The Age of Personal Hype

About a year and a half ago, a colleague of mine whom I'll call Steve Theory walked into my office, shut the door behind him and asked my advice about some recent job offers. Without a hint of sarcasm, he explained, “I just want to do what's best for the brand Steve Theory.”

I sort of nodded and tried to keep a straight face. “The brand Steve Theory,” I muttered, once he left. “Who thinks about life in those terms? Sheesh.”

But in fact, Steve was right and I was wrong. Practically everybody seems to think of life in those terms these days, whether they state it so plainly or not. In the 1980's, Laurie Anderson had a funny line about figuring out how to live life. Basically, she said, just look at what the government does and, you know, scale it down to size. That, of course, was back when people paid attention to the government. Now nobody cares about the government; we care about hot companies. And when we try to figure out how to advance our careers and live our lives, we figure out what hot companies do and scale it down to size. Ours is the age of personal hype.

Granted, the padded résumé is probably as old as the résumé itself. But there is something, I think, about the Internet and our newly networked world that ramps up the possibilities for marketing the self. The other day I got an email from a venture capitalist, who, I noticed, included not just his name and contact information in the “signature” of his email, but links to a half-dozen or so web sites connected to businesses he has invested in. Every email he sends is an open invitation to build momentum for his brands, and thus for him.

It is easy to have a Web site of one's own, featuring not just your padded résumé, but complimentary blurbs about you, thoughtful soundbites from you, photographs of you playing basketball with friends, etc. These little self-marketing monuments exist now by the thousands; even New Yorker writers have them. An e-zine is just as easy a method of self-promotion. One of the authors of the cult hit business book The Cluetrain Manifesto describes how he decided to create a “Web-cum-e-mail newsletter,” featuring his alter ego “RageBoy,” which did wonders for his brand. (His author's note at the end of the book lists two personal web sites.)

Even the first authentic new literary star of the year, Dave Eggers, owes his success in part to a personal Webzine that was taken as a kind of portrait of the artist as a young brand — a viral campaign impossible to imagine in, say, J.D. Salinger's time. And the internet itself feeds on this personal hype that it has engendered, growing thick with micro-targeted discussion groups and personal sites and virtual celebrities who are famous to 15 people. Recently I got a mass email from an acquaintance touting the latest installment of his online column, whose subject was the importance of his latest off-line project. Even more recently I stumbled across a Web guide to chat room communication that is most effective for your personal brand. “Develop a catch phrase,” the author advised.

All of this descends from the idea of the “Brand Called You,” a sort of life-as-company philosophy articulated by the management guru Tom Peters — and long since swallowed whole by the career-advice wing of the business press. But since the concept's debut, two big things have changed. First, the shrill self-promotion needed for a company to become “hot” has been ratcheted up to an astonishing degree. It is no longer enough for a company simply to go about the business of whatever its business might be. Companies market themselves not just to consumers but also to venture capitalists, to potential employees, to Wall Street analysts, to the trade press. An initial public offering is a branding event. The potential must, at all times, be astronomically fantastic. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted one unnamed analyst: “Companies that tell the biggest stories can raise the most money and then can use that money to turn that story into reality.”

The second change, not surprisingly, is that ordinary people are more enthralled with companies than ever. And so, more recently, Peters has published a book called The Brand You 50: 50 Ways to Transform Yourself From an 'Employee' Into a Brand That Shouts Distinction, Commitment and Passion! The book is an extraordinary collection of screamed exhortations, with typography that Marshall McLuhan would find distracting and punctuation that would embarrass Tom Wolfe. “Everybody is a package! . . . You have a personality. (Ask your close friends!) . . . Packaging is Expressed Personality.” “Work with what you've got! (Damn it!) (And make it special.) (Damn it!)” “Build a Web site that wows. (Period.)” “You are your own P.R. 'agency.'”

You must, in other words, manage your career as though you are a growth stock. What is your potential? Is it limitless? Can you have a huge impact? Will you, in effect, change everything? If not, you are a stodgy Old Economy human being, and nobody wants to buy in.

Self-marketing makes perfect sense in a world where — like corporations — we've learned to think in the short term. I have lost track of Steve Theory, but I have spoken to any number of young people working in, say, the high-tech field who view their careers in 18-month blocks: after that, a given job has done all it can for one's brand. Those who have been at it longer seek out arrangements with several employers, consulting here, working a project there, serving as part-time interim vice president of engineering someplace else — resembling, in effect, little morphing conglomerates. Just as it is fashionable for a company to respond to change by constantly redefining its mission, these people are not so much building a résumé as forever cranking out the next annual report.

The problem with trying to fend off the idea of the personal brand is that it is one of those bits of management theory that, if you think about it, is inescapably true. An entrepreneurial person I met not long ago mused that the hype explosion is inevitable in a world in which more and more interaction is mediated, by computer networks (those supposed forces of disintermediation) or otherwise. He was referring to business hype, but what he said translates easily to the personal: Where there used to be time to develop a personality, there is now only time to make a brand impression.

Perhaps Tom Peters would conclude: Hey, that's O.K. We can all stand out! Obviously, this is not true — it is a familiar joke, like the universally above-average students of Lake Wobegon. But the easier it is for some of us to think this way, the sooner it will be necessary for all of us to. And so it is that I have recently launched my new personal home page. I hope it will have a huge impact.

A version of this story appeared in the May 14, 2000 issue of
The New York Times Magazine.