idle gaze 057: self-curation is everywhere
Wherever there's an attention economy, there's personal branding.
The cult of personal branding continues to reign supreme, and its latest visible manifestation can be seen everywhere on the streets of Berlin.
Standing in the queue of a local coffeeshop, among the largely monochrome attire, someone is wearing a cheerful pink top, with the following handwritten message scrawled in a sharpie: “looking for an apartment or a room in Berlin”. The public announcement is rounded off with a wonky, but affectionate smiley.
Meanwhile, on the street outside, among fading club posters, a neat, freshly applied flyer on a lamppost advertises in German - in similar vein - “dear people, I am looking for a shared flat”. Budget: €600. Location: ‘preferably’ in one of the central districts. Alongside the message, a picture portrait featuring a friendly looking guy in glasses and a hoodie, smiling, on best behaviour. This one too features an endearing, wonky smiley face.
Later that day, on TikTok, a video appears on my For You page featuring a cut-out style animation of two people, who introduce themselves as Elena and Gianpaola, looking for an apartment in the city. The voiceover continues to explain that they are “two young talented designers. We have jobs and a stable income. We are hard workers, and we are clean, we shower. We like to cook and dance, but also know how to chill”.
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For anyone who lives in the city, these personal ads won’t come as a surprise. The German capital’s rental market is currently plagued by extreme shortages and demand. For most newcomers (as well as many not-so-newcomers bouncing around temporary places), the frantic search for a rental property is a mandatory rite of passage. In many ways, it can feel like a baptism of fire, a cruel quest to prove you have the resilience to survive the grit of the city, whittling out the weak.
This quest usually requires detective-level trawling of accommodation websites, frantically copying and pasting messages of interest. And then, if you’re lucky, you’ll be invited to the apartment viewing, which then often involves queuing with 200 other hopefuls on a cold, rainy Saturday morning, praying you’ll make it through the front door before someone secures their deposit with the agent.
So it’s perhaps no surprise that those in search of an apartment are instead turning to guerilla, grassroots marketing to circumvent the rental rat race and increase their chances of hitting jackpot.
But these flyers, messages and videos popping up around the city are more than just personal advertisements - they’re also masterful exercises in public image curation. It’s clear that the home seekers have thought carefully about the image they wish to present to the world around them, in the hope of capturing the attention of a home owner or sub-letter looking for a responsible and pleasant tenant to entrust their space with.
Through careful communication of personal details that imply responsibility and a certain degree of normality, combined with polite smiles, great effort is taken to come across as pleasant and friendly enough to interact with, yet clean, tidy and responsible enough to instil confidence that bills will be paid on time.
In modern life, we cannot escape the cult of the “personal brand”. For wherever we compete for attention, we must become masters of curating our self-image, hiding shortcomings, accentuating favourable traits, giving off a good vibe.
The need for a personal brand wasn’t always this ubiquitous. It originated first in the realm of professional life, introduced to the world in a Fast Company piece from 1997 titled “The Brand Called You”. The article argued that “today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand.” The hyper-individualisation of modern society had found it’s calling in the workplace. Suddenly, workers were not merely employees, but marketable commodities.
Then, with the advent of online dating, fuelled by algorithmic matching, opening up a seemingly limitless choice of potential matches, the personal brand seeped into the arena of love. Finding a life partner suddenly required meticulously shaping and finessing the strongest possible value proposition, involving a careful curation of images and personal information in the dating profile.
And now, in moments of property shortage, our image as prospective home dwellers is now also being taken over by the cult of the personal brand.
But there’s a unique tenderness to this particular flavour of self-marketing. It’s tinged with an aura of vulnerability, which stands in stark contrast to the cocky confidence required of ones personal brand at work. And unlike the cool, effortless swoon required of a dating profile, with the home seeker, there’s always a slight whiff of nervous, desperate energy.
And of course it feels vulnerable - out of all the personal brands, it’s the one situated lowest on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Unlike our work persona, tied to our pursuit of status & recognition, or our romantic personal brand, connected to a yearning for love & belonging, the home seeker persona is linked to one of our very most basic physiological needs; the need for shelter.
And in many ways, this is the most personal form of personal branding, because the search for a home is also the search for an identity. Our apartments, streets, neighbourhoods and cities shape who we are. People don’t exist independently of a place. Places bring out who we are. As the philosopher Mary Graham declares: "I am placed, I am located, therefore I am".
So this all begs the question, if the way we work, love and inhabit our homes are so integral to who we are - why do we have to go to such lengths to meticulously and consciously mould and shape them? Why do we have to engage in such deliberate acts of performative self-presentation, projecting a persona based on what we think other people will admire, approve of and buy into?
As Debbie Millman, a designer and brand consultant noted in her critique of personal branding; when a person turns themselves into a brand, they forfeit everything that is truly glorious about being human. she argues that humans are “complicated, messy and inconsistent. We are remarkably imaginative. Sometimes we are generous, sometimes we are kind, sometimes we lie and cheat”. Personal brands on the other hand are perfect, consistent and agreeable. In reality we are none of those things.
As notions of ‘authenticity’ continue to gain currency across culture, it feels plausible that the omnipresent pressure to carefully curate a public image will subside at some point. The introduction of a post-personal brand world, where employers, future love interests and apartment subletters are drawn to LinkedIn accounts, dating profiles and home seeking ads that reveal, rather than hide the human messiness within. Or in Millman’s words, what if we imagined a world that “leaves the branding to brands, the living to the living.”
Sidenote:
The latest issue of OFF Magazine has now hit the newsstands (& online) - issue 4 features my zeitgeist column, this time an ode to bustling neighbourhoods. It explores the rise of 15-minute cities, the disappearance of 'third spaces' and the importance of the vibrant, organic layers of strangers, spontaneous encounters, and neighbours that define the soul of a place.