The dangers of identity capitalism with Jia Tolentino (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Adam Grant: How would you describe what your personal brand is? 

Jia Tolentino: Oh my God, this is humiliating. I've never had to do this actually.

Adam Grant: Hey, it's Adam Grant. We're doing something different for this season of WorkLife, my podcast with TED. I'm still an organizational psychologist, and I still study how to make work not suck, but this season we're pairing each of our regular episodes with a companion interview. It might be with an expert, a practitioner, or someone unexpected who can add a different perspective to our episode and build on and challenge what we said.

Today is our companion interview for the episode on personal branding. My guest is Jia Tolentino, writer at the New Yorker, screenwriter, and author of Trick Mirror. Jia is a brilliant observer of something last week's episode didn't do justice to: the pressure we all face to brand ourselves online. Along with analyzing the problem, Jia has experienced it.

Jia Tolentino: I have made myself known to people through my writing, through social media. 

Adam Grant: The place I wanna start is to ask you, Jia, if you think you have a personal brand. 

Jia Tolentino: I think that I do. I think that I didn't realize the extent to which it was a sort of like, like an economically viable one until my book came out in 2019, at which point I tried to do whatever I could to retreat from having one. I have a strong personality that communicates extremely easily. I'm extroverted, especially for a writer. I am pretty much all on the surface, and I have a kind of personality that is of the type of personality that did really well on the 2010s sort of dawn of surveillance identity capitalism internet. 

Adam Grant: Long before TikTok and Instagram Reels, Jia started off as a blogger. As social media algorithms began to shape how we interact online, it became easier for people to build a following around highly marketable personalities. 

Jia Tolentino: At that time I was writing constantly on blogs and websites about whatever. And the only reason that I was able to get a job in media whatsoever, like I got my first media job, I was in grad school in Michigan, just blogging for free for a website called The Hairpin. And I was, I guess like sufficiently funny on Twitter that I was brought into the fold of like this person could perhaps have a media career in a time that it was like extremely personality based and kind of attention based.

But then, you know, I mean, so much of what I've written about is about how this is bad, right? Like so much of what I wrote about was how I think that the social media internet and the architecture of this version of the internet is existentially destructive. And this like identity capitalism is, it's like soul destroying.

Adam Grant: In our last episode, we asked the question, should you ditch the personal brand? Our experts discussed how personal branding can be both dehumanizing and ineffective for self-promotion, but in today's social media landscape, is it even possible to avoid having a personal brand? Even if you're not trying to build one, it often gets assigned to you.

Jia Tolentino: I definitely have never sat around and thought about like what is consistent with my personal brand. There are some kinds of personalities that like map really well onto performative structures, and mine happened, maybe happens to be one of them. The reason that I stopped writing in a certain way when my book came out was I realized that a path was in front of me to just become a, a fake hack person. The time in which I was writing the most on the internet, it was like the girlboss era, and I always was like, girlboss is bad, but I knew that I was sort of like adjacent enough, and so like the version of it that I was afraid was coming off was like, cool girl who writes about late capitalism. This like girlboss, but not really, but like she is meta about it or whatever. Like that was so horrifying to me that I was like, you have to get off Twitter and stop posting on Instagram. 

Adam Grant: I certainly don't think of you that way, which I guess means this.

Jia Tolentino: That's good.

Adam Grant: This was successful brand management. 

Jia Tolentino: Thank you. I have managed my brand. Yeah. 

Adam Grant: Yeah, I, I would describe you as a cultural critic. I think of you as unusually insightful, unusually witty, and occasionally unusually acerbic too. 

Jia Tolentino: Oh, thanks. That's not embarrassing at all. 

Adam Grant: Talk to me a little bit about what is a personal brand and how is it different from being known for something? 

Jia Tolentino: Hmm. Well, I think that the most important delineation here has to do with market capture. Personal branding is completely identified with an economy in which the big tech companies trade on a model of commodified selfhood and personality and attention, where every social media platform is engineered to get people to act as if they are soon to be famous. It's kind of been baked into the way that we use the internet that everything we look at, everything we say, every impulse we have, every desire to connect with someone, every desire to be seen, like these really human impulses are the foundation for this vast architecture of data scraping and data mining and ad targeting that is making what I think of as our deepest selfhood, the mind that is being mined by all of these companies that are profiting from it, like they, they are making billions and billions and billions of dollars off of tracking and selling against people's selfhood. And what we can get out of it in return is kind of a leg up via a viable personal brand, like personal branding within this context is what people do to like carve out some benefit back for themselves.

