It’s a bad sign that anyone listens to Eugene Healey, to the extent that he has thousands of Substack followers (“Considered Chaos”) and his writing appears in The Guardian. His grift is to be the brand consultant who reads Mark Fisher, which is incredibly annoying.
I’m a millennial, class of 2001. When I was a teenager, it was cool to be against marketing. We read No Logo and failed so hard that this is what’s in The Guardian now.
Authenticity is the great mirage of the modern age. Its promise – to live unmediated, in full accordance with our values and beliefs – feels like the ideal we’re always reaching for before it vanishes beyond the horizon. And ironically, the more we try to prove we’re authentic online, the more we seem to accelerate its disappearance.
The kids aren’t doing their homework. Concern with “authenticity” in this sense comes from existentialism, which became popular in the wake of WWII. Nonconformist individual responsibility seemed critically important to preventing a repeat.
Imagine reading Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking and trying to prove you’re authentic on social media:
Many Germans have lost their homeland, have had to leave their villages and towns, have been driven from their native soil. Countless others whose homeland was saved, have yet wandered off. They have been caught up in the turmoil of the big cities, and have resettled in the wastelands of industrial districts. They are strangers now to their former homeland. And those who have stayed on in their homeland? Often they are still more homeless than those who have been driven from their homeland. Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world. Picture magazines are everywhere available. All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man—all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world.
The problem is that every generation after mine has no concept of life before smart phones and social media.
There’s no rootedness in history:
As Generations Z and Alpha joined social media, they responded to the cultural demand for perfection with chaos – raw, unfiltered, deliberately messy content. The curated feed of flatlays gave way to the sloppy photo dump; the finstas; the bedrotting. Finally, our real lives represented on screen. Finally, something real.
“Bedrotting” is from 2024 and xoJane is from 2011. The overly-curated perfection was a response to people regretting overshares from the last time it was a trend.
But alas, one can overshare as an act with the same bad faith as Sartre’s waiter:
Except that this quickly became another role to be performed, a generation-defining content genre that has itself become subject to more and more extreme performances – filming oneself balling into the camera, extreme overshares, breakdowns in public. Vulnerability-as-aesthetic, where what began as a rejection of perfection has become its own form of perfectionism – the flawless execution of being flawed.
It bothers me that even the newspaper editors didn’t notice that people were BAWLING into the camera and not playing basketball. Spell check wouldn’t catch it.
Imagine his shock at learning how AdBusters ended in self-parody with the “Blackspot Unswoosher” brand shoe.
To understand why authenticity is impossible, first we need to understand what social media has done to us. It’s turned personal identity into performance art – and in doing so, has transformed us all into brands (I should know, I’m a brand consultant).
The irony is that postmodernism was supposed to be the end of meta-narratives, but academics love to make sweeping, totalizing claims about how we’re in the Age of Whatever. Already in No Logo there was this idea that we’d entered a new age, in which brands have become disconnected from physical reality and the material economy doesn’t matter anymore. With age, one learns those kinds of declarations are silly and pretentious.
Imagine thinking authenticity is impossible, not because of some philosophical nit to pick about the existence of the self, but because social media has fundamentally changed what it means to be human. We can’t just…not look at it and go about our physical lives.
Believe it or not, there were authentic people and posers in the 1990s already, before anyone had a social media profile. Maybe you had, like, something creative in your AIM away message, for when you were physically AFK.
Postmodernism was supposed to de-center the West or whatever. Extreme cultural relativism. But inability to imagine people outside “brands” as a reference frame might be even more myopic than dead white guys in the 1800s with opinions about the Nature of Man. Imagine knowing anthropology exists and writing like this.
The modern experience is one of constantly being perceived. We view ourselves in the third person, as an entity to be managed. How will this action make me look? How can my lived experience be something I can capture?
This isn’t limited to chronic social media users. Panoptic surveillance, whether state or private, makes us intensely conscious that every public action is potentially recorded, screenshotted and data-harvested. All the world’s a stage – and we’re all method actors who never break character.
As if feminists never wrote anything about self-objectification before. As if nobody ever wished to capture and communicate experiences (!).
