Young people must curate their identities as authentic brands online.
Evidence
For young people in today’s world, even this small mercy has been taken away. Curating an identity online is not optional, and so their personal lives have become some of the most important work they do. From the moment they take their first steps online, they suffer like Movatar from two perplexingly contradictory demands: they are taught implicitly to see themselves as a brand, yet one that will be judged according to its perceived authenticity. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 658
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘authentic brand’ contradiction connects to Goffman’s presentation of self and to Taylor’s authenticity discourse; also resonates with the attention-economy literature the reader works in. — connects to: Self-branding’s core contradiction is demanding authenticity for a market audience. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 420; Self-branding demands maintaining an edited yet authentic self before an audience — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 507; Social media reframed self-identity as a personal brand selling attention — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1031 (+7 more)
- SEED: Essay angle: ‘The unpaid identity work of the young’ — how mandatory online self-curation is labour under feudalism, the personal life as the worksite.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 658
Broader Connections
- Self-branding demands maintaining an edited yet authentic self before an audience
#corroborates(1.00) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 507 - The Web enabled individuals to apply corporate branding strategies to themselves
#expands(0.95) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 466 - Social media reframed self-identity as a personal brand selling attention
#corroborates(0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1031 - Online self-presentation expresses a neoliberal subjectivity applying market principles to identity
#corroborates(0.90) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 25 - Personal branding online creates performative doppelgangers demanding constant attention
#qualifies(0.85) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 32 - Self-branding functions as a neoliberal technology of subjectivity shaping its practitioners.
#expands(0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 427 - Showing oneself as a self online begins the manufacturing of the self as commodity
#expands(0.80) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 61 - Web 2.0 culture promotes a neoliberal identity that is constructible and improvable.
#expands(0.80) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 495