That's the difference, is that it's not being known for something, it's living on the terms of surveillance capitalism and ourselves being the sort of last commodity left to like strip mine. 

Adam Grant: That's such a helpful distinction. And I think to build on your point, it's not just the internet. At minimum, it's other screens too.

I, I remember somebody asking me at some point like, why is Michael Scott such a jerk as a boss on the office? Like he's not a jerk. He's got a documentary crew and he's performing for the camera, and he thinks this is his ticket.

Jia Tolentino: Right.

Adam Grant: I have to ask you, Jia, because you lived that. Right? When you were a teenager, you were on reality tv.

Jia Tolentino: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: Early days reality tv, right? This was...

Jia Tolentino: It was 2005.

Adam Grant: I think Survivor was a couple seasons old. 

Jia Tolentino: Yeah, it was a month in my last year of high school, I went to Puerto Rico to film this like real world road rules challenge type thing for teens. 

Adam Grant: Is that part of what made you so jaded about personal branding? What did building a personal brand as a 16-year-old do to you? 

Jia Tolentino: Not at all actually, because I never watched the show till I was writing my book. The show was not on YouTube, it was pre YouTube. And it's kind of what I was saying. Like I, I've always had a strong personality, like I, I charmed adults into like, giving me scholarships to every educational institution I ever attended. I had like a, just an instantly legible personality, I think. Like, and I, I see it. Like I have a daughter that's exactly like me and it's, she's the same way. She's good at reading people and it's pretty baked into who she is. And I was always like that. And I wanted to go on this reality show 'cause I was sick. I'd been at the same school for 12 years in like deep Southern Baptist, like Bush era sort of hellhole, Houston, Texas. And I was just like, I'm dying to get out of here. And my little brother was at hockey practice at a mall and they were making casting tapes and I just like walked in and made a tape. And then I got cast on the show and I got to, you know, go to Puerto Rico and play games and flirt and get drunk secretly. And that did not make me skeptical at all. It actually, I, I think of it as kind of a pure experience because I just got to do it. It wasn't reflected back to me. I did not have the endless 24 7 ever extending unlimited audience panopticon that a 16-year-old now is dealing with, with like one single post on Instagram. Like I did not ever have to watch Lookout or think about that ever again until I wanted to. 

Adam Grant: Thinking about this as a psychologist, there was a body of research that was in vogue in the seventies on what was called objective self-awareness. I dunno if you've ever come across this. 

Jia Tolentino: Uh-uh. 

Adam Grant: The basic intervention was... 

Jia Tolentino: No, I've never heard of objective self-awareness.

Adam Grant: The basic intervention was people are doing various kinds of tasks and having conversations and you just put a mirror in the room or not, so that they're self-conscious in a way that they weren't before. And the original finding was people's behavior changes dramatically when they can see themselves.

Jia Tolentino: A hundred percent.

Adam Grant: And it, it's a little bit like why were mirrors put into elevators? 'Cause people find themselves interesting and then the wait doesn't seem so long. But also people get weirdly self-conscious when they see their appearance and they don't like what's looking back at them. And anytime I've talked to people who've been on reality tv, they've said that goes away really quickly. You forget the camera's there. Only the systems that we've built for people to build their personal brands, you never forget about the camera. Like you don't film a reel long enough that you lose sight of how you're gonna look. When I think about the way that people engage with Instagram or TikTok, they're constantly kind of on and off, on and off, and so they never get to just fully experience. They're always performing. 

Jia Tolentino: Well, I, you know, we are speaking on a Zoom call. I have hid myself so I can't look at myself. That's the first thing I do on every Zoom call.

Adam Grant: Same.

Jia Tolentino: Because I do not like the ability to look at myself 'cause I know I will. So much of the conversation on personal branding is about strategy, and to me it's like the, the better way to hack through this whole thicket is just instinct. It's like what makes you feel more human and what makes you feel less human? And looking at myself all the fucking time makes me feel bad. The times in my life in which I have felt most human have nothing to do with surveillance and absolutely nothing to do with self surveillance. And I think there is a difference between a sort of traditional reality TV experience and the sort of perpetual self broadcasting is that you actually aren't watching yourself. You are aware that someone's filming you, but like I did not have to watch myself if I didn't want to. When you are the one holding the phone on and you're the one on both ends of that, you are managing your image, you are producing it, you are broadcasting it, you are manufacturing it. That's different. You've accepted the responsibility to be the commodity and the laborer. And the manager also, like there's a really profound existential exploitation of the social media age.