I’m amused that “panoptic” is just part of how people talk now. We can skip the lecture on Bentham and Foucault. Shakespeare cliche without attribution, saying the same thing as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956).
Remember, this is the guy whose BRAND is being well-read in theory. We’ve kinda forgotten and given up, but the original idea of the left was that we’re in a global, multi-generational war against capitalism. The other team engages in coordinated, long-term planning and executes on it (e.g., the Powell Memo). We have…no such leadership. Instead, each generation rediscovers the same things in circles, because there’s no effective cultural transmission of leftism.
He doesn’t have the fight in him.
If we want authenticity, we’ll need to unwind our culture of surveillance – to create spaces where actions aren’t immediately documented, dissected and distributed. But that feels like trying to uninvent the printing press. The infrastructure of observation has become so fundamental to how we live and work that opting out more or less means retreating from modern society altogether.
If he were thinking tactically, like he was actually in conflict with the state repressive apparatus, he would’ve gotten at least as far as realizing there’s cryptography. Already today, people hide from surveillance!
At one time, “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was a popular slogan. There was a concept of “counterculture”. He’s aware of this, having Instagram videos about corporate cooptation (as if he never heard the Dead Kennedys – Anarchy for Sale). The whole POINT was that there’s something wrong with modern society, and we should self-consciously design a new one that’s in touch with our authentic human needs.
Old-fashioned leftism demanded the bravery of imagining that we could get rid of modern society and figure it out and run things effectively. We wanted to seize the means of production because we didn’t need bosses.
So what we actually need, especially for our youth, is an unmaking of expectation – the suffocating demand that they ruthlessly optimise and curate every element of their lives for public presentation just to access a fraction of the economic prosperity their parents enjoyed. Because we’ve created a world where turning yourself into a brand isn’t a lifestyle choice but a survival strategy, particularly as AI puts a blowtorch to the remaining areas of knowledge work that once promised middle-class security.
Unemployment is terrifying, but imagine what it took for our forefathers in labor unions to get us weekends and ever-diminising benefits. They had to go on strike and fight the police, and then they’d be poor anyway!
This doesn’t have “be your own boss” energy. This doesn’t have “redistribution of wealth” and “classless society” energy. It’s just afraid. The new left utopia is basically cowering together in your friend’s living room:
The internet has fundamentally altered the conditions under which genuine self-expression can exist. The solution isn’t to perform authenticity harder, but to recognise and jealously guard the remaining places where real authenticity might still be possible: in unrecorded conversations, in private moments, in closed networks that haven’t yet been colonised by the attention economy.
Ironically, admitting we can’t be authentic online might be the closest thing to honesty we have left.
But this guy’s JOB is to be the marketing guy and keep things just the way they are. His other piece in The Guardian is clear:
Nobody likes to admit we need marketing, but the discipline has always been necessary to match people with the products and services that fulfil their needs and desires.
It started simply enough, with us focusing primarily on brands’ features and tangible benefits. But as consumer society evolved, we moved on to symbolic benefits: identities, lifestyles. Finally, we began selling values: an ideology that hit its zenith between 2015 and 2022 in the era of “brand purpose”.
He seems totally unaware that The Hidden Persuaders came out in the 1950s, and it already told the story of how we went from matter-of-fact product descriptions to focus groups and Freudian symbolism to manufacture wants beyond need. Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self covers the same ground, for those without the patience for books:
He can’t explain the basic history of his own profession.
The contradictions of the brand purpose era are most apparent when looked at from the view of the average person. Social progress once came hand-in-hand with economic progress. Now, instead, social progress has been offered as a substitute for economic progress.
Blah blah neoliberalism class dealignment. “What’s the matter with Kansas?”, but for Democrats. We know.
For the better part of the last decade, both consumers and employees have observed a marked contrast between multinational brands promoting wholesale social transformation, with bold proclamations for equity and justice for marginalised communities, while simultaneously being some of the single greatest contributors to the decline in living standards across the vast majority of the western world.
They’ve seen messaging grow increasingly heavy-handed, couched in shame, or used as a tactic for plain obfuscation. And they’ve asked the consumer to bear the cost of transition, often charging more for objectively worse products (hello, paper shopping bags).
