The dangers of identity capitalism with Jia Tolentino
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Oh my God, this is humiliating. I've never had to do this, actually. Hey, it's Adam Graham. We're doing something different for this season of Work Life, my podcast with Ted. I'm still an organizational psychologist, and I still study how to make work not suck. But this season, we're pairing each of our regular episodes with a companion interview. It might be with an expert, a practitioner, or someone unexpected who can add a different perspective to our episode and build on and challenge what we said.

Today is our companion interview for the episode on personal branding. My guest is Gia Tolentino, writer at The New Yorker, screenwriter, and author of Trick Mirror. Gia's a brilliant observer of something last week's episode didn't do justice to, the pressure we all face to brand ourselves online.

Along with analyzing the problem, Gia's experienced it. I have made myself known to people through my writing, through social media. The place I want to start is to ask you, Gia, if you think you have a personal brand.

I think that I do. I think that I didn't realize the extent to which it was a sort of like, like an economically viable one until my book came out in 2019, at which point I tried to do whatever I could to retreat from having one. I have a strong personality that communicates extremely easily. I'm extroverted, especially for a writer. I am pretty much all on the surface. And I have a kind of personality that

is of the type of personality that did really well on the 2010s sort of dawn of surveillance identity capitalism internet. Long before TikTok and Instagram reels, Chia started off as a blogger. As social media algorithms began to shape how we interact online, it became easier for people to build a following around highly marketable personalities.

At that time, I was writing constantly on blogs and websites about whatever. And the only reason that I was able to get a job in media whatsoever, like I got my first media job, I was in grad school in Michigan, just blogging for free for a website called The Hairpin. And I was, I guess, like sufficiently funny on Twitter that I was brought into the fold of like this person could perhaps have a media career in a time that it was like extremely personality-based and kind of attention-based.

But then, you know, I mean, so much of what I've written about is about how this is bad, right? Like so much of what I wrote about was how I think that the social media internet and the architecture of this version of the internet is existentially destructive. And this like identity capitalism is, it's like soul destroying. In our last episode, we asked the question, should you ditch the personal brand?

Our experts discussed how personal branding can be both dehumanizing and ineffective for self-promotion. But in today's social media landscape, is it even possible to avoid having a personal brand? Even if you're not trying to build one, it often gets assigned to you. I definitely have never sat around and thought about like what is consistent with my personal brand. There are some kinds of personalities that like map really well onto performative structures and mine happened, maybe happens to be one of them.

The reason that I stopped writing in a certain way when my book came out was I realized that a path was in front of me to just become a fake hack person. The time in which I was writing the most on the Internet, it was like the girl boss era. And I always was like girl bosses bad, but I knew that I was sort of like adjacent enough. And so like the version of it that I was afraid was coming off was like fake.

cool girl who writes about late capitalism. It's like girl boss, but not really. But like she's meta about it or whatever. Like that was so horrifying to me that I was like, you have to get off Twitter and stop posting on Instagram. I certainly don't think of you that way, which I guess means this was successful brand management. Thank you. I have managed my brand. Yeah. Yeah. I would describe you as a cultural critic.

I think of you as unusually insightful, unusually witty, and occasionally unusually acerbic, too. Oh, thanks. That's not embarrassing at all. Talk to me a little bit about what is a personal brand and how is it different from being known for something? Hmm.

Well, I think that the most important delineation here has to do with market capture. Personal branding is completely identified with an economy in which the big tech companies trade on a model of commodified selfhood and personality and attention, where every social media platform is engineered to get people to act as if they are soon to be famous and

It's kind of been baked into the way that we use the Internet, that everything we look at, everything we say, every impulse we have, every desire to connect with someone, every desire to be seen, like these really human impulses are the foundation for this vast architecture of data scraping and data mining and ad targeting that is making what I think of as our deepest selfhood, the mind that is being mined by all of these companies that are profiting from it. Like they are making billions and billions and billions of dollars off of data.

tracking and selling against people's selfhood. And what we can get out of it in return is kind of a leg up via a viable personal brand. Like personal branding within this context is what people do to like carve out some benefit back for themselves. That's the difference is that it's not being known for something. It's living on the terms of surveillance capitalism and ourselves being the sort of last commodity left to like strip mine. Yeah.

