How's your personal brand holding up?

My doppelganger trouble was definitive proof that I had flunked at one of the most valued activities of contemporary capitalism: developing, maintaining, and defending my personal brand.

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (p. 47). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Klein’s discussion about personal branding bothers me in that a person is trying to perform for an audience in a way that captures their attention and maintains it based on providing something that the audience perceives as having value for them. This something is held up as something desirable and worthy to attach oneself to. It is in a capitalist society where likes and the number of followers matters because the viewer’s attention that has been acquired and can be sold to advertisers because that attention has value no matter how good, true, or beautiful that something is. The criteria of success is acquiring and maintaining the greatest number of fans possible to obtain advertising revenue.

It seems that one’s soul is for sale and what one presents as part of their brand does not need to be authentic, genuine, sincere, honest, but rather to the liking of the person being performed for. This turns branding into a con game and can easily slide into fraud.

Turning ourselves into something we’re not is a path to distress and mental illness which may be why so many celebrities have substance abuse and other emotional and interpersonal problems. Turning ourselves into something we’re not is a form of disingenuousness that is based on lying and deceit in order to manipulate.

A doppelganger by definition is an imposter, a fake, something other than the real thing, which we might realize if we know what the real thing even is.

Naomi Klein is lamenting the fact that Naomi Wolf is stealing her show leading to a loss of attention by an audience which has been lucrative for her in terms of book sales, talks, endorsements, etc.

Social media have turned persons into brands that are created by performing for their audiences in the hopes of garnering likes, followers, and subscribers. The folks who engage in this kind of behavior are now called “influencers.” I have heard young people say that this is the job that they aspire to, to be an influencer. Is this any kind of job for a grown person to be doing?