## On Neoliberal Subjectivity, the Poverty of Taste, and the Tragedy of Becoming Your Own Advertisement
### A Letter to Someone Who Has Been Told That Visibility Is Freedom
*For Clout Economics*
Dear aspiring influencer,
I would like to begin by telling you something that the people who make fun of you rarely acknowledge.
You are trying to make a living.
Perhaps you are trying to leave a job you dislike, become financially independent, escape an unsympathetic household, or acquire a degree of freedom that the conventional institutions of work have made increasingly difficult to obtain. Perhaps you simply enjoy dressing up, filming things, decorating your surroundings, making people laugh, or receiving the occasional confirmation that somebody finds you interesting.
There is nothing inherently contemptible about any of this.
Nor is the desire to be seen necessarily evidence of narcissism. Recognition is a perfectly ordinary human need. The wish to make something beautiful and have another person appreciate it is older than Instagram, older than capitalism, and considerably older than the professional vocabulary of *content creation*.
You have been promised a life in which you can turn these desires into an occupation.
You will become your own boss.
Your personality will become your capital.
Your daily routine will become your creative practice.
Your home will become your studio.
Your friendships will become your network.
Your wardrobe will become your professional identity.
Your experiences will become your portfolio.
And, if you are sufficiently disciplined, authentic, consistent, attractive, enterprising, relatable, and fortunate, you may eventually be paid to be yourself.
It sounds almost liberating.
Until one considers the extraordinary violence concealed within the final proposition.
**What happens to a person when being themselves becomes a job from which they can never clock out?**
***
The most successful ideological achievement of neoliberalism has been to persuade individuals to experience the demands of the market as expressions of their personal freedom.
You are no longer simply an employee selling your labour.
You are an entrepreneur selling the possibility of yourself.
Your life becomes an enterprise whose value must be continually increased. Your education is an investment. Your friendships are opportunities. Your interests become niches. Your appearance becomes an asset. Your personality becomes a recognisable commercial proposition.
Even your dissatisfaction becomes productive.
Anxiety can become a wellness journey.
Loneliness can become relatable content.
Romantic disappointment can become a story-time video.
A crisis of identity can become a personal rebranding.
Nothing is necessarily wasted, provided it can be made visible.
The irony is that this apparently liberated individual is subject to a particularly intimate form of discipline.
A conventional employer may instruct you to perform certain tasks.
The influencer economy asks you to organise your entire person around the indefinite possibility of future success.
You must manage your time, appearance, social relations, aspirations, emotional expression, and public image as though your life were a small corporation permanently preparing for investment.
This is what makes the work psychologically distinctive.
The commodity is not simply something you produce.
Increasingly, the commodity is the person you are encouraged to become.
Michel Foucault's lectures on neoliberal governmentality help explain the political transformation involved. Under this economic rationality, the individual can be understood as an entrepreneur of themselves, someone whose capacities, choices, and conduct are interpreted through investment and returns.
The aspiring influencer gives this idea an unusually literal form.
The self becomes an economic project.
But unlike an ordinary commercial enterprise, the self cannot be sold without consequences for the person who inhabits it.
A failed product can be discontinued.
A failed public identity must still wake up the following morning.
***
The media scholar Brooke Erin Duffy calls attention to a phenomenon she describes as *aspirational labour*.
It is work performed in the present on the promise of uncertain rewards in the future.
You create, edit, photograph, schedule, post, network, and promote. You develop an audience. You study what performs well. You cultivate relationships with brands. You supply platforms with original material.
The work may be substantial.
The payment may be negligible.
The system promises that today's unpaid effort will become tomorrow's opportunity.
And, for some people, it does.
Influencer work can generate real income, sustain independent businesses, and create opportunities for people excluded from conventional cultural industries.
The problem is not that success is impossible.
The problem is that the possibility of success can justify an indefinite demand for uncompensated labour.
A young woman producing beautiful videos every day may regard herself as unemployed until she acquires a sponsorship.
The platform, however, has already been receiving the benefits of her creative activity.
Her unpaid work is not outside the economy.
It is helping sustain the economy.
Her aspiration is productive before it becomes profitable to her.
This is the extraordinary arrangement that Duffy's research makes visible.
