Looking back at the crossroads where I faced a clear choice between following the dictates of being a curious writer and being a well-managed brand, I realize that the choice was largely made for me. If I had said yes to the Vogue shopping trips (and the corporate speeches, and the ad campaigns), the movement I was a part of would have torn me to shreds. And rightly so. This was a good decade before personal branding had been normalized—we still called people who tried to cash in on mass movements careerists and sellouts. Which made those marketing decisions pretty easy: I didn't want to lose all my friends.

QUESTION: Did the normalization of personal branding actually reduce this sort of social constraint on cashing in?

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 173