Adam Grant: I wanna come back to commodified selfhood.

Jia Tolentino: Hmm.

Adam Grant: I wanna ask you to describe that a little more.

Jia Tolentino: Mm-hmm.

Adam Grant: And talk about the inescapability of it. You've written about that in the past. I'm curious about whether you still think it's inevitable.

Jia Tolentino: The thing that is inescapable is the fact that like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, all of these social media platforms are based around making every user feel that their personality is a market commodity. That like the purpose of being on these things is to be seen, liked, approved by as many people as possible in a way that ideally translates into you getting some sort of economic benefit. And that's the entire framework of the major social media platforms. Then you have these other platforms where other aspects of our selfhood, like me Googling at 3:00 AM the super deep borehole in Siberia or whatever. All of that is tracked and monetized by corporate entities. There are probably a thousand companies that have tagged each of us with a unique digital ID number with a matrix of data points about what we are most likely to be able to be manipulated into buying, doing, voting for, whatever. Every single search, every single purchase, we have been functionally branded and isolated and targeted by all of these companies that seek to make money off of us in various ways. That part is inescapable. Our participation with the willing self surveillance, that is the optional thing. People don't really post to Twitter anymore. Even the addicted journalists like myself, people stopped posting on grid on Instagram years ago. You know? And so people have started to pull back and change and I mean we, we could also zoom out and say that a huge reason that personal branding has come to mean what it means is that there has been this great dissolution of like labor organization in this country for decades and decades and decades.

There's so many frameworks through which we think of the good as being collective have vanished and disappeared, and so many frameworks in which our individual success is tied to other people's, which is like through unions, we don't have them anymore and they're gonna be decimated over the next four years, and they're already. And so there's like a profoundly atomized isolated quality to American life that has an enormous amount to do with like the disappearance of civic organizations and unions and all these things. And so when people think about how to succeed, it's individually. There are plenty of people that are being exploited top down by a manager, a structure, but we are doing often just doing the exploitation of ourselves, like we are self exploiting with our phones. Like most of what we are doing on our phones is, is willing self exploitation in the name of something like a personal brand.

And it's, it's a sensible thing to do if this is what the economy has incentivized. And if the economy has closed off all of these other pathways to sort of finding your way and achieving security or whatever, like so many of those don't exist. People kind of are like, okay, well I better just go viral, you know? Or like I better like have a good social media presence in case someone in my family gets cancer one day and I gotta do a GoFundMe. So many sort of safety nets and collective threads have been cut, that many people are left with self exploitation as like one of the few viable paths to like try to transcend the kind of hellhole of American labor.

Adam Grant: Wow. I never thought about it that way, and it's striking how actively you resisted that. Why is there so much advice on the internet telling people they have to build a personal brand to succeed in their careers? 

Jia Tolentino: Mm-hmm. 

Adam Grant: What is it culturally that has made that message so popular and so pervasive now?

Jia Tolentino: Well, I think it's, um, kind of, it's a pyramid scheme vibe for me. You know? It's sort of like, why are there so many YouTube tutorials teaching other people how to make money on YouTube? Right? It's like, I've entered the machine, I've put some stock into the machine, and there is a built-in incentive to try to get other people to buy into the machine maximally so that your own buy-in is rendered more sort of solid and valid.

But then it also goes to the, the overarching thing where the question of success has been so utterly reduced to the individual promoted as a brand, there's no faith that you can be part of a company that will treat you well. There is no faith that you get a good job and it'll last. The avenues towards a sense of economic stability and professional security, you know, those have been cut off at the knees since the eighties, and here's the logical endpoint. 

Adam Grant: I think that's right. Recently I was with a group of YouTubers, Mr. Beast level YouTubers, who I figured would have the least precarity of anyone in the online economy. And the overwhelming theme of their questions was like, how do we get predictability and reliability? Like our lives are too dependent on an algorithm. One thing changes and our entire livelihood could fall apart. And I think that just underscores that even the people who seem to be winning the commodified self game feel like they're hanging on by a thread unless they can build a business or some kind of sustainable source of income around that.

Jia Tolentino: Right. And it's, I think it's emblematic of the fact that we can't claw a sufficient amount back from the surveillance economy to balance out what it claws from us as individuals and as a whole. 

Adam Grant: At the risk of now making your reflection visible to you, I just wanna read you something you said a few years ago on book tour.

Jia Tolentino: Oh no. 

