…respects, they never went away. Users, especially young people, have always found ways to evade being understood by the wrong people, deploying veiled references and in-jokes to make sure that certain messages make it only to intended recipients, a technique social media scholar danah boyd described as “social steganography.” If historically, spies would plant codes in knitting and embroidery, today, steganography might take the form of absurd or mysterious self-descriptions in a Twitter bio, or  posting for seemingly different audiences, like one’s professional network and one’s fandoms, on the same profile. Creating separate accounts for an exclusive inner circle and the general public also cultivates mystique, as does simply locking your account.   None of these techniques, then or now, obfuscate users from the tech companies that administer these platforms, however. Rather, such strategies participate in the liquefaction of identity on social platforms’ terms. While social media platforms preached transparency to its users and attempted to enforce real-name policies and blue-check verifications, it also built opaque back-end infrastructure to support the brokering of those users’ personal data. These mechanisms remain in place regardless of what trends currently shape posting behavior or content.   To a degree, this infrastructure assigns users a personal brand whether they intentionally participate in that construction or not. Even if we’re anonymous or confusing to other people, we remain pellucid and knowable to platforms, which establish a recognizable personal brand of sorts algorithmically. When we encounter ourselves in the guise of recommended content and customized ads, we are meeting our coherent public image, as the platforms have deduced it from an entire range of our data, and not only our deliberate attempts to communicate. 
This is not to say the “end of …

The personal brand may dissolve or be fluid re: content-as-brand, but not re: product-as-brand: the brand-surface you present unknowingly to marketers bidding for your eyeballs.

…ct on my experience of the web. To exist on platforms is to be subject to this kind of continual identity reconstitution, to fluidity. Self-branding attempts to hide this inevitability by claiming agency over it, as though by choosing to turn our identity into capital, it becomes a free choice. Self-obfuscation, on the other h…

Hmm. I don’t know – I don’t think the “self-branding” era was really aware of how much we’re ground up and made mincemeat of.

…elf-obfuscation strengthens it. Ultimately, branding and unbranding represent two sides of the same coin. To pick a side is to play a game that commodifies self and society alike; it is more radical to refuse to play at all. Emma Stamm is Visiting Assistan…

This is a very weak ending to a piece this interesting.