Social movement communities policed members against monetizing their activism through branding

Evidence

Looking back at the crossroads where I faced a clear choice between following the dictates of being a curious writer and being a well-managed brand, I realize that the choice was largely made for me. If I had said yes to the Vogue shopping trips (and the corporate speeches, and the ad campaigns), the movement I was a part of would have torn me to shreds. And rightly so. This was a good decade before personal branding had been normalized—we still called people who tried to cash in on mass movements careerists and sellouts. Which made those marketing decisions pretty easy: I didn’t want to lose all my friends. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 173

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘killing my own brand’ method Klein is sketching — the self-undermining of the celebrity-brand apparatus that produces her vulnerability to being ‘branded’ by her critic Naomi Wolf. — connects to: the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”