What Happens When We’re All Brands?
The world doesn't need one more person playing a character
I’m a big fan of a UFC fighter by the name of Colby Covington. Covington is an amazing fighter, but he admittedly has kind of a boring style. Covington has superhuman cardio and amazing wrestling, but not a lot of power. So, he wins his fights via pressure. He’s constantly in the other guy’s face, pressing him against the fence, wearing him down, and is throwing lots of light punches. Eventually, the other guy wears down and Colby is able to get the win, usually by decision. Well, despite the fact that Covington is one of the best fighters in the sport, the UFC was about to release him because he wasn’t exciting enough. So, Covington decided to create a persona for himself:
“I’ve never told this story before but three fights ago, before I fought the No. 2 guy in the world, this guy named Demian Maia in Brazil, they had told my manager Dan Lambert that they weren’t going to re-sign me. They didn’t like my style; they didn’t like that I wasn’t entertaining. This is before I really started to become an entertainer and really understand the entertainment aspect of the business. Before this fight, they told me no matter what happens, I was ranked No. 6 in the world, we’re not re-signing you, we don’t like your character, we don’t like your fighting style. And I’m getting paid $30,000 to go fight the No. 2 guy in the world. After you pay taxes and pay your coaches you’re really going to get $5000 or $10,000. So, I go out there and I beat him up and leave him in a pool of blood in Sao Paulo, in his home city. I shoot this promo on the Brazilians and say, ‘You guys are all a bunch of filthy animals and Brazil you’re a dump.’ So, I go and shoot this promo, and I wasn’t supposed to have my job, but that promo goes so viral on the Internet, that the UFC’s like, we have to keep him, we have to re-sign him because that promo is so big. So that’s what saved my career and that was the turning point of my career. The rest has been history.”
From there, Colby started wearing cheap suits, insulting everyone like a wrestling “heel,” coming up with ridiculous nicknames for his opponents, and shouting about how much he loves Donald Trump.
How much of this is the real Colby and how much of it is an act? It’s hard to really say for sure. In fact, after Colby lost to Kamaru Usman, with whom he supposedly had a ferocious rivalry, he essentially “broke character” talking to him in the right and told him, “It’s all love for you. It’s all about making money nothing but love for you.”
What you are seeing from Colby there is nothing new. Wrestlers have been doing it for decades and yes, we all understand that Mick Foley doesn’t truly have multiple personalities and the Undertaker isn’t actually some unholy dead man who lives to spread evil or be a biker or whatever his last character was before he retired. We all also understand that corporations aren’t really the brands that they try to portray themselves as on TV. Whatever face Coca-Cola, Disney, and Google may show to the public, we all understand that their 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th priorities are making as much money as possible. What is new over the last decade or so is that because of social media, it’s not just the celebrities and corporations that have started taking on personas.
We’re all brands now.
Not you? Really? Are you sure? Here’s a little something I wrote about this subject a few years ago. Read it and see if you can relate:
If you look at my Facebook pictures, they’re all of me traveling. I’m at the Eiffel Tower. Here’s me decked out with my hot girlfriend at the Empire State Building. Woah, there’s me with Alcatraz in the background. You don’t see me, right now, without a shower, wearing sweats and a t-shirt in a messy room, grinding out this column while my girlfriend is pissed at me.
Are people getting “the real you” on social media? Not at all. They’re getting the image of you that you want to present to the world. It’s no different than the fast-food restaurant showing mom looking pleased with herself while her perfectly behaved, smiling children happily wolf down burgers or the guy having the time of his life drinking beer with his friends while hordes of attractive women look at him like he’s a famous movie star who just made a billion dollars. That’s not real. Neither is what you see on social media in most cases.
For the most part, what we see is a Potemkin village, a false construct, a fake presentation of what life is like for people. Do you know how I know they’re fake? Because I’m out in the world, meeting real people, and guess what? They’re not going to parties every night. They haven’t been to New York, Paris, and Los Angeles this week. They’re also, if I may be so blunt, not huge @ssholes like most of the people are on Twitter. If you judged other people by Twitter, you’d think the country was on the verge of a race war, “Karens” are standing around with 91 punched into their phones waiting to hit that last 1, and that every disagreement leads to an outraged shout fest.
Sure, those people exist, but how many of them are there? For that matter, how many of the “people” you see on social media platforms like Twitter are actually real human beings?
…The median average percentage of fake Twitter followers appears to be 41 percent for political figures of all stripes and ideologies. For example, 43.8% of Hillary Clinton’s Twitter followers are fake, 40.9% of Barack Obama’s Twitter followers are fake, 41% of Al Gore’s Twitter followers are fake and 41.5% of Mike Pence’s Twitter followers are fake. From this perspective, the percentage of President Trump’s Twitter followers stands out as being especially high, but it’s really just a matter of degree. Across the board, SparkToro is basically saying that 40% of the political Twitterverse is fake. And this was back in 2018! Now that political discourse is getting much strident and discordant than ever before, it’s not out of the range of possibility that we’re getting close to the 50% tipping point. Imagine that – half of what you see on Twitter is probably fake.
