The Over-Extended Self
Or: The Malady of the Ages
Or: When Did We All Become Brand Strategists?
I took a long break from writing over the summer. Partially, this is because I was avoiding sitting down at a desk unless strictly necessary, and nothing felt particularly necessary. Partially, it was because there were other, more pressing things happening in the world. Mostly, it was because I got hit with this weird, elusive sense of burn-out from thinking about Stuff. I suddenly felt trapped by a strange paradox I wasn’t able to wrap my head around. It began in three ways:
First, I started listening to a podcast about the fashion industry in which the host is, unrelatedly, mildly obsessed with protein. Getting enough of it, supplementing it, asking her guests how they get it. I started thinking about the irony of listening to a podcaster (disembodied) discuss (bodies) as a locus of self-optimization and social status. Paying debt to Naomi Klein here: the radical focus on the individual body and self-perfection as a misguided antidote to structural diseases. A call uttered by the disembodied body of networked communications.
Second, I spent a lot of time on Instagram, and a lot of time looking at “fashion memes,” because my algorithm knows I like those. Rephrasing: they’re actually more like “stuff” memes, or starterpacks, or character assemblages. Iced matcha lattes, denim shorts, white socks and loafers, Eames chairs, shitty tattoos, vacations to Europe: we all learned how to turn ourselves into personae, strategic branding tools that, as Ana Andjelic put it recently, “align marketing, merchandising, design, distribution.” We know and describe ourselves through market-optimized mirrors held up in public space. (We’re all Demna’s Gucci.)
Third, every time I tried to think of something to say about all of this, it felt like someone else was already saying it. I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of analytic discourse on consumer culture. On an industry level, fashion is frantic to diagnose whatever the hell’s made people Stop Buying Stuff. On an Internet Culture level, a sub-genre of entertainment content has emerged that’s designed to make sense of the Late Capitalist Consumer culture age.
Formats as diverse as SSENCE memes and LinkedIn missives offer consumers and brands alike a typology of self-hood in a world where “meaningful” is synonymous with “market value.”
Three things! Those are a lot of big ideas! I had to prioritize my tan!
Je voulais me mettre en arrêt, j’avais besoin de faire un diagnostic. Self Over-Extension, or in layman’s terms, Everything Fatigue.
The Over-Extended Self is a complex syndrome caused by overconsumption to the physical and digital stuff fed to us in endless streams by The Market. Sufferers attempt to build stable identitary foundations on a highly-volatile stack of paradoxes:
1) A locus of control and agency placed completely on the self, even on the body, while our social experiences of self-hood are increasingly disembodied;
2) An attempt to understand oneself through the symbolic and material value of the nouns that surround us (what Belk calls self-extension); where the “nouns” that surround us are digitally material, and move through social space and time so quickly as to make their symbolic value inherently unstable;
3) A growing pressure to understand, master, and know the Self as a Consumer through the conscious cultivation and demonstration of Taste, the precision and perceived rarity of our self-knowledge, and the discursive legibility of our self-assemblages. We train our algorithms like champion hounds.
Advanced stages of Everything Fatigue can lead to Terminal Ennui.
Ok, listen: the world has bigger problems than matcha lattes. The memes were just an example.
The rising hegemony of the individual consumer self as the key agentic cultural entity feeds into our growing - and dangerous - inability to dissociate ideology and self. Is there a fundamental difference in the “masculinity” that paints its nails and reads Sylvia Plath versus that which fires guns and drinks raw milk? Moreover, is it possible to distinguish either as a set of belief systems, values, and behaviors outside of their associated consumer practices?
A lot has been written by people much, much smarter than myself about the aesthetics of facism; as fascist ideology as a mode of expression. What we’re witnessing today - the gilding of the White House, the rise of Trump merchandise, the anti-vax/MAHA movement - could be considered, in part, the rise of fascism occurring at the very locus of the consumer self, and at the scale of late, information-age hyper capitalism, the absolute subjugation of the community at the feet of the networked individual.