That's such a helpful distinction. And I think to build on your point, it's not just the internet. At minimum, it's other screens too. I remember somebody asking me at some point, like, why is Michael Scott such a jerk as a boss on The Office? Like, he's not a jerk. He's got a documentary crew and he's performing for the camera and he thinks this is his ticket.

Right. I have to ask you, Gia, because you lived that, right? When you were a teenager, you were on reality TV. Yeah. Early days reality TV, right? This was... 2005. I think Survivor was a couple seasons old. Yeah. It was a month in my last year of high school. I went to Puerto Rico to film this like...

real-world road rules challenge type thing for teens. Is that part of what made you so jaded about personal branding? What did building a personal brand as a 16-year-old do to you? Not at all, actually, because I never watched the show until I was writing my book. The show was not on YouTube. It was pre-YouTube. And it's kind of what I was saying. Like, I've always...

had a strong personality. Like I charmed adults into like giving me scholarships to every educational institution I ever attended. I had like a just an instantly legible personality, I think. Like and I see it like I have a daughter that's exactly like me and it's

She's the same way. She's good at reading people. And it's pretty baked into who she is. And I was always like that. And I wanted to go on this reality show because I was sick. I'd been at the same school for 12 years in like deep Southern Baptist, like Bush era, sort of hellhole Houston, Texas. And I was just like, I'm dying to get out of here. And my little brother was at hockey practice at a mall and they were making casting tapes. And I just like walked in and made a tape. And then I got cast on the show and I got to

You know, go to Puerto Rico and play games and flirt and get drunk secretly. And that did not make me skeptical at all. It actually I think of it as kind of a pure experience because I just got to do it. It wasn't reflected back to me. I did not have the endless 24-7 ever extending experience.

unlimited audience panopticon that a 16-year-old now is dealing with with like one single post on Instagram. Like I did not ever have to watch, look at, or think about that ever again until I wanted to. Thinking about this as a psychologist, there was a body of research that was

In vogue in the 70s on what was called objective self-awareness. I don't know if you've ever come across this. The basic intervention was... No, I've never heard of objective self-awareness. The basic intervention was people are doing various kinds of tasks and having conversations and you just put a mirror in the room or not so that they're self-conscious in a way that they weren't before.

And the original finding was people's behavior changes dramatically when they can see themselves. 100%. And it's a little bit like why were mirrors put in elevators? Because people find themselves interesting and then the wait doesn't seem so long. But also people get weirdly self-conscious when they see their appearance and they don't like what's looking back at them. And anytime I've talked to people who've been on reality TV, they've said that goes away really quickly. You forget the camera is there.

Only the systems that we've built for people to build their personal brands, you never forget about the camera. You don't film a reel long enough that you lose sight of how you're going to look. When I think about the way that people engage with Instagram or TikTok, they're constantly kind of on and off, on and off. And so they never get to just fully experience. They're always performing.

Well, I, you know, we are speaking on a Zoom call. I have hid myself so I can't look at myself. That's the first thing I do on every Zoom call because I do not like the ability to look at myself because I know I will.

So much of the conversation on personal branding is about strategy. And to me, it's like the better way to hack through this whole thicket is just instinct. It's like, what makes you feel more human and what makes you feel less human? And looking at myself all the fucking time makes me feel bad. The times in my life in which I have felt most human have nothing to do with surveillance and absolutely nothing to do with self-surveillance. And I think there is a difference between a sort of traditional reality TV experience and the sort of perpetual self-broadcasting is that you actually aren't watching yourself.

You are aware that someone's filming you, but I did not have to watch myself if I didn't want to. When you are the one holding the phone and you're the one on both ends of that, you are managing your image, you are producing it, you are broadcasting it, you are manufacturing it. That's different. You've accepted the responsibility to be the commodity and the laborer and the manager also. Like, there's a really profound existential exploitation of the social media age. ♪

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I want to come back to commodified selfhood. I want to ask you to describe that a little more and talk about the inescapability of it. You've written about that in the past. I'm curious about whether you still think it's inevitable.