It’s this contradiction that’s been so effectively exploited by the far right.
Yes, pretending Nike is a vector of social progress was only ever going to end with people getting turned off by the hypocrisy.
The appropriation and weaponisation of “woke” was supercharged by the narrative that leftist thinking had infiltrated the highest echelon of corporations. Painting the two as bedfellows has allowed a new breed of conservatives to occupy the position of “counter-cultural” – the net effect being large swathes of young people supporting authoritarian or ethno-nationalist political movements. In a bizarre inversion of reality, it’s somehow become punk to champion the same power structures that have dominated society for centuries.
For all the crying about Republican disinformation, it’s actually done a lot of harm to the public’s understanding of reality that it confuses the distinction between leftists and liberals. Republicans and Democrats both benefit from that, in different ways. It’s been so effective at discrediting the left that it had to be on purpose.
What is saddest about this turn of events is that it was entered with good intentions. The brand purpose era was, in many ways, marketers trying to reconcile their roles such that they could feel they were effecting positive change even while playing the corporate game. Instead, it became yet another cautionary tale in capitalism’s ability to absorb its critiques and repackage them as aesthetics to be sold on a supermarket shelf.
It would probably blow his mind to read The Conquest of Cool and learn that 1960s culture also came from corporate douchebags with self images as cool guy opposition types. We definitely haven’t needed cautionary tales about this for a very long time.
Through the rear window it’s easy to see that the backlash was inevitable: if progressive values could so easily be commodified as a tool for selling mayonnaise, why shouldn’t those values be treated with the same fickleness as condiment preferences?
This is kinda like blaming basic Christian morality for MAGA Christianity.
This piece isn’t intended as a call out to any individual. We all live under this system. To make a living means we are all in some way complicit. But as marketers, we must reckon with how we’ve trivialised activism by turning it into comms strategy, how we’ve co-opted movements only to abandon them when the winds changed.
The responsibility we bear now is undoing the lesson we inadvertently taught consumers over this era. Structural reform can’t be achieved through consumption choices – unfortunately, we’re all going to have to get dirt under our fingernails.
“The revolution will not be televised” was already common sense before I was even born.
Imagine thinking that your capitalist day job is going to be the means of creating leftist utopia. This is all about his own guilt for knowing marketing is wrong and doing it anyway.
If this all sounds a bit doom and gloom, let me provide a reason to be optimistic. After two decades of misplaced optimism, we have entered a period the writer and “luxury memeologist” Edmond Lau has termed “the dark mode shift”. In this “mask-off” era, everyone’s true intentions have come to light. Your boss is back to looking like your boss, not Adam Sandler on a coffee run; your office is back to looking like an office, not a college common room.
And brands are back to their true role: creating fiction and spectacle to grease the wheels of consumption. Done right, I believe that fiction can still produce moments of extraordinary clarity and beauty.
Coining cute names for supposed new eras isn’t really deep intellectual work. The last sentence links to some Adweek article about how marketers had the Severance actors set up in a pretend office in Grand Central Terminal in New York.
What’s the point of listening to opinions from someone who’s employment prevents him from saying that consumerism is bad?
What a hopeful vision of the future he has!
But there’s a line to be drawn between what we do and where meaningful progress really comes from: grassroots movements, political organising, policy reform. Brands’ swift exit grants oxygen for more authentic acts of resistance to return to centre stage.
And if we’re not prepared to sacrifice profit in support of those causes, then perhaps our most radical act is one of humility – wielding our influence with greater care and consciousness than before.
Here’s to proclaiming: the revolution will not go better with Pepsi.
I wonder what he even thinks “center stage” is nowadays.
Doesn’t “if we’re not prepared to sacrifice profit in support of those causes” give the whole game away? Eugene Healey doesn’t actually give a fuck and works against those who do, while making a big show of piety and righteous self-awareness. Of course he likes Mark Fisher, the guy who says ending capitalism is unimaginable. Convenient moral license, dressed up as thoughtfulness.
We had Naomi Klein. Today’s youth have…Eugene Healey. Fuck.