People are encouraged to pursue their dreams through a system that can benefit commercially from the pursuit regardless of whether those dreams are realised.
You are not foolish for wanting the dream.
But the dream has an owner.
And the owner is not necessarily you.
***
Now we must discuss taste.
I suspect this is where you may become defensive.
You have worked hard on your aesthetic.
You have selected the colours, studied the lighting, chosen the clothes, arranged the furniture, and developed what you call a personal style.
Perhaps your feed is beautifully coordinated.
Perhaps everything is beige.
Perhaps everything is monochrome.
Perhaps you prefer pale ceramics, symmetrical interiors, expensive-looking coffee, discreet typography, immaculate skin, and the kind of room that appears never to have contained an argument.
Perhaps your chosen aesthetic is entirely different.
The issue is not beige.
Beige has done nothing to deserve our collective hostility.
The question is why an economic system that celebrates unprecedented individual freedom produces so many recognisably interchangeable forms of self-expression.
Why does originality so often resemble a template?
Why does authenticity arrive in a commercially familiar colour palette?
Why is the apparently spontaneous morning routine filmed according to conventions shared by thousands of strangers?
Why does personal taste so frequently appear to have been selected in advance by the very system through which it is displayed?
There is a tempting response: people simply have bad taste.
But this explanation is lazy, and often socially arrogant.
Taste is not a natural resource that some individuals possess and others lack.
It develops through exposure, education, experimentation, conversation, access to cultural institutions, and the freedom to encounter things one does not immediately understand.
The affluent person who has travelled, attended galleries, studied music, visited libraries, and grown up surrounded by cultural objects may possess opportunities unavailable to someone whose education and leisure have been restricted by money, family circumstances, work, or geography.
To ridicule the latter person's aesthetic vocabulary without examining these inequalities is merely to transform inherited cultural advantage into a claim of personal superiority.
That is not criticism.
It is snobbery with a bibliography.
Yet the opposite position is equally unsatisfactory.
We cannot avoid discussing the impoverishment of aesthetic experience simply because judgements of taste are entangled with class.
The problem is not that you have failed to become sufficiently sophisticated.
**The problem is that a commercial system has encouraged you to mistake aesthetic recognisability for aesthetic discovery.**
Your image must communicate itself rapidly.
Your style must become legible before the viewer scrolls away.
Your references must be familiar enough to attract an audience.
Your choices must remain consistent enough for a brand to recognise you.
You are instructed to stand out.
But not so far that the system ceases to understand what you are offering.
Difference becomes desirable only within the limits of marketability.
This is a peculiar kind of impoverishment.
You may have access to more images than any previous generation while possessing fewer reasons to linger over an image that resists immediate comprehension.
You may know thousands of songs without having developed the patience to listen closely to one.
You may encounter exquisite works of architecture, painting, cinema, and design as fragments circulating through a feed, each stripped of the conditions that once made it intelligible.
Culture becomes a reservoir of aesthetic effects.
A painting becomes a colour palette.
A film becomes a mood.
A historical movement becomes a style.
A philosophical idea becomes a caption.
The object is no longer encountered primarily as something capable of disturbing your understanding.
It becomes material through which you communicate an already established identity.
You are not discovering your taste.
You are furnishing your brand.
***
In *Our Aesthetic Categories*, Sianne Ngai examines the seemingly modest aesthetic judgements that become especially important in late-capitalist society: the cute, the interesting, and the zany.
These categories matter because they connect aesthetic experience with consumption, circulation, and performance.
The cute invites our attachment to the manageable and endearing.
The interesting sustains attention through the promise of novelty.
The zany makes strenuous performance appear entertaining.
Consider how closely these categories resemble the ordinary demands of an influencer's working life.
You must be attractive without appearing intimidating.
Interesting without becoming difficult.
Funny without losing commercial appeal.
Relatable without surrendering aspiration.
Spontaneous without abandoning consistency.
Productive without appearing exhausted.
You must perform an enormous amount of work while preserving the appearance that your life simply happens to be delightful.
The most difficult task is often making the effort disappear.
An elaborate photograph must look effortless.
A sponsored recommendation must sound sincere.
A calculated disclosure must appear intimate.
