Anti-Marketing Is the Future and the Future Terrifies Me
On anti-marketing and modern living.
Somewhere, a creative director opens the coffin they work from in the dusty bowels of a converted Brooklyn loft and sends an uncapitalized Slack message: “have we considered using ring camera footage for the campaign?”
Later, a pop star scrolls past the ad on her phone in the back of an Uber in Crete. She tweets: “truly believe anti marketing will become a thing soon… still marketing but it’s just a different approach, more intimate, personal, private, one on one. less about the projection of scale. i’m into it xx.”
A 20-something in a self-described second city sets up a ring light, instructing the ghosts of the free market haunting her apartment on how to break in ballet flats. The influencer who wants to be an actor now posts a photo dump with the purse they were sent peeking out from behind a pile of clothes in a hotel room in Positano. A brand rep is sent a copy of the post for review, asking that photos of the purse be kept separate from the influencer-actor’s new swimwear line. A 20-something in the West Village bumps into someone filming a front-facing video while swiping through the post. That other 20-something sends out a TikTok about the “tasteslop” ruining the spirit of the West Village.
A gay guy somewhere sends that video to his hag, laughing about how they went to college with the girl, before she discovered Eastern European fashion trends.
He swipes back to Instagram, navigating to his favorite creator’s new photo dump, to see if he could find a rug dupe from that furniture company partnership. He buys the cologne on the dresser instead. In the dark, his hag scrolls LTK, finding dupes for the lace-y little peasant dress on her former college roommate.
This is not modern life now, but it is an approximation of modern life. One wakes up, logs online, and experiences what can only be described as an infinite hall of mirrors. Perhaps it is the anti-marketing the internet’s been abuzz with, trumpeted about by cool kids and creative directors and people who think taking a stance online is a real job?
It starts, like almost everything, with a post from a pop star — a real 365 party girl. It’s quoted above, but the important bit reads: “still marketing but it’s just a different approach, more intimate, personal, private.” It’s a rather plain idea, on its face. Completely of the moment and not a very novel concept, at least when weighted against the visual trends dominating the culture industries. The following list is about as tired as posts about posts from pop stars: photo dumps, “messiness,” authenticity, camouflage, flash photography, film, Substack, beat-up purses, unwashed hair.
Charitably speaking, it is an idea one comes to when they see themselves as uniquely positioned in culture to shape it, guide it, aware of not of the similar forces pushing at their heels. Interestingly, that’s the exact position everyone seems to be clamoring for online near-constantly — to be both the product and the designer of the product.
Mere days after sending out that post from wherever — Crete merely the product of my overactive and sometimes laughable imagination — a longtime fashion-fluencer shared an equally contested carousel of stills captured from what is presumably a Ring doorbell camera.
The changing tides were an entirely predictable development, as social media congealed into a basic function of everyday life. Ultra-glamour would always give way to raw messiness. The influential forces in fashion reforged themselves; high-gloss editorials and campaigns became slice-of-life videos and the above “photo dumps.” The reality star turned fashion muse posts the brand-approved bag in slide four of the vacation roundup. The youthful movie star doesn’t post red carpet photos; she will post those off-the-runway heels dangling from their straps in the elevator on Instagram Stories.
Nobody but faceless fashion accounts and perhaps this fashion editor would care if Amber Valletta was on the side of a bus again in Gucci.
The shift is felt beyond fashion, in this new marketing-as-real-life landscape. Musicians traffic in secret shows for those in the know while stickers on cameras spread like a plague. Physical items and even brands have shed the need to be marketable because most everyone has become the product. Not even the experience of the secret concert is very much desired, or the in-the-know pop-up boutique, or the ultra-exclusive party venue. Not even the most basic of goods on the totem pole, like little-now-big purses, are exempt.
No, the upper echelons of the culture industry do not sell physical items anymore. They do not even sell experiences. What a wave of so-called “anti-marketing” heralds is the selling of a self, a hollow self. This new, algorithmically driven landscape desires to sell the being of a person. The party girl was right to point out it is “less about the projection of scale,” because anti-marketing’s startling immediacy is born of the very intimacy she gestures towards. There are not a million versions of a person to reproduce, as the algorithm narrows. There is just the one: you.
If the idea sounds plain, even banal, it is because like most philosophical grandstandings: it is. The history of the advertising age has always bent towards the being of somebody: the type to drive a sports car, smoke a cigarette, clean the house, raise good children, be hotter and sexier and smarter and cooler. What has changed is the narrowing of those selves into something akin to a tree trunk, its branches clipped, desperately growing straight towards the sun.
On the topic of plain, grandstanding philosophy, one calls to mind the dueling theories of the rhizome and arborescence, repeated by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. To both, culture was not wholly unlike a rhizome, a living organism in which every point is interconnected. Past and present and future come into being at once, set free of the linearity that constrains the tree and its roots. Instead, they saw culture as proof that all people, knowingly or not, exist in constant tandem with each other.
More immediately, and to the point: the work of keeping that rhizome alive was left to the billions of us on Earth, milling about, borrowing and learning and stealing and copying and growing and changing all together. But algorithmic self-generation now threatens the work, born of shifting marketing trends and artificial intelligence that exists in symbiosis. They have infiltrated the organism, absorbing great swathes of that rhizome, distilling down millions of interconnected people and places and things into a reproducible, hollow machine consciousness.
I find it quite enchanting, this magical-realist rhizome. Plainly speaking: brands and their algorithms outsourced the work of branding to their customers, so they could then package the data, and sell instead the very concept of being alive. The internet and its thinkers circle ideas like “anti-marketing” and “authenticity” repeatedly because the internet and its thinkers want most everyone to become better products. It’s almost boring to point out how obvious it is; to sell the concept of person-as-brand, marketing executives and their acolytes made the first sale of their own soul to the machine devil.
How lucky for the machine devil. Without the abandonment of creative principles, the best it could attempt would be “merch drops” that read like years-late luxury workwear ads.
What is more alarming is the readiness with which everyone even loosely related to the culture industries has adopted the same mindset. Even the average Joe — and his good Judy — post like an Italian fashion house or cleaning product company will stop by Akron, Ohio with a brand deal. It goes high, then low; a dusty Deleuze passage confronts Jemima Kirke’s now-famous adage: “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.” Is that the solution, then? To think less about ourselves, to want and desire less? Perhaps the purse must simply be a purse. Perhaps we party for the sake of partying. Perhaps I think less about the way my own personhood reads based on the ordering of a photo dump of my friends at the beach, the sunrise positioned just so, to show I am someone who lives in the moment.
But then we arrive back at that machine intelligence haunting my phone, which stole my humanity and reproduced a facsimile. Then we arrive back at anti-marketing, an inevitability that feels almost overwhelming in the face of AI-generated images and videos of indeterminable origin. These hollow people with empty faces post my own sunset to sell it back to me.
Until the data centers are dismantled and the hard drives of marketing executives in culottes are smashed to bits, I cannot see the solution. The first step, then, will be to reclaim the dream from which individuality is born. Once, anyone, anywhere could be somebody. Now, that dream has turned into a nightmare. It demands that everybody, everywhere desire to become some thing, or: the only thing.
I love how narrative this essay is. Thank you.
I wish I have the capacity of writing this piece