already know how to do, the result is a break in the rote. This is how I feel about the emergent strain of shit-posting: You shit-post to prove you’re not a brand. You shit-post to prove your humanity.
What is the best spa in the city?
What is a shoe that has the spirit of a ballet flat but will keep my feet warm in the winter? Must be a slip-on, must be femme, must not be a loafer. Allegra Samson says Solomon Snow Clogs.
What can I buy a used fur coat in person that doesn’t shed?
hilarious how i've been trying to get a writing job and failing because i didn't start building a personal brand when i was three years old
I must kill the pr manager inside me that demands cost/risk analysis.