The audience must encounter the finished image without being constantly reminded of the labour through which the image was manufactured.
Your life becomes a performance of naturalness.
And the greater the labour required to maintain it, the more persuasive the performance must become.
This is why the influencer's apparent frivolity can conceal considerable exhaustion.
The cheerful person who appears to spend the day making coffee and arranging flowers may also be managing an unforgiving schedule of production, editing, correspondence, negotiation, analytics, and self-promotion.
The content looks like leisure.
The life has become work.
The tragedy is not that you lack discipline.
It is that your discipline is increasingly devoted to making discipline look like freedom.
***
Sarah Banet-Weiser's work on brand culture reveals another contradiction.
Authenticity has become commercially valuable.
But once authenticity becomes a recognisable selling point, it must be performed according to conventions that allow audiences and advertisers to recognise it.
You must be authentically yourself.
Yet the self must remain commercially intelligible.
Your individuality becomes most valuable when it can be repeated.
A distinctive gesture becomes a signature.
A personal preference becomes a niche.
A private experience becomes a narrative.
A sincere conviction becomes a potential brand association.
A political position becomes part of your public identity.
This is how subjectivity becomes a commodity without simply becoming false.
You may sincerely care about the things you promote.
You may genuinely enjoy the lifestyle you display.
You may believe in the causes you endorse.
The contradiction does not depend upon deception.
It depends upon the transformation of sincerity into a commercial resource.
The system does not need you to be inauthentic.
It needs your authenticity to become economically productive.
Indeed, an apparently unpolished confession may become more profitable than a carefully arranged image precisely because it signals that the commercial performance has momentarily been suspended.
The performance of not performing becomes another aesthetic convention.
The supposedly private self becomes the most marketable version of the public self.
And the distinction between who you are and how you are consumed becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
This is why I would ask you to protect something of yourself that cannot be converted into a public identity.
Not because privacy is morally superior to visibility.
But because a person requires experiences that do not have to justify their existence through an audience.
You deserve a thought that need not become a caption.
A friendship that need not become a collaboration.
A holiday that need not become a travel diary.
A relationship whose value does not depend upon whether it produces a good photograph.
You deserve the possibility of being uninteresting.
This is not a small freedom.
It may be one of the freedoms that your occupation most persistently threatens.
***
There is also a political problem concealed within the language of lifestyle.
Your content may appear entirely apolitical.
You show cafés, clothes, beauty products, restaurants, holidays, apartments, and cheerful routines.
You do not discuss elections.
You do not endorse legislation.
You do not publish ideological manifestos.
You simply show people how you live.
Yet a lifestyle is never entirely independent of the social relations that make it possible.
The tasteful apartment has a property market.
The beautiful neighbourhood has a history of land ownership and urban development.
The luxurious restaurant depends upon workers.
The immaculate home may depend upon domestic labour.
The affordable delivery has conditions of employment.
The fashionable destination has residents whose relationship to the place may be quite different from the tourist's.
The product has a supply chain.
The photograph has an economy.
You need not turn every post into a lecture on capitalism.
But if your aesthetic imagination never extends beyond the commodity itself, the world begins to appear as though commodities simply materialise for your enjoyment.
The worker disappears.
The neighbourhood disappears.
The institution disappears.
The conditions of production disappear.
What remains is the beautiful object and the desirable self who possesses it.
This is one of the ways neoliberalism narrows political imagination.
The world is presented as a collection of opportunities for individual consumption and self-improvement.
Social problems become personal inconveniences.
Structural inequalities become lifestyle differences.
Freedom becomes the capacity to choose among available commodities.
Even solidarity can become an aesthetic.
The ethical product.
The socially conscious campaign.
The carefully photographed charitable initiative.
None is necessarily worthless.
But political life cannot be reduced to the consumption of morally reassuring things.
The central question is not simply whether the object represents good values.
It is what social relations make the object possible.
You may be surprised to discover that this question can deepen rather than diminish your creative life.
A city becomes more interesting when you understand its labour, architecture, languages, and histories.
A garment becomes more interesting when you understand its fabric, manufacture, and cultural genealogy.
A meal becomes more interesting when you understand its movement across communities and generations.
