For Sale: Personal Brands & Commodity Lives
Modern marketing changes language and machinery but not its
material foundation, which existed long before the industrial age. An allegedly
“new” economy of information technology - IT - is just an update with different
jargon and tools but the profit and loss substance remain exactly what they’ve
always been: great for some, nice for many, and terrible for the earth and most
of its people.
Consuming at the market is the same whether walking, riding
a horse or driving a car to get there, ordering on a phone or tapping a keyboard.
Fewer and cheaper workers result in more profits from new forms of automation,
which bring greater loss to those no longer employed. Along with being replaced
by machines, exporting jobs to cheaper foreign labor markets and importing cheap
foreign labor to this market, we can add apps that act as hi-tech scabs by
displacing workers with phone-text-symbol manipulation. All these create
profits for private investors and loss for everyone else.
Sometimes, in contradiction to ruling dictates, people use
newer tech to communicate about things other than commercial consumption. These
steps toward real democracy have not yet been “branded", though they could help
create a product called social revolution in a transformed marketplace of the near
future.
Slavery, peasantry, wage labor and middle classes have been
means to an end for centuries. Machines, computers, cheap immigrants, native scabs
and other ways to put people out of work and get more private profits at public
loss are nothing new. The techniques change but the game is always the same:
lower costs for investors while increasing profits for them and their servant
class and telling those who absorb the loss to work harder and things will get
better for them. Or telling them to pray, see therapists, get drunk or get
stoned. If that doesn’t work and they resist, just kill them in the biggest
profit maker of them all: War.
Talk of “new” markets only means commodities with new
packaging or new labels being sold to still another consumer group with ads describing
old stuff with new terminology. The present global crisis of incredible wealth
amassed by a shrinking minority with expanding majorities carrying the loss has
created new jargon to rationalize such inequality as the will of market deities.
But sometimes the power centers revive old terms and unconsciously reveal more
than they would like about just what is going on. At least if we pay attention.
The all-encompassing term “branding” was initially used in
modern market-speak to make products out of all entities at the mall, including
those in what used to be considered a public sector, supposedly free of market
forces. Colleges, museums, and other real or imagined non-profit institutions
have spent tens of millions of dollars in order to fix their “brand” in
people’s minds and differentiate it – supposedly – from all similar products.
Brand names and branding have meant products, firms, businesses, and the
revived term “entrepreneur” – moving from economics classes into every day
thought – all involve lessons for individual endeavors in the market under this
all consuming term. Its original use was not quite the adventure in ego and
commodity glorification it has become. The creatures suffering the “branding”
did not find it romantic or pleasant.
Cattle – the cows and beef we milk and eat - had ownership
established by investors burning their initials-logos into the flesh – “branding”
– so that no one would confuse one owner’s cattle with another’s. They all
looked alike - packaging hadn’t yet
been invented and anyway they were animals - so there had to be a way of
establishing distinctions between different products, which is all they were
and, to an uncomfortable extent, we still are. And cattle rustlers – early crooks
who took far more risk than present financial swindlers – would have more difficulty
selling the beasts when burnt flesh revealed the “brand” of the original owner.
We’ve come a long way?
Now our owners don’t need to actually burn logos into our
flesh, since our minds are more easily accessible and invading them isn’t as
likely to cause us to retaliate as violently as we might against people who
would put us to the torch. But personal brain-branding has joined all the other
forms of marketplace consciousness controls, with people urged to differentiate
their “product” from others in the same way major firms and institutions
separate themselves from the alleged competition. It’s not by creating a
better, more reliable, longer lasting and healthier product, but by getting
people to believe their “brand” is far better than any other, despite the usual
lack of material evidence to back up such claims.
Thus we have athletes, entertainers, celebrities from all
walks of wealth and even folks selling “gourmet” food out of glorified
pushcarts all “branding” their products – their brawn, beauty, money, hot dogs -
to better claim what is called market share. Even that humane term – sharing –
has become a brand in profiteering as people claim a new “sharing economy” as a
brand in competition with less sharing marketeers, especially those with union
employees. An important part of the so-called new economy is what the old
economy taught it to dread; workers who organize and act in a democratic style
that contradicts market profits for their owner investor bosses.
We haven’t yet seen the term used to describe the real
nature of our economy – warfare – and if it were used we’d hear about hundreds
of thousands of humans in the Middle East being branded as “dead”, while
millions more would qualify for the brand “refugee”. And of course the
horrifying brand “terrorism”, the alleged cause of our most recent slaughters,
would acquire a negative cache as a product only to be seen as positive in
clandestine deals conducted by weapons merchants. They are always positive.
Perhaps our most negative brand, mass murder, will force us
to confront the horrors of life reduced to commodities bought and sold and move
us to strip humanity of divisive marketing labels and finally face the unity of
people. Along with new product names like democracy and social revolution we
might develop the catchiest and most priceless brand name of all:
Universal Peace.