The thing that is inescapable is the fact that like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, all of these social media platforms are based around making every user feel that their personality is a market commodity. That like the purpose of being on these things is to be seen, liked, approved, appreciated.

by as many people as possible in a way that ideally translates into you getting some sort of economic benefit. And that's the entire framework of the major social media platforms. Then you have these other platforms where other aspects of our selfhood

like me Googling at 3 a.m. the super deep borehole in Siberia or whatever, all of that is tracked and monetized by corporate entities. There are probably a thousand companies that have tagged each of us with a unique digital ID number, with a matrix of data points about what we are most likely to be able to be manipulated into buying, doing, voting for, whatever. Every single search, every single purchase is

We have been functionally branded and isolated and targeted by all of these companies that seek to make money off of us in various ways. That part is inescapable. Our participation with the willing self-surveillance, that is the optional thing. Like people don't really post to Twitter anymore. Even the addicted journalists like myself, people stopped posting on grid on Instagram years ago, you know?

And so people have started to pull back and change. And I mean, we could also zoom out and say that a huge reason that personal branding has come to mean what it means is that there has been this great dissolution of like labor organization in this country for decades and decades and decades. There's so many frameworks through which we think of the good as being collective have vanished and disappeared. And so many people

frameworks in which our individual success is tied to other people's, which is like through unions. We don't have them anymore and they're going to be decimated over the next four years and they're already. And so there's like a profoundly atomized, isolated quality to American life that has an enormous amount to do with like the disappearance of civic organizations and unions and all these things. And so when people think about how to succeed, it's individually. Yeah.

There are plenty of people that are being exploited top down by a manager or a structure, but we are doing often just doing the exploitation of ourselves. Like we are self-exploiting with our phones. Like most of what we are doing on our phones is willing self-exploitation in the name of something like a personal brand.

And it's a sensible thing to do if this is what the economy has incentivized. And if the economy has closed off all of these other pathways to sort of finding your way and achieving security or whatever, then

Like so many of those don't exist. People kind of are like, OK, well, I better just go viral, you know, or like I better like have a good social media presence in case someone in my family gets cancer one day and I got to do a GoFundMe. So many sort of safety nets and collective threads have been cut that many people are left with self-exploitation as like one of the few viable paths to like try to transcend the kind of hellhole of American labor. Wow. Yeah.

I never thought about it that way. And it's striking how actively you resisted that. Why is there so much advice on the internet telling people they have to build a personal brand to succeed in their careers? What is it culturally that has made that message so popular and so pervasive now?

Well, I think it's kind of it's a pyramid scheme vibe for me. You know, it's sort of like, why are there so many YouTube tutorials teaching other people how to make money on YouTube? Right. It's like I've entered the machine. I have put some stock into the machine. And there is a built in incentive to try to get other people to buy into the machine maximally so that your own buy in is rendered profitable.

more sort of solid and valid. But then it also goes to the overarching thing where the question of success has been so utterly reduced to the individual promoted as a brand. There is no faith that you can be part of a company that will treat you well. There is no faith that you get a good job and it'll last. The avenues towards a sense of economic stability and professional security are

You know, those have been cut off at the knees since the 80s. And here's the logical endpoint. I think that's right. Recently, I was with a group of YouTubers, Mr. Beast level YouTubers, who I figured would have the least precarity of anyone in the online economy.

And the overwhelming theme of their questions was, how do we get predictability and reliability? Like our lives are too dependent on an algorithm. One thing changes and our entire livelihood could fall apart. And I think that just underscores that even the people who seem to be winning the commodified self game feel like they're hanging on by a thread unless they can build a business or some kind of sustainable source of income around that. Right.

Right. And it's I think it's emblematic of the fact that we can't claw a sufficient amount back from the surveillance economy to balance out what it claws from us as individuals and as a whole.

At the risk of now making your reflection visible to you, I just want to read you something you said a few years ago on Book Tour. Oh, no. I found it very thought-provoking, and I think it foreshadowed your reaction to this self-exploitation as you describe it. You said, I quote, "...I refuse to be told that my personality is a brand strategy."

Someone asked me at a Q&A what my strategy would be for other people who are looking to cultivate a personal brand around authenticity. And that ruined me. That existentially ruined me. Well, that was like pre-revelation that whether, like it didn't matter whether I thought of my personality as brand strategy or whether it actually is. It is simply my personality.