An image becomes more interesting when it is allowed to disclose something beyond your own desirability.
The world ceases to be a backdrop.
It becomes an object of attention.
***
I want to return to the question of impoverished aesthetic sensibilities because it contains a misunderstanding worth resisting.
Aesthetic impoverishment is not the absence of expensive possessions.
A person with almost no money may possess a profound capacity for aesthetic experience.
They may understand the tonal intricacies of a song, the rhythm of a language, the texture of a street, the beauty of an ordinary object, or the emotional architecture of a story.
A wealthy person may possess an extraordinary art collection while remaining almost entirely incapable of encountering art as anything other than a possession.
The distinction is not between luxury and poverty.
It is between possession and attention.
Between recognising something as desirable and discovering why it matters.
Between acquiring a style and cultivating a sensibility.
Taste is not simply the ability to identify the right object.
It is a capacity for discrimination, curiosity, interpretation, and pleasure.
It involves learning to recognise differences that were previously unavailable to you.
Sometimes it involves discovering that something you initially disliked contains a form of beauty you did not know how to perceive.
It may require patience.
It may require repeated encounters.
It may even require boredom.
And this is precisely why it can become difficult to cultivate within a commercial environment organised around immediate stimulation.
A difficult film may reveal its form only after you have stopped expecting constant entertainment.
An unfamiliar piece of music may require the listener to relinquish familiar expectations of melody.
A novel may demand that you enter a consciousness very different from your own.
A painting may refuse to reveal its meaning in the first few seconds.
These experiences are not always compatible with the rhythms of the feed.
They do not necessarily reward instant comprehension.
They are not always relatable.
They cannot always be reduced to a mood board.
The extraordinary promise of art is that it may change what you are capable of perceiving.
The commercial function of a personal aesthetic is often to reassure an audience that it already knows what kind of person you are.
These are different operations.
One makes the world less familiar.
The other makes the self more recognisable.
A serious aesthetic life requires room for both pleasure and estrangement.
It cannot consist entirely of arranging familiar signs into commercially pleasing combinations.
You must occasionally encounter something that does not flatter your taste.
Something that cannot be incorporated into your existing identity.
Something that makes you uncertain.
You may not know what to do with it.
That is not a failure.
It may be the beginning of an aesthetic education.
***
Of course, aesthetic education is not simply a personal responsibility.
Libraries, public education, accessible arts institutions, affordable cultural spaces, and opportunities for leisure all matter.
The market cannot demand sophisticated cultural judgement while treating access to cultural life as a luxury.
A society that privatises opportunities for cultural discovery and then mocks people for possessing limited aesthetic references has created a particularly unpleasant contradiction.
It distributes the conditions of taste unequally.
Then it interprets the resulting differences as evidence of individual superiority.
This is why I refuse to treat the aspiring influencer as an object of ridicule.
You may have grown up in a world where the social-media feed was the most available cultural institution.
Where a career in art appeared financially impossible.
Where creative work seemed inaccessible without family connections.
Where the conventional professions required credentials, resources, or forms of conformity you could not easily acquire.
Where visibility appeared to offer a route around those exclusions.
The influencer economy did not invent your desire for a creative life.
It offered a particular commercial solution to that desire.
The tragedy would be to mistake the solution for the desire itself.
You wanted an interesting life.
You were offered an interesting profile.
You wanted independence.
You were offered an unstable form of self-employment.
You wanted recognition.
You were offered metrics.
You wanted beauty.
You were offered an aesthetic.
You wanted to create.
You were offered content.
These are not identical things.
And it is perfectly possible to begin by wanting one and discover, years later, that your working life has become organised entirely around the other.
***
What, then, would it mean to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility without abandoning the work of influencing?
It would begin by recovering curiosity from the obligation to be interesting.
Read something you cannot immediately quote.
Listen to music you do not understand.
Learn the history of an object before purchasing it.
Encounter an unfamiliar artistic tradition without asking how it might improve your personal brand.
Visit a public library without photographing the books.
Learn to distinguish between an image that communicates wealth and an image that actually rewards attention.
Find something beautiful that nobody else has told you to admire.
And resist the temptation to turn every discovery into evidence of your own sophistication.
The point is not to become a more elite influencer.
