Branding constraints predate the internet and resemble platform algorithmic pressure

Evidence

In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”; in the same passage, he worried that individuals were getting stuck in “a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.” Data. Computing. That was written in 1841, but it sounds very much like the cri de coeur of many a modern YouTuber or Twitch streamer, stuck churning out near-identical videos almost daily, lest fickle subscribers abandon them for one of the legions of new copycat influencers whom the algorithm recommends in the column next to or underneath their own videos. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 203

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own writing on platforms and authenticity economies; Emerson’s ‘data for computing our orbit’ nearly anticipates algorithmic audience modeling. — connects to: Internet platforms gained unprecedented power to manufacture user behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 941; Platform algorithms mediate and restrict what buyers and sellers can see and do. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 923
• SEED: Angle: ‘self-reliance’ as unlivable under algorithmic personal branding — the 1841 Emerson as a diagnosis of the creator economy’s authenticity trap.