I just read a Forbes article about a guy who sold his e-learning company to private equity. The article mentioned the powerful combination between the PE firm's 'financial might' and the guy's 'formidable personal brand'. What even is that. The company was faceless and the PE was only interested in net profit and number of active recurring clients. Moreover, the guy exited. Who cares about his personal brand.

This idea of a personal brand stems from how we present ourselves on social media platforms. Somehow we must reduce our existence to a 120 character bio and a 200x200 pixel photo. And hope for the best. 🤞 We can even hire someone to build it!

It's reductionist. It's disingenuous. It's objectification. It's a way we managed to further commodify ourselves. Like we weren't flattened enough, we also had to create this palatable avatar of ourselves. It's the object oriented approach we apply on everything, this time turned towards ourselves.

Last year I wrote an article on why architecture is so difficult to describe. I suggested we should stop objectifying it. If it's negative space, then it's more than just an object. Architecture is a hyperobject, just like climate change, nuclear war and globalization.

Now that we can represent ourselves online, we also become not objects, but hyperobjects. We are viscuous (leave an impression to someone), we become nonlocal, we produce time undulation (by reaching immortality online). We leave traces every time we use the Internet. The digital footprint is the trace of ourselves interacting with the network. Like a physical footprint, it is our own, specific only to ourselves.

I promise this will all make sense if you read just one (or more) thing from below.

The Things

Hyperobjects A philosophy book written in 2013 by a guy who tries to understand why we remove ourselves more and more from the natural environment. Get the bootleg PDF

Architecture is a Hyperobject Me justifying why architects sound so annoying when they have to describe their work. Read the article

What's a Passive Digital Footprint Instead of building a fucking personal brand, just take care of your existing digital footprint. Read the article

This email ends with the poem from last year that started everything:

Thank you Loredana for helping me further clarify this concept, through our discussions.

I love you, big beautiful humans.