In the competitive field of personal branding, Gregory Gorgeous is considered a champ. His vlogs (like blogs, but with video), which consist mainly of cosmetics tutorials, have generated 25.6 million YouTube views, presumably by people who want to look like a Real Housewife of Orange County. I’ve watched the tilt of his Carol Brady hairdo and the gloss of his Kristen Stewart lips as he offers a lesson on thermal hair spray. “Stay gorgeous!” he says. I’ve also witnessed his account of the night he lost his iPhone in a club, a story that wends, for eight unbearable minutes, along a road to nowhere. Weakly leveraging the “born this way” message of the times, he makes paid and unpaid endorsements (though there’s never any distinction) for his “favourite things,” such as sparkly fuchsia platform pumps and a line called Swedish Skin, in his videos and on officialgregorygorgeous.com.
One of the countless young Canadians seeking fame and fortune in “lifestyle blogging,” Gorgeous kick-started his YouTube semi-celebrity as a bored sixteen-year-old in 2008, then followed a well-worn path to semi-riches: launch a YouTube channel, tweet about yourself (he counts more than 48,000 followers), secure sponsorship from advertisers, bask in the attention. He is part of a digital black hole that’s sucking up the most superficial minds of his generation, including a phalanx of aspiring PR girls who spend all day photographing themselves, a fraternity of party-hearty amateur rappers who hoist red plastic cups in a kind of ne’er-do-well salute, and platinum blondes who go by names like Raymi the Minx, and Lauren O’Nizzle (real name: O’Neil). On Lauren Out Loud, the latter blogs about dyeing her cat’s tail green, and her love of “kitty-cat videos”; this recent Toronto Star intern is now qualified to be, in her words, an “instructor of online journalism at a local college.” At twenty-six, she has a modest 6,200 Twitter followers, but she is a leading Blondebot (also her word) of the personal blogging scene, with a creative signature that does little more than establish how cute she looks in a tank top.
Gorgeous and O’Nizzle are only two of the attention-seeking asteroids careening through the universe of personal branding. What these kids have in common is a goal: to become a new order of quasi-socialite. What they stand for, sadly, is nothing.
This alone should irk the hell out of anyone who is older than they are, and it frequently does, particularly the glib fortysomethings of my peer group, who revel in damning shallowness. My people also profess to distrust all conspicuous self-promoters. So we can find no better target for our ire than kids who self-promote without so much as a product to sell.
But I’ve learned a few things about this axe we’re grinding: First, that protesting their inanity on the Internet is as futile as spearfishing with a toothpick. Second, that lifestyle bloggers haven’t cornered the market on being inane. And finally, that they weren’t just “born this way.” Okay — they were. But all little monsters were spawned by something. And that particular something is my Gen X. That’s right — it’s kind of our fault.
Grown-ups, here are the harsh tokes: We are the ones who made brands out of every nostalgic pop culture totem from Tootsie Rolls to Beavis and Butt-Head. We are the ones who started the irrational obsession with the concept of branding, by reading our copies of No Logo and lobbying for bike lanes while driving our Subarus to Starbucks. (It’s embarrassing when the worst cliché about your peer group is actually true.) We are a generation of both thumb-twiddling and eye-gouging ambition, who spent half of the ’90s resenting the boomers — for soaking up all of the riches and leaving us the scraps — and the other half thrashing around in the deep end of online enterprise.
Our resulting self-obsession encouraged the Millennials’ worst narcissism, yet still we scoff.
By many accounts, the concept of the personal brand was first introduced by marketers Al Ries and Jack Trout (both my parents’ age, as it turns out), with their 1987 book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, in which they advise corporate cogs to use a “positioning strategy to advance your own career.” I was in my twenties when that notion received a major public airing, in a 1997 article in Fast Company, then a new business magazine with its lens tightly focused on tech-driven start-ups. The dot-com universe was booming with overvalued companies that would soon implode, and although most of us didn’t have a clue what the Internet meant, we hoped it would result in gainful employment. The author of the Fast Company piece, management thinker Tom Peters (or “tompeters!” as he brands himself) exhorted readers to develop an indelible mark, like the Nike swoosh or the Starbucks siren. “It’s time for me — and you,” he wrote, “— to take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson that’s true for anyone who’s interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work.” Today his essay reads like Orwellian fiction, an eager fist pump for the commodification of the self. As for the locus of branding’s next boom, Peters identified the Internet.
The tech boom was about young people propelling themselves into the future, but unfortunately we were conditioned to our very core to wait our turn — for a tap on the shoulder that meant we could join the boomers in the traditional job market. Waiting had become a way of life; fearing unknown consequences, we practically invented putting things off. So our response to Peters’ call to arms was conflicted. First, inspiration (“I have to figure out my brand”), followed by panic (“I have to figure out my brand!”), followed by embittered defiance (“Who needs a bloody brand anyway?”).
In the decades after the Fast Company story, we became further discouraged by fear of failure: as people, at work, and eventually as parents. Instead of doing things, we jabbered on about our lives to anyone who would listen, voicing our “takes” more than any previous generation had, a penchant that gave birth to a ubiquitous breed of personal, confessional writing, from “young gal in the big city” columns in print to “young mom coping with Chardonnay” blogs online.
When a new generation appeared on the scene, with new media at their fingertips — and brimming with self-esteem, thanks to their poor, well-intentioned parents — they deftly realized the concepts we struggled to wrap our heads around. The supersize personas that emerged, kids who were self-assured and style obsessed, invited damning generalizations. But I’m looking for reasons to understand the monstrosities we created, and maybe even to cut them a little slack.
Toronto’s Casie Stewart is a pixie blonde with an ardent audience — 50,000 unique visitors to her blog, This Is My Life, and a Twitter following of over 7,000 — that consists of 60 percent young girls. That crowd, she says, tells her all the time how much she inspires them to be “positive” individuals whose purpose is to enjoy “the VIP life.” This entails attending openings and junkets, and promoting products (be they Puma shoes or Virgin America flights), often in return for free stuff. Air New Zealand recently sent Stewart to cover its fashion week, where she drank in the experience of riding around with a car and driver. When we meet, just after the Halloween weekend, she tells me she spent the day working at her friend’s vintage fashion store in downtown Toronto, in exchange for free clothes.
