We need to abandon the idea of role models altogether and find new routes to personal development. The notion that here in the 2020s, you could put a savvy entrepreneur in front of a large group of naive hopefuls, and NOT end up with one billionaire and a queue outside a food-bank, is, frankly, ridiculous.
If social media has accomplished any useful Darwinian purpose, it's been to educate us in our own stupidity. One of the most sobering things social media has taught us, is that we no longer need people to be the offspring of a deity or to perform miracles in order to garner our worship. All we need them to do is:
a) Have a soapbox.
b) Agree with us.
Once they've met these two conditions, we will blindly applaud and submit to every self-serving action they take, however much we suffer in the process. A brief, demonstrational interlude...
El Musky Fanboy
Elon, you're the best! I LOVE free speech!
Free speech 4 sale
Better pull your wallet out then champ. Free speech is sadly not free. Gimme eight bucks. A month.
El Musky Fanboy
Done! And good call on that Sir. I mean I know the other guy didn't charge me to talk, but he was a leftist asswipe and you are a friend to men's rights activists and ivermectin salesmen so I'm happy to pay.
El Musky Fanboy
Elon? Can you see my free speech yet Elon?
Free speech 4 sale
Eleven bucks now little buddy. You paid eight. Snooze you lose.
El Musky Fanboy
Ah, I see what you did there! Paid in FULL! I was actually just thinking that a 37.5% rise after one month would be a good idea, because that way we are helping you sock it to those anti-capitalist leftists at Apple. How dare they try to put their leftist hands onto your rightful profit Sir. And what better way for you to smash their greedy leftist app tax than for us to pay yours for you out of our own pockets? Genius! Community activism right there!
El Musky Fanboy
And I don't mind at all that I took the trouble to follow 650 people on your platform and I can't see shit from a single one of 'em cause you piss-pumped my feed with Tesla bots and pickup artists.
El Musky Fanboy
I think maybe the wholesome yet busty feMRAs I originally followed must have been CLOSET FEMINISTS and that you have rightly silenced them in favour of evangelical incels who retweet a weight-lifting affiliate link 40 times a day. Thank you for proving my choices wrong. You are helping me learn so much.
El Musky Fanboy
To summarize, I am totally cool with paying $11 a month for the privilege of being the PRODUCT that you pimp out to advertisers, lab-rat to researchers, expose to your mates in the media, flog to data brokers and spunk into the surveillance vault of Big Brother and the FBI! Long live FREE SPEECH!
El Musky Fanboy
Elon?
El Musky Fanboy
Can you see me Elon?
Free speech 4 sale
$50 boost package if you want views chappy.
El Musky Fanboy
Thank you Sir! I knew someone of your brilliance couldn't have broken Twitter.
This is what brand-worship looks like. For Elon Musk's worshippers, it doesn't matter how much dog-piss he industrially jet-blasts into their faces. They will twist their brains into knots until they persuade themselves they're enjoying it.
Again, Musk's only necessary commitment in return for these people's unconditional worship is to have a soapbox, and agree with them. In fact the agreement doesn't even need to be real. In private, Musky-boy can be compiling an AI anime-illustrated AOC fanfic over a candle-lit dinner with Jack Dorsey. And to be honest I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that he was. But as long as he plays them both cold and backslaps chuds in public, he retains his ideological powerbase.
In a society built on exploitation, worship is basically masochism.
I'm not making a political statement here. The Loony Left have their own separate jetstream of dog-piss to bask in. A growing group of them, indeed, are now busy completing unpaid surveys for a serial rogue and harassment perp who's gleefully asking them to predict how many $millions his Meghan-Markle-fans-only outrage-chamber is gonna screw out of them - before he's even opened it. 27% of these hopelessly compliant wretches have assured him they'll pay him a defined monthly sub for extra features, without actually knowing what the extra features are. On a platform that doesn't yet exist. Run by a career snake oil salesman and harassment perp. That's what you call worship. And once again, all it takes is a soapbox, and ideological agreement.
DISCIPLE SYNDROME: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DYNAMICS OF BRAND-WORSHIP
So I'm on no one's side, and this is in fact an article about NOT taking sides. It's an article about the way taking sides leaves us vulnerable to exploitation. The way brands exploit ideological passions to induce overly compliant behaviour in the public. Once we've convinced ourselves that someone is an ideological ally and a champion of our cause, saying "no" to them creates severe cognitive dissonance. Let me explain that...
Cognitive dissonance is a product of our psychological need to make our behaviour make sense - both to ourselves and to other people. Making our behaviour make sense is incredibly important to our ego.
