I [DO NOT] WANT TO BECOME A BRAND

Doc, give it to me straight... am I... a brand???

Like any well-adjusted person, I maintain an evolving list of all my pet peeves on a scroll that curls off the edge of my desk (okay maybe chill out there, Fran Lebowitz*). In an entry that comes after “powdered sugar on donuts” but before “person on the train is sniffling endlessly instead of just blowing their nose,” is this line:

“when people say ‘Kleenex’ when they mean ‘tissues’”

It’s tissues, not Kleenex.

Lip balm, not Chapstick.

Bandage, not Band-aid.

A few years ago, I had the singular joy of discovering that not only is there a name for this phenomenon, there’s a whole Wikipedia page with multiple entries dedicated to it. It’s called “trademark erosion,” in which the brand name for a product becomes generic shorthand for a whole category of products.

If left unmitigated, it can blend into a language undetected. If someone called an escalator a “moving staircase,” I would think they’re a square, (or maybe a time traveler?), but “escalator” was in fact a copyrighted name belonging to the Otis Elevator Company. I suppose you could refer to the popular backyard item that children jump on as a “rebound tumbler,” but you would more likely opt for “trampoline” (originally copyrighted by the Griswold-Nissen Trampoline & Tumbling Company). Both of these companies eventually lost their trademarked product names to the public domain. Bad luck, boys!

Like most of my pet peeves, this is a stupid and pointless thing to let irritate me. Knowing how much brands stress over their own trademark erosion should make the David-and-Goliath dynamic of this phenomenon delightful — we the people WILL misuse these words! We WILL pulverize them to dust between the mortar and pestle of our ignorance! And the more examples I find of trademark erosion, the more I realize that, again, like most of my pet peeves, I am guilty of doing it myself — how exactly do you reference a Ziploc bag without calling it a Ziploc bag?

I think trademark erosion presents such an interesting counterweight to the capitalist value of limitless growth. Of course, a company will still strive for increased sales quarter after quarter. But their brand identity is far more precious, demanding a measured approach. Companies have a vested interest in courting the line between widespread popularity and diluting themselves into genericity. If their trademarked name becomes too widespread, the brand can no longer trademark it. The brand’s own runaway popularity dissolves their claim to their own identity.

*I saw Fran Lebowitz while walking on 14th Street last week and considered saying “hi”, but she looked cranky, and also there was a stain on the front of my shirt 💔

So I’ve been thinking about brands a lot this week, and like everything that holds my attention, I’ve been puzzling out how I can make this about me. Fortunately, I’m alive in the age of the influencer, so it’s not a hard leap to make. In a country where brands tumble off grocery shelves and billboards and Instagram ads, the final frontier for brandable entities, it seems, is ourselves.

The influencer of yesteryear was a canvas for existing brands to project onto. Instagram beauty influencers hopped from one tropical vacation to the next, posing while holding biotin gummies or weight loss tea. Their online personas were charismatic enough to attract a following, but neutral enough not to ward off potential brand partnerships. I’ve grown more-or-less desensitized to the omnipresence of these influencers in my IG feed, their calculated blandness rendering them closer to a billboard than a living human being. What was a novel concept in the early 2010s now seems passé.

But as more of our thoughts, actions, and environments became mineable for content, we’ve pass an inflection point. The pandemic herded everyone online, where we were met with a smorgasbord of platforms to monetize ourselves on. Take your pick: start a Patreon, Substack (like this one!), OnlyFans, or a podcast. Launch a weekly comedy show on Instagram Live. Post your Cashapp under your tweets. Brand deals are no longer the only way to monetize yourself. The content is me and I am the content. It’s a content eclipse.

Jia Tolentino writes in Trick Mirror (2019): “Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized — not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention.” Nicki Minaj summed it up more succinctly in her 2012 song, “I Am Your Leader”:

Hit the hot topic, Nicki Minaj hoodie,
I'm a brand, bitch, I'm a brand!

Monetizing your online self has shifted from a novelty to a tenable career: “According to a poll released in 2019, some 54 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight would, if given the chance, become a social-media influencer.” That’s like, astronaut-level job desirability.

This avalanche of content creation has resulted in a responding wave of paywalls, subscriptions (like this one!), and digital tip jars. It produces what Jason Parham identifies as, “…the subscription ouroboros, a constantly renewing cycle of collective (and sometimes shameless) self-sponsorship where everyone can stay in their own loop forever.”

We’re facing a future (and honestly, a present) where even the smallest passing thought can become part of a monetizable personal brand. Kaitlyn Tiffany writes,

“At this point, when most of our interactions happen in this handful of highly commodified spaces, who could be blamed for feeling like everything they do is — or at least feels like — commerce? …we might also wonder what follows from the understanding that every little thing we do — every second of our time, every funny thought that pops into our mind — is something to be owned or sold.”

