Self-branding success depends on privileged white-collar positions unavailable to most workers.

Evidence

While founding a company or working independently certainly can be creatively fulfilling, this option isn’t available to everyone. The most successful self-branders are white-collar professionals with creative or engineering capacities, or people selling goods and services over the internet. In other words, the Web 2.0 workers I interviewed function as the “proof” that self-branding, and entrepreneurial governance in general, works, but only in exceptional cases. Championing self-branding as a universal solution for economic woes demonstrates the disconnect between neoliberal ideals of identity—which emphasize self-improvement, responsibility for skill acquisition, and self-surveillance—and the reality of day-to-day life. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 419

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to critiques of the gig economy and hustle culture (e.g., Kessler’s ‘Gigged’ or similar labor scholarship) — self-branding as credentialed opportunity. — connects to: Self-branding success is unsustainable for most and structurally excludes marginalized workers — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 444; Self-branding succeeds for few yet is promoted as a universal fix — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 525
• SEED: Angle: why ‘just brand yourself’ fails as universal career advice — the invisible class prerequisites of the personal-brand gospel.

Broader Connections

• Self-branding success is unsustainable for most and structurally excludes marginalized workers #corroborates (0.90) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 444
• Self-branding succeeds for few yet is promoted as a universal fix #expands (0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 525