So when we adopt a hero or a champion for our cause - especially if we do so publicly - we put increasing pressure on ourselves to worship them. To support them even when they gently screw us over. Because if we've publicly chanted for someone - emotionally invested in that support - and then we suddenly decide they're nothing but a dog-piss pump attendant, it makes all the chanting look stupid. Makes us look stupid. Makes us feel stupid. Our behaviour doesn't make the sense that our ego needs it to make. At that point, the uncomfortable feeling we get is called cognitive dissonance.
Jack Dorsey should be in jail
The way we normally resolve this discomfort is to pay an "egotistical ransom". That is, tolerate the hose-burst of dog-piss, and externally at least, rationalise it as some kind of noble act on the part of our champion. That way, our champion can remain a champion, and all our worship remains valid. We don't feel stupid. We have to pay a price for retaining our egotistical equilibrium, but if the price is modest, many of us will do just that. The more of these "egotistical ransoms" we pay, the more fanatical our worship appears to outsiders.
An "egotistical ransom" can be financial - like Elon Musk's ideological tax, introduced, ironically, with a tagline of "Power To The People" as a wEaPoN AgAiNsT eLiTiSm. But it may instead be paid in mental or physical labour. We might, for example, be required to perform mental gymnastics to reconcile our own, previously expressed view with a contradictory view expressed by our champion. We might feel obliged to attack people who question our champion, even if we can see that they are right and our champion is wrong.
So this trait of "Disciple Syndrome" serves the promotional and image-management needs of our champion as well as their financial needs. In the long haul, we, as worshipper, cease to critically assess information, and find ourselves bogged in a mire of self-imposed, self-destructive ignorance. Constantly humiliating ourselves as we squirm to defend other people's indefensible takes - for no personal gain whatsoever. In a society built on exploitation, worship is basically masochism.
"Disciple Syndrome" is highly, HIGHLY exploitable. Dangerously so.
That's why many brands have completely stopped telling us about their products, and begun to run pseudo-political campaigns. These campaigns differ from real politics in that politicians are expected to action their policies. Brands aren't. Brands can do all of the finger-pointing and virtue-signalling, without ever having to put anything right. It's been a golden ticket for them.
Elon Musk: just a brand. Meghan Markle: just a brand.
THE POWER OF PERCEPTION
Whilst it might appear that the driving force of "Disciple Syndrome" is our inability to resist brands' ideological bait, the syndrome is really driven by our inability to even recognise brands as brands in the first place. It's true!
If we worship a brand, the overwhelming likelihood is that we do not see it as a brand. If we could more reliably identify a brand as a brand, and assimilate the inevitability of it behaving as a brand, we would much less often find ourselves caught up in these self-exacerbating spirals of worship.
By stereotype, a brand is a corporation that makes slick TV commercials. Hogs the billboards. Materially possesses a "virtue-signalling calendar" whilst subliminally reeking of contempt for all humanity. Takes six weeks to answer a private complaint but responds to a publicly-visible complaint within six minutes. And expects a glowing Trustpilot review as a condition of doing its basic, minimal job. Badly.
For obvious reasons, we've kinda lost our affection for these openly hostile refuges of yobbery. So in the modern age, the very concept of brand is rapidly rebranding. Yes, for some time, brands have been going out of their way to avoid looking like brands. I almost feel like I'm shattering the Father Christmas charade here, but... Well, brace yourself... "Influencers" are brands. Some of them are entire companies that present as a single person. Their social feed may even be assembled by the same labour pool that assembles Walmart's feed. When you Tweet certain influencers, if anyone reads your message at all, it's probably ^JW, or ^RM.
And whether they're companies or sole traders, "influencers" exploit their public recognition just as Walmart exploits its public recognition. To drive revenue.
We have to stop distinguishing personal brands from corporate brands. The dynamics are exactly the same. It's only the facade that differs.
So invested are we in the melee of siding with one mouth-almighty against another, that we totally neglect to take our own side. If we don't stop worshipping people who see us solely as a free publicity and cash machine, how can late stage capitalism be anyone's fault but our own?
So brands don't have to conform to any established stereotype, and increasingly, they don't. They just have to be a recognisable entity whose motivation is money. Brands can be vloggers, bloggers, websites, NGOs, religions... A nonprofit is a brand. Wikimedia is a brand. Creative Commons is a brand. Recognised "tech journalists" are brands. Elon Musk is a brand. Meghan Markle is a brand. If they convert public trust into money, they're brands. And whether they're one person or one thousand, they have the same impetus to self-serve. The same impetus to conceal the truth. The same impetus to lie.
Wired has no less impetus to conceal an inconvenient truth than the companies who pay it to "review" their products. Brave and Proton have no less impetus to conceal an inconvenient truth than Google. A "digital rights blogger" has no less impetus to conceal an inconvenient truth than Facebook.