Brands are not communities, Taylor Swift is not a community, belonging to a member’s club is not a community: all of the things that consumer culture offers us as an anecdote to this sense of alienation are merely tools for self-extension in disguise.
To complicate things a little more, “consumption”’ as a practice has become so divorced from notions of ownership and possession. To “consume” something is - what, exactly? We ceaselessly “consume” everything from haute couture gowns to celebrity gossip; from genocide to senior cat food. We engage with international humanitarian atrocities on the same level, and alongside, fashion campaigns, first day of school pictures, and a very good meme about the 2002 film Jeeper’s Creepers.
It’s little wonder that the legacy media institutions and brands once responsible for creating meaning, or at least declaring it - are finding themselves floundering for a share of voice and relevance. Their authority has been irreparably lost to the algorithm. They are suffering, like so many of us are, from the social consequences of The Over-Extended Self.
As awareness of Everything Fatigue grows, so have attempts to cure it. Companies (who would like to make money, which is fair) are desperately looking for ways to create products meaningful enough that people will want to spend their money on them, rather than just look at them on their phones.
I wish I could tell you what the cure is. “Touching grass,” I think, is part of it.
Engaging with the people around us - in our actual, real communities - is another key part of it; repositioning and reconceptualizing the body in the interconnected realities in which we operate, rather than as professional self-optimizers.
Aggressively refusing to understand ourselves as consumers is another key part of it. That goes for us who are posting Instagram stories from the Tillmans expo as much as for those who are standing in line for whatever this week’s Labubu is. I’m a student of Consumer Culture Theory, I won’t refute you - but I will tell you that we can reshape the ways in which we interact with the things we engage with, read, enjoy, and devote our attention so that we position ourselves as producers - or at the very least, co-creators - of cultural discourse.
And finally - and this is the best cure I’ve got - have bad taste! Make bad art, publish online diatribes, mail your friends poetry, create stupid content, not brainrot… I think the only cure we’ve got in the culture of self-curation is to be really, really bad at it. We can’t solve the world’s problems on our own, but we can all get a little bit weirder. I think we’ll be better off for it.
The Over-Extended Self
Or: The Malady of the Ages
Or: When Did We All Become Brand Strategists?
I took a long break from writing over the summer. Partially, this is because I was avoiding sitting down at a desk unless strictly necessary, and nothing felt particularly necessary. Partially, it was because there were other, more pressing things happening in the world. Mostly, it was because I got hit with this weird, elusive sense of burn-out from thinking about Stuff. I suddenly felt trapped by a strange paradox I wasn’t able to wrap my head around. It began in three ways:
First, I started listening to a podcast about the fashion industry in which the host is, unrelatedly, mildly obsessed with protein. Getting enough of it, supplementing it, asking her guests how they get it. I started thinking about the irony of listening to a podcaster (disembodied) discuss (bodies) as a locus of self-optimization and social status. Paying debt to Naomi Klein here: the radical focus on the individual body and self-perfection as a misguided antidote to structural diseases. A call uttered by the disembodied body of networked communications.
Second, I spent a lot of time on Instagram, and a lot of time looking at “fashion memes,” because my algorithm knows I like those. Rephrasing: they’re actually more like “stuff” memes, or starterpacks, or character assemblages. Iced matcha lattes, denim shorts, white socks and loafers, Eames chairs, shitty tattoos, vacations to Europe: we all learned how to turn ourselves into personae, strategic branding tools that, as Ana Andjelic put it recently, “align marketing, merchandising, design, distribution.” We know and describe ourselves through market-optimized mirrors held up in public space. (We’re all Demna’s Gucci.)
Third, every time I tried to think of something to say about all of this, it felt like someone else was already saying it. I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of analytic discourse on consumer culture. On an industry level, fashion is frantic to diagnose whatever the hell’s made people Stop Buying Stuff. On an Internet Culture level, a sub-genre of entertainment content has emerged that’s designed to make sense of the Late Capitalist Consumer culture age.
Formats as diverse as SSENCE memes and LinkedIn missives offer consumers and brands alike a typology of self-hood in a world where “meaningful” is synonymous with “market value.”
