Personal branding intensifies as collective planetary action feels impossible

Evidence

It has often struck me, as I have contemplated my own branding crisis at a time when I felt I should be more properly focused on the climate crisis, that I am hardly the only one who has turned away from large fears in favor of more manageable obsessions. In fact, it makes a certain kind of sick sense that our era of peak personal branding has coincided so precisely with an unprecedented crisis point for our shared home. The vast, complex planetary crisis requires coordinated, collective effort on an international scale. That may be theoretically possible, but it sure is daunting. Far easier to master our self, the Brand Called You—to polish it, burnish it, get the angle and affect just right, wage war against all competitors and interlopers, project the worst onto them. Because unlike so much else upon which we might like to have some sort of impact, the canvas of the self is compact and near enough that it feels like we might actually pull off some measure of control. Even though, as I have discovered, this, too, is a grand illusion. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 214

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s concept of ‘diagonalism’ — the same retreat-into-self logic that draws people to wellness culture as a substitute for political efficacy.
• SEED: Angle: Donald Trump’s ‘Brand Called You’ essay as the founding document of the era of self-branding-as-politics — what was actually being abandoned when we all built our brands.