But there are distinct differences in the amount of public worship that various types of brand command. For example, brands represented by a single person (so-called personal brands) garner worship much more easily than corporations. There's no tangible reason why, other than the way we're socially engineered to form relationships with individuals rather than groups. There's no evidence to show that personal brands are any less manipulative or greedy than corporate brands. Some of them, indeed, are corporate brands.
Meanwhile, "nonprofits" garner worship more easily than their profit-making counterparts. Again, there's no reason why they should. At executive level there's no difference between a "nonprofit" company and a profit-making company. Same over-inflated salaries, same self-serving decisions. And in some ways, "nonprofits" can be worse. They're more likely to expect free labour than a for-profit company, for example. And they're more likely to get it.
In tech, newer brands can fare hugely better in public opinion than older brands. Indeed, when it espouses the right ideology, a complete newcomer can be better trusted than a longtime market leader. As long as they talk the talk, some of us will better trust platforms that have not yet even opened, than platforms that have run more smoothly than most for a decade and a half.
This tells us something interesting about the way we allocate our trust. Under certain conditions, we don't require a commercial entity to earn our trust. We grant trust as a default, and then steadily withdraw it as we discover how they're really treating us.
And the conditions under which we allocate free trust are tenuous in the extreme. Many people will trust any tech brand that professes to share their ideology. Despite the fact that brands routinely lie about their ideology. Did you think that Google was left wing? Think again. Many will trust any tech brand that is introduced to them by a well-known tech blog. Despite the fact that well-known tech blogs are really just ad boards for hire.
We are to brands what the Disciples were to Jesus. Unfortunately, our faith is rather more misguided.
THE PERSONAL BRAND
But without question, our greatest vulnerability is the personal brand. Single-face brands not only garner the most worship. They can extract our money in return for the least value - often no value at all. They're the most powerful propagandists. We trust them more. They're less subject to scrutiny than companies, and they're more resistant to bad publicity. Whereas we tend to treat corporations as machines, we tend to treat personal brands as humans. We see them as potential friends. As fallible individuals who are entitled to forgiveness, free help, etc.
Would you oblige Bognor and Clacton Mutual Insurance if they slid into your inbox asking for free help? I'm guessing you'd junk the message and put the company on block. I certainly would. But what if Miley Cyrus slid into your inbox with the same request? I won't speak for you on that, but if I believed it was genuinely her, I would have to summon an absolute tidal wave of self-discipline in order to restrain myself from playing the Good Samaritan.
The thing is, Miley Cyrus is a lot wealthier than some tinpot insurance company that no one's ever heard of. She's far less in need of free help. And yet I would find it much, much more difficult NOT to help her out gratis, than I would find it NOT to help out a startup insurance brand gratis. You can attribute this bias to a variety of factors, but in the end, the only thing that matters is who most needs the free help - and versus an SME, it ain't Miley.
For reference, I'm not a crazed Miley fanboy. I picked her because she's richer than SMEs and universally relatable. But the dynamic of us preferencing individual people over collectives - even when they don't deserve it - is constant across the brand spectrum. And it's something that collective brands are now beginning to exploit in a big way.
More than ever before, brands are fronted by one individual, and it works. Even brands that are not fronted by one individual increasingly use individuals to disseminate their message. They might disseminate via major influencers. But there's also now a market for micro-influencers: individual people with modest audiences on social media, who can, collectively, reach a wider audience than a single celebrity. Services are springing up to connect brands with large groups of these micro-influencers. It's a form of information laundering, in which individual nice people proxy propaganda from groups of nasty people. But all the public see is a chirpy "friend" giving them advice, and the ploy is staggeringly effective.
That's the 'shop floor' of the personal brand. Then you have the elite...
Twitter's current subscription leaderboard, as reported by Apple's in-app purchase listings, is exclusively topped by personal brands - some of them commercial enterprises presenting as individual people. And if anyone remembers my Cash Messiah article from 2019, I have an update.
The man whose antics formed the of nucleus that article was one Bill Pulte. And as I write, Pulte's $2.99 subscription is Twitter's in-app purchase board-topper on the Apple store. After publication of the original piece, I received communication from the media, indicating that not only Pulte, but Twitter's complicity in the entire "cash-giveaway" genre that he took into the mainstream, was a concern under investigation.
So to find him headlining the Twitter subscription league table struck me as particularly sickening. Pulte perpetrates an excruciatingly repetitive drone of smug, worthless spam, which would STILL be overpriced even if he were paying you to endure it. He's exploitative, manipulative, controlling, abusive, nauseatingly self-sanctifying...