Driving this exponential content creation is the understanding that there is financial reward to identifying your most monetizable qualities and leaning into them. You gotta rub barbecue sauce over yourself, so as to be all the more delicious in your own roasting and consumption.

No platform encourages this more than TikTok. Bella Poarch (brand: she bobs her head), Charli D’Amelio (brand: she dances), the guy in the orange suit (brand: he’s thicc. No, really, that’s his brand) all have leaned into the algorithmic reward of finding your schtick and sticking to it.

But while building a strong brand can leverage you into success, it can also corrode the extraneous elements of your personality. Bella Poarch flattens into Bobblehead Girl. Michael James Schneider is better known as Balloon Guy. Charli D’Amelio is the TikTok dancing girl to millions of people who don’t know her name but vaguely know her content. If Charli woke up tomorrow and wanted to pivot to a different niche… would we let her? Imagine Charli posting political discourse TikToks… would she still have her brand deals from Hollister, Dunkin Donuts, Pura Vida, Orosa Beauty, Eos Skincare, Sabra Hummus, Morphe 2, Hulu, Takis, Moncler, and Simmons Mattress?

I feel so desperately sad for this generation of content creators, especially the teenage ones, who have been recruited into into an industry that will cordon them into their respective brands, at least until it is no longer profitable. They’re balancing the conflicting imperatives to post as much as possible on every social media platform, while remaining inoffensively neutral.

In a profile for Harper’s, Barrett Swanson spent a few days at a TikTok content house (content houses are sponsored landing pads for young TikTokers to live and create together), and he defends the TikTokers, who can be so easy to mock:

“…if we sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, it might be because they serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways in which we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands.”

I have no evidence to back it up, but it’s my newsletter and I’ll say it anyway: humans are not evolutionarily equipped for this level of fame. In branding ourselves, and leveraging ourselves into the same ubiquity as brands, I fear that we’ve made ourselves vulnerable to the trademark erosion of our humanity. Kat Tenbarge writes:

“Teenagers should be allowed to be boring and normal without having major corporate interests tied to their entire sense of being before their 16th birthday. TikTok was prime, fertile ground for advertisers, and that sucks. It strips creativity and innovation from creators who are incentivized to go where the money is.”

What does trademark erosion look like on a human host? When we’re compelled to form ourselves into brands, we run the risk of collapsing into two-dimensional caricatures of ourselves. As we propagate these facsimiles of ourselves across the internet, we lose control over how they are perceived. A whole generation of content creators is blurring into genericity. By existing online as brands and pinning our livelihoods on our marketability, we commit so much time to tweaking the maintenance of our reputation, just like companies do: striving to be a household name, while holding onto just enough individuality to cling to a trademark.

I suppose this is a morose mood to end on, but, hey, it’s what I’m thinking about this week! Hopefully you all go outside and touch grass regularly, so all of this will sound like hysterical doomsdaying.

But for anyone who’s online 24/7, I hope you are granting yourself grace and flexibility in navigating the economy of being perceived. I’ve struggled to pin down exactly what themes SWEET TOOTH explores, but writing this post felt like a revelation that, ah, I don’t have to commit to a bulleted list of personality characteristics and interests. A newsletter, or a YouTube channel, or a TikTok, or a Twitter account, will always feel deficient in capturing our “authentic” selves. I’m working on accepting that.

Emily, not a newsletter.

This SWEET TOOTH MISSIVE marks the international launch of a new segment I’m calling, “DIET DR. PEPPER NEWS WORLDWIDE,” in which I will report any DDP-related news (worldwide).

This week in DIET DR. PEPPER NEWS WORLDWIDE:

Demi Lovato gripped a DDP mic a few weeks after reprimanding a froyo place for carrying sugar-free options and promoting diet culture. TB frickin H? I really don’t care about the hypocrisy if it gets Demi to join the ranks of DDP lovers (worldwide). We are accepting all recruits, even those who have a paper trail of hating on sugar-free froyo!!

Creating that segment felt so good I’m gonna create another one, this one called: “SOMETHING THAT MADE ME CRY THIS WEEK, PROBABLY IN A GOOD WAY.”

SOMETHING THAT MADE ME CRY THIS WEEK, PROBABLY IN A GOOD WAY:

I’m dubious of posts from Dudes Posting Their Ws, on account of how I do not like to see men winning, but this sweet letter from an old man who has just discovered eBay… yupppp it’s a W (W for win, and W for WEEPING!!!!!!).

This week I’m craving: Sticky toffee pudding, the rare British dish that tastes as good as its name sounds. I first had it while traveling with the Sister of the Newsletter Eryn Riley, and I don’t think either of us have shut up about it since.