But I do have this vague memory of someone being like, what advice would you have for someone else that's looking to cultivate a personal brand around authenticity? That's an oxymoron. And I was like, if you're asking that, you've already lost. If you're asking about how to adjust your personality and way of living strategically, I don't know. To me, that's just...

It kind of has to do with the difference between like a means and an end. Everything should be an end in itself. Like everything we do should be worthwhile just as humans. Like just try to be more thoughtful and interesting and careful and whatever. Like all of this is worth it as an end, not as a means to entrap a person.

I think about this. I somehow ended up with a job at The New Yorker when I was in my late 20s, which would have been absolutely inconceivable to me, like even two years before that. Like I didn't write in college. I didn't do media internships. I never lived in New York. I didn't know anybody there.

And whenever I talk to college students or high school students about writing, which I do quite a bit, they're like, what is my strategic path? And sometimes they ask similar questions like, how do I sort of cultivate a personal brand around authenticity or whatever? And I'm like, if I had tried to have a career in journalism as an end in itself, if I'd been like, OK, I want to work at The New Yorker by the time I'm 29, there's no way I would have gotten there.

But I was like, what I did was just try to do interesting things and try to write interesting things for the sake of writing interesting things to see if I could get better at writing. And that was the only way I could have ended up with my job. So even if from the mercenary sort of retconned, like, what is the best strategy, quote unquote, I don't think it is to have one. Like, I think it's to just be...

And to see what you can do every single day to bring your actions in line with your deepest instincts and capabilities. And that's the most amazing thing about being alive and being human. And it's the thing that is elided and precluded entirely by the idea of like, how do I cultivate a brand strategy to get here?

I just remember being like, wow, if we're thinking about how to like pitch deck our way to authenticity and we can say that with a straight face, we're really, really losing the plot. It's sort of like be brave enough to just actually do what feels correct to your deepest instincts.

It reminds me a little bit of what was originally a John Stuart Mill observation about happiness, which John Kay then built into a whole theory in obliquity, which is that the best things in life can only be pursued indirectly. Yeah. And if you aim at them, whether they're happiness or success or, to your point, authenticity, then you're just going to end up...

Sort of missing out on the very things that you would naturally do that are aligned with your values and your interests that are better suited to getting you where you want to go. Yeah. And the harder you try to project something, the less it becomes possible to feel it. I think that's so self-evident. It's so obvious. It's like...

The harder anyone is trying to project happiness, like the bigger the sort of trap door grows beneath them. Yeah. And this, I think in some ways, this is one of the big lessons of emotional labor research, which is by definition, if you're focused on projecting a feeling, you're doing surface acting where you're like, okay, like how do I make the right face? Or how do I display the right body language? Yeah.

Whereas if you want to look authentic, it's much more effective to engage in deep acting, which is how do I actually feel what I want to show? And that, I think, to your point, is about how do I become the person I want to be as opposed to how do I create the image I want to project? Right. And I guess it's like, how do I separate my own incentives from the incentives that are being pushed on to me by market structures? And that's a real question. And that's a human question. But it's almost like

A lot of language has gotten in the way for people to even perceive that that's the question they're really asking. Like, and I often think when people are like, how do I become happy? You know, the question is often like, how do I find meaning? We just did an episode on what goes wrong when people try to build personal brands. Is there anything you disagreed with or wanted to react to? It wasn't that I disagreed with it, anything. I think everything you guys said was right. It's more like, to me, what is convincing to me

What would work on me is not like as soon as anyone starts telling me like what I should do for better outcomes, like I'm out, you know, but that's my personality and I seek everything out kind of obliquely. And so I'm just saying like what would personally work on me is not someone telling me it doesn't work. People can tell it's fake. What works on me is like instinctive human feeling. And to me...