It is to become a person with a larger world.
That distinction matters.
A broader cultural vocabulary can deepen your creative practice. It can also make you less dependent upon the narrow forms of recognition that govern the platform.
You may discover that your audience responds to unfamiliar ideas.
You may discover that certain kinds of work do not produce immediate engagement.
You may have to decide whether every worthwhile experience must be justified by its performance.
That decision belongs to you.
But you should at least be allowed to recognise it as a decision.
The system has encouraged you to understand your interests as investments.
You might begin asking which interests you would preserve even if they yielded no return.
Not every valuable activity requires an audience.
Not every beautiful object needs to become a possession.
Not every experience must become content.
Not every private discovery deserves public confirmation.
And not every failure to attract attention establishes that something lacked value.
These propositions should be elementary.
Under neoliberalism, they can begin to sound almost revolutionary.
***
Dear aspiring influencer,
I have no desire to persuade you that your profession is inherently fraudulent or that the people who follow you are foolish.
Your work may bring pleasure, knowledge, companionship, humour, and beauty into other people's lives.
You may develop genuine creative skills.
You may make an independent income.
You may use visibility to challenge institutions from which you were previously excluded.
You may produce something that deserves sustained attention.
But none of this requires believing that the market has the authority to determine the value of your person.
There is an important difference between making a living through your personality and making your personality answerable to the demands of making a living.
The first can be a form of work.
The second threatens to become a form of existence.
Your aesthetic sensibility need not be condemned because it has been shaped by commercial culture. Every sensibility is historically formed.
But it can be enlarged.
You can learn to perceive things that the platform does not know how to recommend.
You can develop attachments that your audience does not understand.
You can cultivate interests whose value remains invisible to a sponsor.
You can make work that resists immediate recognition.
You can refuse the proposition that everything worthwhile must become an opportunity.
And you can discover that being yourself is not an achievement that requires continuous public demonstration.
There may come a day when the photograph is beautiful, the lighting is perfect, the caption is witty, the sponsorship is secured, and the audience has responded exactly as you hoped.
Everything will have worked.
The brand will be coherent.
The metrics will be encouraging.
Your public identity will appear entirely successful.
And yet you may experience the peculiar emptiness of having produced a perfect representation of a life you have barely had the opportunity to inhabit.
If that happens, I hope you do not interpret the feeling as evidence that you need another reinvention.
Perhaps the problem is not that your brand has become insufficiently authentic.
Perhaps you have become tired of representing yourself.
Perhaps you want to encounter something without having to turn toward the camera.
Perhaps you would like to love an object without acquiring it.
Perhaps you would like to admire another person without comparing your achievements.
Perhaps you would like to do something badly, privately, and without the prospect of improvement.
Perhaps you would simply like to live.
You deserve that possibility.
The market has already acquired your photographs, your preferences, your attention, your creative labour, and considerable portions of your time.
**It does not need to acquire the entirety of your capacity for experience.**
You wanted to become someone.
The platform offered to make you recognisable.
Please do not confuse the two.
You deserve an interior life.
And it need not be sponsored.
---
### Reading and intellectual references
- Brooke Erin Duffy, * (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work* (Yale University Press, 2017; revised paperback edition, 2022). On aspirational labour, gender, precarious creative work, and the promise of future professional rewards.
- Sarah Banet-Weiser, *Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture* (NYU Press, 2012). On branding as a structure of identity and social experience rather than simply a marketing practice.
- Sianne Ngai, *Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting* (Harvard University Press, 2012). On the transformation of aesthetic experience through capitalist production, circulation, and consumption.
- Michel Foucault, *The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979*. On neoliberal governmentality and the entrepreneurial conception of the subject.
- Kyle Chayka, *Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture* (Doubleday, 2024). On the standardisation of cultural experience through algorithmic recommendation systems.
- Theodor W. Adorno, *Aesthetic Theory* (posthumously published, 1970). On the relationship between aesthetic autonomy, social mediation, and the possibility of an artistic encounter not exhausted by exchange value.
*This essay is a critique of the economic conditions and aesthetic conventions of influencer culture, not a claim that individual creators are uniformly exploited, aesthetically unoriginal, or incapable of meaningful creative work.*
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