A Legal Update on Your Personal Brand

A French couple is suing Airbnb for creating a replica of their apartment inside the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Here is a list of the offenses:

• 1 Ikea Lack concealed mounting wall shelf, 190x26x5cm, white (buy)
• 1 Smeg Brand 50’s Style Refrigerator, right hand hinge, silver (buy)
• 1 young girl with bird silhouette on head “Alix” poster (buy)
• 1 silhouettes of household things and also nature things “Everyday Objects” poster (buy)
• 3 Peter Bowles Titan 1 Pendant lights, aluminum (buy)
• 1 “Fresh Up with 7 Up” wooden crate (buy)
• 1 DIY Ribbon bulletin board (tutorial here)
• 1 large rectangle of chalkboard paint, approx. 182x52cm, size estimated via known measurements of above items (buy)
• Chalk doodles of question mark, dragonfly, angel, crown, flyswatter and/or spatula, indiscernible four-legged animal, illegible cursive scribbling

Here is the evidence (Airbnb headquarters left):

images via SFGate and Buzzfeed

I generated this list in ~37 minutes. I was able to find websites selling all of the items in the first 15, with the exception of the Peter Bowles Titan 1 Pendant lamp, which I learned from Twitter can be found by searching “silver pendant light” and not “silver pendant lamp,” “industrial pendant lamp,” “galvanized warehouse lamp,” or “oversized metal schoolhouse lamp” (I was overthinking it). This point is, I feel very proud of all this. I might even go as far as to admit that I feel superior to people who cannot identify certain commodities of the day on sight. Sometimes, in the privacy of my own home, alone in bed at night, in full view of my various undergraduate Marx anthologies, I smile and think to myself that expansive knowledge of purchasable goods and the language to search them out is a natural-born talent, akin to playing music by ear or a photographic memory. Is this level of investment reprehensible? I think so. Is the projection of selves on to objects a chief value of our time? Probably…

A few months ago, I read a short book called What Was the Hipster? (Full disclosure, I actually read the Kindle edition, because I’ve lately come to resent the literary smugness implied by people who decorate extensively with books.) (I realize that conscious resistance betrays some level of investment in the idea…) This book is super well-executed, and talks about about the then-emergent bogeyman of “the hipster” from a solid variety of perspectives. What Was the Hipster? was published in 2010, and since then the term has become even more diluted and maybe less useful, but I keep coming back to a sound byte from contributor Mark Greif:

The hipster is the cultural figure of the person…who now understands consumer purchases within the familiar categories of mass consumption (but still restricted from others) — like the right vintage T-shirt, the right jeans, the right foods for that matter — to be a form of art.

Since the book’s publication, once-hipster values like authenticity, eco-consciousness, artisanal-ity, and blandly minimalist graphic design have trickled down (or up)(or maybe even laterally) to achieve mass appeal. The other day, I bought a bottle of Bolthouse Farms cold-pressed beet juice for $3.48 from a rural Walmart. The (square-shaped, matte-finish) bottle explicitly announced itself as USDA organic, gluten-free, non-GMO, and vegan. The side of the bottle read, “Founded in 1915 — A century on the land means we’re rooted in times when food was simpler.”

via Bolthouse Farms

Bolthouse Farms is owned by Campbell’s Soup, the poster child for bland-commodity-abstracted-as-art, ranked #966 on Forbes’ list of the world’s biggest public companies. I bought the juice in a Walmart, which is probably the farthest possible place (both literally and symbolically) from “times when food was simpler.” Nobody is being fooled here, or at least, it is highly unlikely that anyone thinks a Walmart is the same thing as a 1915 farm stand. The organic, gluten-free, non-GMO, vegan, square-bottled, matte-finished juice exists in the Walmart because Walmart knows that a broad enough (and thus profitable enough) cross-section of people who shop at Walmart (read: most people) now appreciate the abstracted value of these adjectives, not just Brooklyn hipsters in 2004 or 2010. These specific words (organic, vegan, etc.) could be swapped out for any other sets of adjectives to associate yourself with, but the point is, mass culture is on board with the idea that you can express your sense of self by associating with the right pre-fabricated objects, experiences, and concepts. Some might call this a personal brand.

(I’ll get back to Airbnb — bear with me.)

I saw a tweet once, which I was never able to find again, which read something like, “In 2015, brands want to be your friends and your friends want to be brands” [Update: someone found the tweet!]. I worked in advertising for the first part of 2015, and then committed the rest of the year to talking about myself on the internet, so I can speak to both truths in the sentiment. Here is where a broad swath of our culture is at right now (me included) (probably you too, because late-capitalist darlings like us are the meat-and-potatoes of sparsely-designed, consumer-facing soft-tech endeavors like Medium):

1. People seek to imbue their lives with meaning by “curating” the correct set of objects and ready-made experiences to express that meaning (i.e. I bought Bolthouse Farms juice because it tastes good, but also because I would like to be the kind of person who endorses things like health and simplicity, and buying a juice is an easier way to associate with those values versus going to the gym or forsaking my worldly possessions.)
2. Brands seek to endear themselves into this class of meaningful objects by communicating to consumers that they “get it,” even when they don’t, because they are a brand, and by definition the only meaning that a for-profit company seeks is profit (for an example of this, see: organic, gluten-free, non-GMO, vegan, square-bottled, matte-finished juice at Walmart)

To be honest, I’m not terribly cranky about this paradigm. Besides that fact that unchecked capitalism reifies/profits from almost every major societal injustice, I have been known to indulge in an enjoyable product like quinoa salad or feminist Beyonce. My point isn’t to complain or talk you into anything. What I’m trying to illustrate is the fact that the Airbnb case represents a key development in the “personal brand as art” debate. That is, if the specific arrangement of purchasable commodities is upheld as a true form of intellectual property, then we have reached the day that all brands dream of, when strategic participation in capitalism is legitimized as a meaningful reflection of our authentic selves.

A victory for the quirky graphic designers with the very nice Paris apartment might look like a victory for people, but in either outcome, Airbnb wins. The apartment owner told Buzzfeed, “They are branding the company with our life,” but what the apartment owner is missing is that what he is calling “life” is really just the specific arrangement of things purchased from companies. The more that people believe that association with beautiful, well-arranged commodities is the stuff that gives meaning to life, the more beautiful apartments in desirable locales Airbnb stands to rent. The “personal brand as art” debate validates businesses more than people.

Anyway, I have no horse in this race. I project my self concept upon a wide variety of objects, and I’ve stayed in several comfortable Airbnbs.