Perhaps that is the most convincing case against the whole paradigm is not like whether it's successful or how to like adjust in a way that makes it more honest. Like it's a question of like does it does anything you're doing at any given time make you feel more human or less. And a lot of work inherently makes us feel less human like a lot of work.

places people into structures like this whole conversation doesn't apply to someone that's being tracked going around an Amazon warehouse for 12 hours a day. A lot of work is just inherently dehumanizing. But if you're within the kind of field where this conversation is applicable to you, then you inherently have enough freedom to

arguably, to redirect the question into like, how am I going to live in this world and do the thing that I have potential to do in a way that makes me feel like good and honest and human and genuinely interested in it? And I think that that would not, in the year of Our Lord 2025, that would not lead a lot of people into like, how do I improve my personal brand territory? Yeah, that's fascinating. It

I think my approach, I guess my instinct as an organizational psychologist is always to Trojan horse. Hey, this thing that you're doing to achieve success is actually not effective the way you think it is. And so let's meet a bunch of people where they are. But I think your approach is, I mean, it's more principled as opposed to pragmatic, right? Of saying like, forget whether this works or not. What does it do to how you feel? I think it's pragmatic long-term though. I'm trying to avoid a point in my life where like,

I look back on the previous however many years and I'm like, man, I'm full of shit. Like, I'm really just trying to avoid that. Like, that's a primary objective in my life. You actually anticipated where I was going, which is you're saying essentially, let's think about this less strategically and let's think about it more emotionally.

I think so, yeah. And I'm like, yeah, there's something to that. I like it. At the same time, I think all of us, in order to express our values, end up doing things that make us profoundly uncomfortable.

And I don't care in the moment. Like, does this make me feel human? No, it actually feels like getting on stage for like 10 years as a shy introvert made me feel profoundly terrible in every possible way. And yet I was okay with it because I care deeply about sharing knowledge and building relationships with students. And so it felt authentically inauthentic. Like I'm being false to my personality to be true to my values.

And the reason I did it was not because it made me feel a certain way in the moment, but rather because I knew I would look back and feel like I'm proud of the way I spent my time. Yeah. And I just, I wonder, I guess to the extent that you're outlining an alternative to building a personal brand, your version of it is, does it make me feel human now? Yeah.

My version of it is, am I going to look back and say this was worth it? This is a good reflection of what matters to me. And it sounds like you're actually on board with both. I'm a profound believer in doing things that make you unbelievably uncomfortable, like being on stage or whatever. Writing is one of the deepest pleasures I ever have in my life, in part because I find it agonizing and a really important kind of agony. But I just, I do think that question of instinct...

is sometimes cast to the side and that strategy can overtake. Like strategy is like, how do I get to an end versus like maybe most of what we do, we should be able to find an end in itself. Ideally, that's what we want is for a lot of this to feel like the work of a discarded draft, something I work on for five days and I'm like, it's dog shit, I'm throwing it away. That's not a failure because the work was an end in itself.

It wasn't a strategy to like get me more visible or whatever. Yes. And so what I'm taking away from your perspective is the alternative to a personal brand strategy is to focus more on your identity.

And part of that is asking, does this feel like me today? Is this expressing something that I'm interested in right now? And part of that is asking, who do I want to become tomorrow? And is this helping me move closer toward the person I aspire to be? Yeah. And you know what I mean? Like, I was interviewing George Saunders once, and he talked about word choice, like so much of the discipline of being a writer. Yeah.

is that you have this kind of carefully vibrating tuning fork and you're able to like use it on every word, every sentence. And you have become sensitized enough to how something rings. Does it ring true or is it hollow? Has the life gone out of it? And then you cut it if it is. And I think of a lot of the project of just like being a person as developing that, but about your own life. That's kind of what I'm thinking about. Like, ideally, we get it to a point where

We know on the inside, not from the outside. We know from the inside what we're doing and what we want to do and what will feel right and what will be interesting, what will be hard for good reasons, what will be hard for bad reasons. I think that's like really what I'm thinking about is like if one is lucky enough to have some sort of freedom in one's professional life.

It seems like that's the best way to govern it is just like the same sort of instinctive yes or no thing that many of us apply to much more granular decisions in our, like for me, word by word. For an architect, it's shape by shape, right? Like it's that kind of instinctive quality that we often hone in really specialized areas that kind of feels like it should be applicable to how we live. ♪

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Just to speak to the practical concerns that some people have of

Okay, I get that personal branding does not serve me, but I still need to get my work out there. I don't want to be boxed into a brand. How do you think about that, Gia? I think I probably have bad advice about this because writing is one of those things where the work can, should, and does speak entirely for itself. Yeah, it's what I love most about it. I have found myself in sort of mentorship positions where I don't really have...

