Personal branding reduces identity to a predictable pattern of consumer preferences

Evidence

By contrast, at its most successful, an algorithmic “honing in” would seem to incrementally entomb me as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why. It certainly makes sense from a business point of view. When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital. In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 472

When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital. In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 472

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what the demand to ‘be yourself’ actually means in advertising and personal-branding terms: ‘be more yourself’ as a reified, appropriable pattern.
• XREF: Connects to Odell’s broader attention argument in ‘The Case for Nothing’ and to the filter-bubble critique of Eli Pariser — the algorithmic ‘honing in’ is the same narrowing. — connects to: Social media reframed self-identity as a personal brand selling attention — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1031; Advertisers classified foods by gender to exploit subconscious consumer preferences — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1348; Consumption history serves as shorthand for personal identity and biography — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 864
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 472