Adam Grant: I, I found it very thought provoking and I think it, it foreshadowed your reaction to this self exploitation as you describe it. You said, I quote, "I refuse to be told that my personality is a brand strategy. Someone asked me to Q&A, what my strategy would be for other people who are looking to cultivate a personal brand around authenticity, and that ruined me. That existentially ruined me." 

Jia Tolentino: Well, that was like pre revelation that whether like, it didn't matter whether I thought of my personality as brand strategy or whether it actually is, it is simply my personality. But I do have this vague memory of someone being like, what advice would you have for someone else that's looking to cultivate a personal brand around authenticity.

Adam Grant: That's an oxymoron.

Jia Tolentino: And I was like, if you're asking that you've already lost. If you're asking about how to adjust your personality and way of living strategically, I don't know. To me that's just, it kind of has to do with the difference between like a means and an end. Everything should be an end in itself. Like everything we do should be worthwhile just as humans, like just try to be more thoughtful and interesting and, and careful and whatever.

Like all of this is worth it as an end, not as a means to entrap a person. I think about this. I somehow ended up with a job at the New Yorker when I was in my late twenties, which would've been absolutely inconceivable to me like even two years before that. Like I didn't write in college. I didn't do media internships. I never lived in New York. I didn't know anybody. And whenever I talk to college students or high school students about writing, which I do quite a bit, they're like, what is my strategic path? And sometimes they ask similar questions like, how do I sort of cultivate a personal brand around authenticity or whatever?

And I'm like, if I had tried to have a career in journalism as an end in itself, if I'd been like, okay, I want to work at the New Yorker by the time I'm 29, I, there's no way I would've gotten there. But I was like, what I did was just try to do interesting things and try to write interesting things for the sake of writing interesting things to see if I could get better at writing. And that was the only way I could have ended up with my job. So even if from the like the mercenary sort of retcon, like what is the best strategy, quote unquote, I don't think it is to have one, like I think it's to just be a human and to see what you can do every single day to bring your actions in line with your deepest instincts and capabilities.

And that's the most amazing thing about being alive and being human. And it's the thing that is elided and precluded entirely by the idea of like, how do I cultivate a brand strategy to get here? I just remember being like, wow, if we're thinking about how to like pitch deck our way to authenticity and we can say that with a straight face, we're really, really losing the plot.

It's sort of like, be brave enough to just actually do what feels correct to your deepest instincts. 

Adam Grant: It reminds me a little bit of what was originally a John Stewart Mill observation about happiness, which John Kay then built into a whole theory in obliquity, which is that the best things in life can only be pursued indirectly.

Jia Tolentino: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: And, and if you aim at them, whether they're happiness or success or to your point, authenticity, then you're just gonna end up sort of missing out on the very things that you would naturally do that are aligned with your values and your interests that are better suited to getting you where you want to go.

Jia Tolentino: Yeah. And the harder you try to project something, the less it becomes possible to feel it. I think that's so self-evident. It's so obvious. It's like the harder anyone is trying to project happiness, like the bigger the, the sort of trap door grows beneath them. 

Adam Grant: Yeah. And this, I, I think in some ways, this is one of the big lessons of emotional labor research, which is by definition, if you're focused on projecting a feeling, you're doing surface acting where you're like, okay, like how do I make the right face? Or how do I display the right body language? Whereas if you want to look authentic, it's much more effective to engage in deep acting, which is how do I actually feel what I want to show?

Jia Tolentino: Yeah.

Adam Grant: And that I think, to your point, is about how do I become the person I want to be, as opposed to how do I create the image I wanna project?

Jia Tolentino: Right, and I, and I guess it's like how do I separate my own incentives from the incentives that are being pushed onto me by market structures? And that's a real question, and that's a human question, but it's almost like a lot of language has gotten in the way for people to even perceive that that's the question they're really asking. Like, and I often think when people are like, how do I become happy? You know, the question is often like, how do I find meaning? 

Adam Grant: We just did an episode on what goes wrong when people try to build personal brands. Is there anything you disagreed with or wanted to react to? 

