Commodification refers to viewing something as a product – an item that can be bought or sold. When we talk of ‘self-commodification’ we’re talking about how personality can be used to sell ideas and products. Instead of marketing an item, we’re selling a personal brand or personality. Tom Peters, business author and speaker says, “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is head marketer for the brand called You” (Davis). The familiar idea of a ‘personal brand’ permeates much of the influencer culture that we observe online.

This type of ‘personal branding’ gets presented as a way to ‘escape the 9-5’ and the perpetual ‘rat race’ of capitalist America. It sounds empowering. Many of us have daydreamed about becoming influencers, podcasting, or creating a YouTube channel like the people we see online. Many of these influencers exist with a sort of ‘mini fame’ that appears glamorous and exciting. It sounds thrilling to have people tuning in to listen to your thoughts, or to have different brands willing to pay you to endorse them.

Unfortunately far less spoken of, personal branding also comes with the temptation to view the self as a product or commodity. It also creates a temptation for those consuming content to view creators in this manner. Any attempt to reduce human beings to commodities in this way inevitably creates harm in the lives of both creators and consumers.

We see this most clearly in cases like Jordan Cheyenne’s, where the line between person and ‘brand’ blurred so closely they became indistinguishable. Cheyenne’s livelihood became her life, and what her viewers witnessed resulted from an extreme commodification of her existence. When your personality becomes your livelihood, as it did for Cheyenne, you end up making each moment of your day ‘marketable’. Everything is content. In her case, the personal nature of the moment was caught up in the whirlwind of marketable, ‘relatable’ content creation. There is no doubt that the family experienced previous vulnerable moments that turned into opportunities to increase engagement with an audience.

While touted as a convenient path to empowerment and freedom from the traditional workweek, creating a personal brand can end up consuming more time and attention or replacing personality altogether. “To be successful at Me. Inc, my traits, values, beliefs, and so on—the qualities by which I locate myself and where I stand—must be self-consciously adopted or discarded, emphasized or de-emphasized, according to the abstract and competitive standards of the market” (Davis). In other words, personal branding requires us to accentuate or downplay certain aspects of our personality for the sake of market appeal. This naturally impacts our sense of self, and our ‘best self’. Perhaps, we even begin to define ourselves by our personal ‘marketability’. More time spent on personal marketing equals more effort exerted in commodifying the personality.

Instead of creating the desired sense of stability by ‘escaping the 9-5’, investing in “Me Inc” creates an environment where livelihood wraps itself up with identity, belief, personality, and beauty and becomes dependent on them. Rather than promoting the virtues of a product we must promote the virtues of a person. The person must retain their usefulness to others in order to stay relevant. “Since the market is never static, staying ‘relevant’ like the great brands means that these qualities [personality, and sense of self] must be constantly monitored and adjusted to retain the desired image” (Davis). Fears of becoming ‘irrelevant’, ‘too old’ or of having controversial ‘unmarketable’ beliefs (adherence to a political party, religious views, or parenting philosophy, for example) occupy the mind and can influence the suppression of not just ideas, but of a person’s unique personality as a whole. The more time one spends creating content, and the more moments of a person’s life become content, the more extreme the self-commodification.