Personal branding requires an internal doubling that alienates and erodes trust

Evidence

Branding is a process that requires what the author and psychotherapist Nancy Colier describes as an imperative to “relate to our self in the third person.” A commodified self may be rich, but commodification still requires a partitioning, an internal doubling that is inherently alienating. There is you, and then there is Brand You. As much as we might like to believe that these selves can be kept separate, brands are hungry, demanding things, and one self necessarily impacts the other. If countless numbers of us are doubled, all partitioning and performing ourselves, it becomes harder for anyone to know what is real and what and who can be trusted. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 201

Categorization

• QUESTION: This internal doubling (you vs. Brand You) is structurally the same device as Klein’s own doubling with Wolfson — worth tracking whether Klein is consciously building the device’s theory here before deploying it.
• XREF: The third-person-self commodification echoes Goffman’s presentation of self and also the ‘we’ constructed selves in Zamyatin’s We. — connects to: When concepts meet particulars only externally, administration can brand and liquidate individuals