And even if one or two of his subscribers actually do cop for a windfall - tip: don't hold your breath - for the vast majority it's three dollars a month straight down the toilet. Zero value. Based alone on the number of people who have been scammed within the overwhelmingly fraudulent "Twitter Philanthropy" environment that Pulte boasts he invented (and which Jack Dorsey should be in jail for encouraging), he's responsible for endless misery. He profits from misery. Most of the people paying his $2.99 a month are flat broke or in debt. The very notion of a philanthropist charging people to be considered for aid should forever consign Pulte to the comedy drawer. Thirty years ago, comedians were doing that very sketch.
But it seems that with the assistance of Silicon Valley profiteers, who cut themselves in on exploitation rather than shutting it down, life has finally imitated art. Many people quite seriously equate Pulte with Jesus. This is brand-worship at its absolute height. No tangible redeeming features. Wall to wall spam. Clear exploitation of poverty and misery. A viral driver of scams, who KNOWS he's a viral driver of scams and doesn't give a shit. A creator of public suckers' lists. It's hard to imagine how capitalism could be made any more irresponsible. How can this garner worship?
Simply, people are misinterpreting commercial enterprise as humanitarianism. They are failing to recognise a brand as a brand. And this dynamic runs right across brand-worship. People will still believe, for example, that free cybertech is offered out of the goodness of the provider's heart. Even if they've stopped believing that Facebook and Google are paragons of benevolence, they think the likes of Vivaldi, Startpage, Mojeek, etc - self-styled "privacy" brands - are humanitarian in nature. Here's a thing. Facebook originally billed itself as the privacy-focused alternative to Myspace. Look what happened. Every household name in tech has professed to care about our privacy. Narrator voice: "They lied". How long will it take us to learn the lesson?
There IS NO BENEVOLENCE where commercial enterprise is concerned. The goal is to make money, and ONLY to make money, and it doesn't matter how many times brands assure us that it's not, we all need to assure ourselves that it categorically is.
BREAKING THE PATTERN
Disciple Syndrome and the potency of brand-worship has been inflated by the lucid irresponsibility of social media. Social media created a soapbox effect which did not exist in previous online communities. THE most fascinating element in the research I did for this piece, was tracing back the online histories of people who have garnered worship on social media to see how they fared on traditional forums. I was actually able to see those very same people failing on trad forums. Being kicked off those forums, branded scammers. Without the soapbox, their voice was just one in a crowd. Easily challenged. Easily disarmed.
Social media made it necessary for most of us to worship brands and personal brands - in order to exist at all.
So one practical step in breaking the pattern of brand-worship is simply to get off social media and find (or even return to) community venues where all voices have equal reach.
There's been a steady swell in the number of disillusioned Twitter users as Elon Musk progressively drives up the cost of "free speech" until only brands can afford it. But the line of vultures jostling at the exodus gate are offering EXACTLY THE SAME DEAL. Same pleb-pit of worship beneath an exploitative orator's soapbox. Same inevitability of exploitation. Okay, so maybe you're gonna be paying to chant for Meghan Markle rather than paying to chant for Elon Musk, but how does that compare with paying (or even NOT paying) to chant for yourself?
So invested are we in this melee of siding with one mouth-almighty against another, that we totally neglect to take our own side. Seriously! YOU matter. Your own welfare matters more than some manipulative brand that will tell you it loves you, whilst grasping at your banknotes, or flogging you off to the Devil, or both. If we don't stop worshipping people who see us solely as a free publicity and cash machine, how can late stage capitalism be anyone's fault but our own?
As a society, we need to abandon the idea of role models altogether and find new routes to personal development. The notion that here in the 2020s, you could put a savvy entrepreneur in front of a large group of naive hopefuls, and NOT end up with one billionaire and a queue outside a food-bank, is, frankly, ridiculous.
So let's stop listening to that mouth almighty and start taking our OWN side. You do not need to "prove your stake" in anyone's ideological package. Build your own ideology, around your personal needs. And as you build it, you will see how exploitative ALL copy-and-paste ideological packages are. It's okay to dispute BOTH sides. It's okay to agree with eight things a soapbox orator says but disagree with the ninth and tenth. Indeed I wholeheartedly encourage you to disagree with the ninth and tenth, because it's almost invariably the ninth and tenth that deliver the sucker-punch. You can agree that a media figure is right about one thing, or three things, or six things, without having to agree that they're right about everything. You can pick and mix. DO pick and mix. Pick the things that help you, and the things that help people who deserve your help. Don't pick the things that help brands - be they collective or personal - at your expense.
Just a quick note to say that I'm now posting more on the Neocities blog Backlit, and I'm planning to make that my main haunt for this type of content going forward. If you want notifications on new posts, Backlit now has an RSS feed, which is https://backlit.neocities.org/rss.xml. No trackers or third-party embeds whatsoever, and the blog has a zero-JavaScript version natively compatible with true indie browsers like Lynx. See you over there.