Three things! Those are a lot of big ideas! I had to prioritize my tan!
Je voulais me mettre en arrêt, j’avais besoin de faire un diagnostic. Self Over-Extension, or in layman’s terms, Everything Fatigue.
The Over-Extended Self is a complex syndrome caused by overconsumption to the physical and digital stuff fed to us in endless streams by The Market. Sufferers attempt to build stable identitary foundations on a highly-volatile stack of paradoxes:
1) A locus of control and agency placed completely on the self, even on the body, while our social experiences of self-hood are increasingly disembodied;
2) An attempt to understand oneself through the symbolic and material value of the nouns that surround us (what Belk calls self-extension); where the “nouns” that surround us are digitally material, and move through social space and time so quickly as to make their symbolic value inherently unstable;
3) A growing pressure to understand, master, and know the Self as a Consumer through the conscious cultivation and demonstration of Taste, the precision and perceived rarity of our self-knowledge, and the discursive legibility of our self-assemblages. We train our algorithms like champion hounds.
Advanced stages of Everything Fatigue can lead to Terminal Ennui.
Ok, listen: the world has bigger problems than matcha lattes. The memes were just an example.
The rising hegemony of the individual consumer self as the key agentic cultural entity feeds into our growing - and dangerous - inability to dissociate ideology and self. Is there a fundamental difference in the “masculinity” that paints its nails and reads Sylvia Plath versus that which fires guns and drinks raw milk? Moreover, is it possible to distinguish either as a set of belief systems, values, and behaviors outside of their associated consumer practices?
A lot has been written by people much, much smarter than myself about the aesthetics of facism; as fascist ideology as a mode of expression. What we’re witnessing today - the gilding of the White House, the rise of Trump merchandise, the anti-vax/MAHA movement - could be considered, in part, the rise of fascism occurring at the very locus of the consumer self, and at the scale of late, information-age hyper capitalism, the absolute subjugation of the community at the feet of the networked individual.
Brands are not communities, Taylor Swift is not a community, belonging to a member’s club is not a community: all of the things that consumer culture offers us as an anecdote to this sense of alienation are merely tools for self-extension in disguise.
To complicate things a little more, “consumption”’ as a practice has become so divorced from notions of ownership and possession. To “consume” something is - what, exactly? We ceaselessly “consume” everything from haute couture gowns to celebrity gossip; from genocide to senior cat food. We engage with international humanitarian atrocities on the same level, and alongside, fashion campaigns, first day of school pictures, and a very good meme about the 2002 film Jeeper’s Creepers.
It’s little wonder that the legacy media institutions and brands once responsible for creating meaning, or at least declaring it - are finding themselves floundering for a share of voice and relevance. Their authority has been irreparably lost to the algorithm. They are suffering, like so many of us are, from the social consequences of The Over-Extended Self.
As awareness of Everything Fatigue grows, so have attempts to cure it. Companies (who would like to make money, which is fair) are desperately looking for ways to create products meaningful enough that people will want to spend their money on them, rather than just look at them on their phones.
I wish I could tell you what the cure is. “Touching grass,” I think, is part of it.
Engaging with the people around us - in our actual, real communities - is another key part of it; repositioning and reconceptualizing the body in the interconnected realities in which we operate, rather than as professional self-optimizers.
Aggressively refusing to understand ourselves as consumers is another key part of it. That goes for us who are posting Instagram stories from the Tillmans expo as much as for those who are standing in line for whatever this week’s Labubu is. I’m a student of Consumer Culture Theory, I won’t refute you - but I will tell you that we can reshape the ways in which we interact with the things we engage with, read, enjoy, and devote our attention so that we position ourselves as producers - or at the very least, co-creators - of cultural discourse.
And finally - and this is the best cure I’ve got - have bad taste! Make bad art, publish online diatribes, mail your friends poetry, create stupid content, not brainrot… I think the only cure we’ve got in the culture of self-curation is to be really, really bad at it. We can’t solve the world’s problems on our own, but we can all get a little bit weirder. I think we’ll be better off for it.