Great advice for this because my advice for it is just like focus on your work. If your work is impeccable, people will come. And I am a believer in that to a pretty significant extent. There is an acupuncturist that has been passed around to 50 to 60 of my friends because she's so good. Just by text message, here's her Gmail, like email Paula, she'll get it done. How would I negotiate this if I was in a different kind of field and I was really, really averse to the idea of self-promotion?

I don't know. I guess ultimately the goal of personal branding is to get other people to feel like they are connecting with you, right? That they know you, that you're legible to them, that you are appealing to them, and they want more. This is just like a function of human connection. And I guess in those circumstances, I would just be looking for like, how can I connect to more people? Like, what are things that I can do that can put me

in community with people that are trying to do the same things that I'm doing, what are the ways in which it appeals to me to try to do that? What are the ways where it's like easy, manageable, honest to try to do that? And presumably anyone could find some version of that. I like it. Gia, you're a careful observer of cultural trends.

And you're part of them without drinking the Kool-Aid and are able then to hold up a mirror. I guess it would be ironic if you couldn't, given the trick mirror was your book. But you're able to hold up a mirror in a way that seems like it's a thoughtful insider as opposed to just a dismissive outsider. Thanks. I mean, I feel like I...

deliberately and also inadvertently simultaneously milked the shit out of whatever I could get out of the 2010s internet and then was like, oh, I have still let it take too much from me. I haven't suffered by any means from it. I've really only benefited. But spiritually, it became like incredibly clear. Like even just my own usage of social media, I was like, I always have to be taking more from it than it's taking from me. It's fascinating to me because I think about it so differently. Yeah.

which is I only want to do this if it feels like I'm giving. I resisted the idea of being on Instagram as long as I could. I was like, okay, I can put my ideas and studies on Twitter. I get it. It's worked. What value does Instagram have? She's like, am I going to post selfies as a public intellectual? No, no. I reject the premise.

And then I had a former student say, people are like screenshotting your tweets and putting them on Instagram. Like that might as well come from your account. And I was like, oh, I can take pictures of my words. Okay.

And then it kind of morphed into this, all right, like I said something that people, you know, found helpful in a Q&A. Why don't I broadcast that? I've got an idea that I think might be article worthy. Let me try the first few sentences of it and see if the audience is interested in it. And that'll help me figure out of the nine articles I'd love to write this week, is this one of interest to people other than me?

And that doesn't feel commoditized in that if I think about the Venn diagram of what I care about and what my audience is interested in, the list is too long if I just prioritize what I care about. So this is a helpful filter. What do you think about that as an alternative way to engage with this surveillance capitalism problem?

I think it's the same thing because you're taking from it what you want. You are getting from it something you want. Like what you want is a platform through which there's like an idea exchange and a kind of giving. That's still something you want. Inherently in my job, I want to communicate certain ideas successfully. My ability to do that is part of what I put in that sort of like taking bucket. Like if I'm able to do something that I want, I'm getting something out of this platform. If what we want is security,

for ourselves and like economic security for ourselves. There's like a lot of other ways in which we could seek to build that that aren't just located in the self. Like I'm just like unionize your workplace if you can try to unionize it. Like that's how we get security. I make half of my living by screenwriting only because that union has made it such that it is possible to kind of play around with

and try to do things and have health insurance that four people in my family are on. Like a lot of the conversations I've had about personal branding, especially with young people, what's underneath it is a more existential question of like, how do we find purchase on this world? And how do I feel like what I'm doing matters? And I just think that there are a lot of ways that we are better off finding that together than alone. ♪

Beautifully put. Well, Gia, this was every bit as eye-opening and fun as I hoped. Thank you for having me on to rant about the subject. I will take a Gia Tolentino rant anytime on any subject. Thank you.

This episode was produced by Brittany Cronin. Our team includes Daphne Chen, Constanza Gallardo, Greta Cohn, Grace Rubinstein, Daniela Balarezo, Ben Ben-Cheng, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Heilash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Sarah Bruguere. Original music by Hansel Su and Alison Leighton-Brown.

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