While founding a company or working independently certainly can be creatively fulfilling, this option isn't available to everyone. The most successful self-branders are white-collar professionals with creative or engineering capacities, or people selling goods and services over the internet. In other words, the Web 2.0 workers I interviewed function as the "proof" that self-branding, and entrepreneurial governance in general, works, but only in exceptional cases. Championing self-branding as a universal solution for economic woes demonstrates the disconnect between neoliberal ideals of identity—which emphasize self-improvement, responsibility for skill acquisition, and self-surveillance—and the reality of day-to-day life.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 419