Everyone’s a Sellout Now

When Rachael Kay Albers was shopping around her book proposal, the editors at a Big Five publishing house loved the idea. The problem came from the marketing department, which had an issue: She didn’t have a big enough following. With any book, but especially nonfiction ones, publishers want a guarantee that a writer comes with a built-in audience of people who already read and support their work and, crucially, will fork over $27 — a typical price for a new hardcover book — when it debuts.

It was ironic, considering her proposal was about what the age of the “personal brand” is doing to our humanity. Albers, 39, is an expert in what she calls the “online business industrial complex,” the network of hucksters vying for your attention and money by selling you courses and coaching on how to get rich online. She’s talking about the hustle bro “gurus” flaunting rented Lamborghinis and promoting shady “passive income” schemes, yes, but she’s also talking about the bizarre fact that her “65-year-old mom, who’s an accountant, is being encouraged by her company to post on LinkedIn to ‘build [her] brand.’”

The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections whenever you get promoted; for others, it’s asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it’s crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram. And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist.

We like to think of it as the work of singular geniuses whose motivations are purely creative and untainted by the market — this, despite the fact that music, publishing, and film have always been for-profit industries where formulaic, churned-out work is what often sells best. These days, the jig is up.

Corporate consolidation and streaming services have depleted artists’ traditional sources of revenue and decimated cultural industries. While Big Tech sites like Spotify claim they’re “democratizing” culture, they instead demand artists engage in double the labor to make a fraction of what they would have made under the old model. That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.

“Authors are writing these incredible books, and yet when they ask me questions, the thing that keeps them up at night is, ‘How do I create this brand?’” says literary agent Carly Watters. It’s not that they want to be spending their time doing it, it’s that they feel they have to. “I think that millennials and Gen Xers really feel like sellouts. It’s not what they imagined their career to look like. It inherently feels wrong with their value system.”

Because self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to “build a platform;” we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream — working for yourself and making money doing what you love. The labor of self-promotion or platform-building or audience-growing or whatever our tech overlords want us to call it is uncomfortable; it is by no means guaranteed to be effective; and it is inescapable unless you are very, very lucky. (...)

You can see this tension play out in the rise of “day in my life” videos, where authors and artists film themselves throughout their days and edit them into short TikToks or Reels. Despite the fact that for most people, the act of writing looks very boring, author-content creators succeed by making the visually uninteresting labor of typing on a laptop worthwhile to watch. You’ll see a lot of cottagecore-esque videos where the writer will sip tea by the fireplace against the soundtrack of Wes Anderson, or wake up in a forest cabin and read by a river, or women like this Oxford University student who dresses up like literary characters and films herself working on her novel. Videos like these emulate the Romantic ideal of “solitary genius” artistry, evoking a time when writing was seen as a more “pure” or quaint profession. Yet what they best represent is the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume.

It’s precisely the kind of work that is uncomfortable for most artists, who by definition concern themselves with what it means to be a person in the world, not what it means to be a brand. There’s been a fair amount of backlash to this imperative, recently among musicians on TikTok. (...)

The system works great for record labels or publishing houses, who can hand over the burden of marketing to the artists themselves. But that means, as Montgomery says, “If you have absolutely no knowledge of video creation, good fucking luck.” The labor of making TikToks — and if you want to reach the most people in the shortest amount of time, TikTok is pretty much the only place to go — requires both tedium and skill. You’ve got to get used to the app’s ever-evolving editing features, understand the culture of the platform, make yourself look presentable but not too presentable or risk coming off as inauthentic, prepare for and practice what you’re going to say, but again, not too much. And you’ve got to do it again and again and again, because according to every single influencer ever, the key to growing your audience is posting consistently.

More than that, you’ve got to actually spend your time doing this stuff on the off chance that the algorithm picks it up and people care about what you have to say. You’ve got to spend your time doing this even though it’s corny and cringe and your friends from high school or college will probably laugh as you “try to become an influencer.” You’ve got to do it even when you feel like you have absolutely nothing to say, because the algorithm demands you post anyway.

by Rebecca Jennings, Vox | Read more:
Image: Eleni Kalorkoti for Vox
[ed. Plus, it helps if you're good looking. See also: Are These Recipes Good, or Is the TikTok Chef Just Good-Looking? (NYT):]

"In an article for IZA World of Labor titled “Does It Pay to Be Beautiful?” Eva Sierminska and Karan Singhal explained that “empirical results support the fact that ‘better-looking’ people receive a wage premium, while those with ‘below-average’ looks incur a wage penalty.” In their overview of the research on the beauty premium, they said that men actually faced a greater plainness penalty than women did. They also found that being attractive was especially important in jobs dealing with customers, because customers preferred to deal with attractive salespeople and waiters, and that as a result, more attractive people gravitated toward those kinds of jobs.

In a sense, when anyone puts a video on social media, anyone who consumes it is a customer. But on top of individual human preferences for beauty, there is also an algorithm’s invisible sorting. (...)

That said, he thought there’s more pressure lately for people with all sorts of expertise (or no expertise) to put themselves in their content. So let’s say you’re an expert in Excel spreadsheet hacks. Whereas once you might have just put the spreadsheet on the screen, now you’re putting your mug on there, too. “I’ve definitely spoken to many younger people on TikTok, and they say that there’s more pressure to put your face on the internet to make a TikTok,” Chayka said. “You need to put yourself, your full corporeal body online in a way that wasn’t necessary with Twitter, for example, or Tumblr or even early-days Instagram.”