Brand, Identity, and the Social Media Matrix
in which I discuss the hall of mirrors that social media has become and the sad fact of being trapped there as artists
Long, long ago, in a society far away, people made art without thinking about algorithms, or hashtags, or “digital brand identity.” They just made the things they felt compelled to make and then released those weird, wild little creations into the world to fare as they may, which, hopefully, was well. There was no pressurized campaign to create a claustrophobic identity capsule represented by neat little squares on a photo app, or peddle politically-correct Current Things in order to get followers pumped into your ecosystem by a computer code.
Hello, I’m here to rant. Like and subscribe if you, too, are fed up with the rat race. (And if you’re here for the irony.)
“Identity” has become so corporatized that it’s nearly impossible to form real, human connections through art anymore. Every creator must have a “brand” that they strictly adhere to: a ritual they perform to appease the algorithmic gods that govern the society which we unfortunately inhabit. Deviate from the predictable cycles and pathways that have been etched into the collective psyche, and you’ll find yourself dumped from the speeding train into a ditch.
I’m so tired of feeling boxed in every time I get online to share thoughts, or try to connect; to be human, I guess. (Maybe the internet isn’t a place for humans, but perhaps that’s another topic for another time.) For now, it’s where people are, and it’s where you have to be, too, if you want to have any hope of sharing the things you create. And, on some level, it feels wrong to complain, because the internet—and specifically social media—has given us creative people opportunities we’ve never had in the past. Finally, there’s a back door into the industry that isn’t as heavily guarded by the denizens of the ivory tower. It isn’t all bad—just psychologically.
The pressure to be a certain person, or, really, part of a certain person in a certain space is crushing. On Instagram, I’m a “book account” (hahahahaha, you think, but it’s true, or it was once); on Twitter, I get more political because, well, it’s Twitter. On Substack, I do…whatever this is.
The truth is, I came to Substack because I felt less pressured to have a “brand identity,” or to conform to one topical stream. It felt more like a place where I could just scream into the void about the things I wanted to, without feeling like all of those things had to match all of the time. Without feeling like I was stifling my identity in order to sell a product. It seemed like, here, it was okay to be a patchwork human, as we all are.
The social media matrix has a death-grip on our society, and on our individual minds. It’s like the verse in Hotel California that goes, “Mirrors on the ceiling / pink champagne on ice, and she said / “We are all just prisoners here / of our own device / And in the master’s chambers / they gathered for a feast / They stab it with their steely knives / but they just can’t kill the beast.”
Eagles drummer, Don Henley said about that song: “It was really about the excesses of American culture […] But also, it was about the uneasy balance between art and commerce.” Unfortunately, this web has become such an intrinsic part of our world that you can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.
For good or ill, if you want to share the things you create, you have to be Online. As an author, having social media is a necessary evil, and, at times, it can be difficult to even sense your own true identity beneath the algorithmic haze. Why are you here, again? What is it you really want to do? What is it you really came to say? Why did you start making art in the first place? Eventually, it can become hard to remember what compelled you before you got tangled up in this mess of likes and comments and cheap dopamine hits. The serotonin floods your brain and you do more of the thing that makes that happen—even if it isn’t the thing you originally set out to do. Who even are you anymore?
It's hard to be independent in this realm. It’s like a hall of mirrors: everything reflects everything else, and you’re lost in the maze. No matter which way you turn, there are only more layers. You are known by the trends you follow, the politics you align with, and the hashtags you use. Who you are underneath all of that is nearly irrelevant.
I don’t know what we do about this, precisely. On some level, I do get the sense that other people feel the same way I do: they want an escape from it all. They want to go back to a simpler, more human time. Before you had to be A Brand in order to be Somebody. When your identity wasn’t comprised of a series of pretty little squares in a grid. And I think that, slowly but surely, the old conventions about “finding your niche” and “building your brand” as an individual are beginning to fade out of fashion as people seek an exit from our overly-corporatized society.
As always, there has to be a balance between art and commerce. You’ve got to be able to build an audience and sell your work if you want to eat. But something tells me that people are getting tired of seeing other people as commodities rather than connections. And I hope that, somehow, we’ll be able to start seeing ourselves without those filters again, also.