Jia Tolentino: It wasn't that I disagreed with it, anything, I think everything you guys said was, was right. It's more like, to me, what is convincing to me, what would work on me is not like as soon as anyone starts telling me like what I should do for better outcomes, like I'm, I'm out, you know? But that's my personality and I seek everything out kind of obliquely. And so I'm just saying like, what would personally work on me is not someone telling me it doesn't work. People can tell it's fake. What works on me is like instinctive human feeling. And to me, perhaps that is the most convincing case against the, the whole paradigm is not like whether it's successful or how to like adjust in a way that makes it more honest. Like it's the question of like, does it, does anything you're doing at any given time make you feel more human or less? And a lot of work inherently makes us feel less human. Like a lot of work places people into structures, like this whole conversation doesn't apply to someone that's being tracked going around an Amazon warehouse for 12 hours a day. A lot of work is just inherently dehumanizing. But if you're within the kind of field where this conversation is applicable to you, then you inherently have enough freedom, arguably, to redirect the question into like, how am I going to live in this world and do the thing that I have potential to do in a way that makes me feel, like, good and honest and human and, and genuinely interested in it?

And I think that that would not in the year of our Lord 2025, that would not lead a lot of people into like, how do I improve my personal brand territory. 

Adam Grant: Yeah. That's fascinating. It, I, I think my approach, I guess my instinct as an organizational psychologist is always to Trojan Horse. Like, Hey, this thing that you're doing to achieve success is actually not effective the way you think it is, and so let's meet a bunch of people where they are. But I think your approach is, I mean, it's more principled as opposed to pragmatic, right? Of saying like, forget whether this works or not. Like what does it do to how you feel?

Jia Tolentino: I think it's pragmatic long-term though. I'm trying to avoid a point in my life where like, I look back on the previous however many years and I'm like, man, I'm full of shit. Like I'm really just trying to avoid that, like that's a primary objective in my life. 

Adam Grant: You actually anticipated where I was going, which is you're saying essentially like, let's think about this less strategically and let's think about it more emotionally.

Jia Tolentino: I think so. Yeah.

Adam Grant: And I'm like, yeah, there, there's something to that. I like it. At the same time, I think all of us in order to express our values, end up doing things that make us profoundly uncomfortable. 

Jia Tolentino: Mm-hmm. 

Adam Grant: And I don't care in the moment like, does this make me feel human? No. It actually feels, like getting on stage for like 10 years as a shy introvert made me feel profoundly terrible in every possible way, and yet I was okay with it because I care deeply about sharing knowledge and building relationships with students. And so it, it felt like authentically inauthentic, right? Like I'm being, I'm being false to my personality to be true to my values. And the reason I did it was not because it made me feel a certain way in the moment, but rather because I knew I would look back and feel like I'm proud of the way I spent my time.

And I, I just, I wonder like, I guess to the extent that you're outlining an alternative to building a personal brand, like your version of it is, does it make me feel human now? My version of it is, am I gonna look back and say, this was worth it, this is, this is a good reflection of what matters to me. And it sounds like you're, you're actually on board with both.

Jia Tolentino: I'm a profound believer in doing things that make you unbelievably uncomfortable, like being on stage or whatever. Writing is one of the deepest pleasures I ever have in my life, and in part because I find it agonizing and a really important kind of agony, but I just, I do think that question of instinct is, is sometimes cast to the side, and that strategy can overtake, like strategy is like how do I get to an end versus like maybe most of what we do, we should be able to find an end in itself. Ideally, that's what we want just for a lot of this to feel like the work of a discarded draft, something I work on for five days and I'm like, it's dog shit. I'm throwing it away. That's not a failure because the work was an end in itself. It wasn't a strategy to like get me more visible or whatever. 

Adam Grant: Yes. And so what I'm taking away from your perspective is the alternative to a personal brand strategy is to focus more on your identity. And part of that is asking, does this feel like me today? Is this expressing something that I'm interested in right now? And part of that is asking, who do I want to become tomorrow? And is this helping me move closer toward the person I aspire to be? 

Jia Tolentino: Yeah, and you know what I mean? Like I was interviewing George Saunders once and he talked about word choice. Like so much of the discipline of being a writer is that you have this kind of carefully vibrating tuning fork and you're able to like use it on every word, every sentence, and you have become sensitized enough to how something rings. Does it ring true or is it hollow? Has the life gone out of it? And then you cut it if it is. And I think of a lot of the project of just like being a person as developing that, but about your own life.

That, that's kind of what I'm thinking about. Like ideally, we get it to a point where we know on the inside, not from the outside, we know from the inside what we're doing and what we wanna do and what will feel right and what will be interesting, what will be hard for good reasons, what will be hard for bad reasons. I think that's like really what I'm thinking about is like I, if, if one is lucky enough to have some sort of freedom in one's professional life, it seems like that's the best way to govern it is just like the same sort of instinctive yes or no thing that many of us apply to much more granular decisions in our, like for me, word by word for an architect, it's shape by shape, right? Like it's that, that kind of instinctive quality that we often hone in really specialized areas that kind of feels like it should be applicable to how we live.