As you can see, not many. So, when people try to impress them, who do they think they’re impressing? Do you know who’s going to genuinely think more of you as a human being for being militant about masking, Ukraine, or your gender pronouns? Almost no one. Because even the real people know why people are doing it.
We’re drowning in a sea of phoniness. Everyone is blasting out messages designed to get affirmation, to send signals about who they are, and to sell themselves to the world. Those messages don’t necessarily have anything to do with who they really are. As the book Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy notes, we can’t even keep up with what the corporations are saying anymore, much less the fake images people are presenting to the world on Twitter:
In 1965 a typical consumer had a 34 percent recall of… ads. In 1990, that figure had fallen to 8 percent. A 2007 ACNielsen phone survey of one thousand consumers found that the average person could name a mere 2.21 commercials of those they had ever seen, ever, period. Today, if I ask most people what companies sponsored their favorite TV shows – say, Lost or House or The Office – their faces go blank.
Don’t get me wrong. I have friends who’ve parlayed their large Twitter accounts into Fox appearances and know women who get paid, well, at least in merch, to promote products on their Instagram posts. In a sense, those people have a reason to act like brands. The same goes for celebrities, politicians, and Elon Musk.
Do the rest of us? Really?
Do you know who’s not interesting? The person aiming the nasty insult at a celebrity on Twitter. Yet another person mouthing propaganda that they don’t understand. The latest boring person popping off a cutting remark they think is a nuclear bomb even though it’s really not even a firecracker. These are people acting like mindless drones hoping to catch the attention of other mindless drones and get a like or two for it. “Oh, you hate the same person I do! (Like).” “Har, har, Joe Manchin sucks and you insulted him! (Like).”
We live in a world desperately crying out for authenticity and yet we’re drowning in virtue signaling and tribalism. Instead of building a beautiful, meaningful, real life, people are playing a role on social media in exchange for likes. Instead of being who they really are, they’re so desperate for approval that they’re saying what they think people want to hear. Instead of building themselves into a person they can look at in the mirror with pride, they’re presenting the lie to the world that they think people want to hear.
Of course, it’s true that you are not going to get as much fake applause for being real on social media. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Do you want to be genuinely interesting? Do you want to be fulfilled? Forget about being a brand and say what you really think, be who you really are, and focus on becoming the best you that you can be, not the best image you can be. Your “nuanced” opinion won’t get as many cheers as going along with whatever the tribe is saying, but it will be more interesting, more real, and it will free other people up to be honest. Do you want to make real friends online? Give them a window into you, not the person who you want to pretend to be. Do you want to be a good role model for your kids? Do you want to change the toxic online culture? Do you want to help guide the world back to real dialogue instead of two sides shouting different propaganda at each other? Then be real. Be you.
I’m not going to tell you that’s always easy or that everyone will pat you on the back for doing it, but I will tell you that it’s good for you as a human and it’s what our society needs right now. Don’t let what Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy says happened to the corporations happen to you:
It was, and is, a depressingly true-to-life example of what’s going on today in TV commercials. There’s no originality out there – it’s too risky. Uncreative companies are simply imitating other uncreative companies. In the end, everyone’s a loser because we as TV viewers can’t tell one brand from the next.
The world doesn’t need one more NPC trying to impress everyone else. It needs you. The real, authentic you.
Since I don't participate in any social media, the only time I have to witness the cheap tawdriness if not downright vulgarity, and transparent fakery that is part and parcel of social media, is when I am reading something that provides a link to a tweet, or video. I scroll through the comments a little way before I have to stop because I can't take anymore - same with You Tube video comments, and many comment sections of random websites I visit. These commenters are NPC's, most of them empty of brains and souls, hence fakebots. I'm an NPC, myself, in that I only offer the real me to very limited exposure - a small number of friends, a few workmates, and my family with whom I socialize, plus a handful of websites, including your Substack and a few others, where I enjoy reading the comments and posting a few myself. I don't have time to be a brand. It's all I can do to just be me. Thanks for your essays and commentary on our culture, John. I really enjoy hearing your opinions, probably because you explain so well many of my own.
I hate to play the Luddite card all the time, but this essay validates my continuing decision to limit my engagement in social media. I don't have a smart phone, which makes me a retro crank to others. No Twitter, Instagram or Facebook for the reasons/examples John gives. My brand would probably be "leave me to hell alone," I wouldn't even fly the "Don't tread on me" banner because I don't want the attention. I think that's why progressive owned cars are festooned with bumper stickers; mine has none. Just yesterday I was talking to a couple of friends, face to face, and I said to each; "if you could go back and change something, like Sarah Connors tries to do in Terminator 2 when she decides to kill Miles Dyson to stop Skynet, would you try to kill the internet for the coarsening and dumbing down of our culture?" Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, maybe, unless that "baby" has already been drowned? It certainly has infantilized our whole society.