The Brand that is killing us
You are a brand.
These are some of the most dangerous words of the last decade. They’ve done an immense amount of harm to the western world.
About 10 years ago I sat in an MBA level class on social media. Before you ask, it was pointless, but that’s a different post. The professor told us that we were a brand and that we needed to actively control that brand. It wasn’t his fault, he was echoing the wisdom of the day. I read the same thing in countless marketing blogs and books over the next decade.
Man, did we eat that advice up. We pixel perfected our Insta accounts, nailed our Youtube content, concocted tasty tweets, snapped all the chats and ticked all the toks. We did it all right. We spun stories, built beautiful bios, and pinned perfection. People only saw what we wanted them to see, and it was beautiful.
And it broke us. As a society, it broke us.
It’s for the same reason that we’re all okay with a little road rage. People go postal in their Prius, because when we are in cars we aren’t human. Instead we are wrapped up in a package that makes us less human. We cease to be a person, we become a black BMW or a blue Sonata.
That’s what acting like a brand does to us online. When we act like a brand, we dehumanize ourselves. We take away the layers and complexity of our humanity to become little perfect packages. We stamp our name on the package and ship it off to the internet. Where it becomes even less human.
We do the hard work of dehumanizing ourselves, making it easy for the impersonal internet to complete the task.
And now, we reap the benefits. I’ve been watching as we tear each other apart online, we don’t even need anonymity to do it anymore. Our “friends” on facebook are just as likely to tear into our opinions as the strangers in the twittersphere. Our brand can be destroyed by having the wrong opinion, and more recently by not even expressing opinion.
It’s like high school all over again, but the stakes are much higher.
If we continue to be divided, we will be conquered, not by some mysterious outside force, but by our neighbors, friends, children, coworkers, relatives, and fellow citizens.
People talk about the warming of the climate as being an imminent danger, but the heat death of our society is already at the doorstep.
But this isn’t about fear. Fear won’t help us.
We can fix this, but it’s going to take courage.
We have to stop being the brand. We have to be genuinely, truly human again. We must stop fearing to show our failures and foibles. We have to show our weaknesses. We have to be willing to be judged, and judged harshly.
But wait, there’s more. This is probably the more difficult thing. We have to love our enemies. We have to stop seeing their brand, we have to stop seeing their tribe, and we need to love them. We need to love them enough, and show enough kindness that we start to see them, not as enemies, but as our brothers and sisters. And hopefully then they can see us as something more than the brand we’ve been so careful to cultivate. Maybe then we can all see others as humans again.
This doesn’t mean backing down, it means reaching out. We can stand firm in our principles while still embracing our enemies.
Till next time, remember, YOU are the masterpiece.