Adam Grant: Just to speak to the practical concerns that some people have, like, okay, I get that personal branding does not serve me, but I still need to get my work out there. I don't wanna be boxed into a brand. How do you think about that, Jia? 

Jia Tolentino: I think I probably have bad advice about this because writing, writing is one of those things where the work can, should, and does speak entirely for itself.

Adam Grant: Yeah, that's what I love most about it. 

Jia Tolentino: I have found myself in sort of mentorship positions where I don't really have great advice for this because my advice for it is just like, focus on your work. If your work is impeccable, people will come. And I, I am a believer in that to a pretty significant extent.

There's an acupuncturist that has been passed around to 50 to 60 of my friends because she's so good. Just by text message, here's her Gmail, like email Paula, she'll get it done. What, how would I negotiate this if I was in a different kind of field and I was really, really averse to the idea of self-promotion? I don't know. I guess ultimately the goal of personal branding is to get other people to feel like they're connecting with you, right? That they know you, that you're legible to them, that you're appealing to them, and they want more. This is just like a function of human connection. And I guess in those circumstances, I would just be looking for like, how can I connect to more people? Like what are things that I can do that can put me in community with people that are trying to do the same things that I'm doing, what are the ways in which it appeals to me to try to do that? What are the ways where it's like easy, manageable, honest, to try to do that? And presumably anyone could find some version of that.

Adam Grant: I like it. Jia, you're a careful observer of cultural trends. And you're part of them without drinking the Kool-Aid and are able then to hold up a mirror. I guess it would be ironic if you couldn't given that Trick Mirror was your, your book, but you're able to hold up a mirror in a way that seems like it's a thoughtful insider as opposed to just a dismissive outsider.

Jia Tolentino: Thanks. I mean, I feel like I deliberately and also inadvertently, simultaneously milked the shit out of whatever I could get out of the 2010s internet and then was like, oh, I have still let it take too much from me. I haven't suffered by any means from it. I've really only benefited, but spiritually it became like incredibly clear. Like even just my own usage of social media, I was like, I always have to be taking more from it than it's taking from me. 

Adam Grant: It's fascinating to me because I think about it so differently, which is like I only wanna do this if it feels like I'm giving. I resisted the idea of being on Instagram as long as I could. Like, I was like, okay, I can put my ideas and studies on Twitter. I get it. It's words. Like, what value does Instagram have? Just like, I'm gonna post selfies as a public intellectual? Like, no, no, I, I reject the premise. And then I had a, a former student say, people are like, screenshotting your tweets and putting them on Instagram like that might as well come from your account. And I was like, oh, I can take pictures of my words. Okay. And then it kind of morphed into this, all right, like I said, something that people, you know, found helpful in a Q&A. Why don't I broadcast that? I've got an idea that I think might be article worthy. Let me try the first few sentences of it and see if the audience is interested in it, and that'll help me figure out of the nine articles I'd love to write this week, is this one of interest to people other than me? And that doesn't feel commoditized. In that, if I think about the Venn diagram of what I care about and what my audience is interested in, like the list is too long if I just prioritize what I care about. So this is a helpful filter. What do you think about that as an alternative way to engage with this surveillance capitalism problem? 

Jia Tolentino: I think it's the same thing because you're taking from it what you want. You are getting from it something you want. Like what you want is a platform through which there's like an idea exchange and a kind of giving. That's still something you want. Inherently in my job, I want to communicate certain ideas successfully. My ability to do that is part of what I put in that sort of like taking bucket. Like if I'm able to do something that I want, I'm getting something out of this platform. If what we want is security for ourselves and like economic security for ourselves, there's like a lot of other ways in which we could seek to build that that aren't just located in the self. Like I'm just like unionize your workplace if you can. Try to unionize it. Like that's how we get security. I make half of my living by screenwriting only because that union has made it such that it is possible to kind of play around and try to do things and have health insurance that four people in my family are on.

Like a lot of the conversations I've had about personal branding, especially with young people, what's underneath it is a more existential question of like, how do we find purchase on this world and how do I feel like what I'm doing matters? And I just think that there are a lot of ways that we are better off finding that together than alone. 

Adam Grant: Beautifully put. Well, Jia this, this was every bit as eye-opening and fun as I hoped. 

Jia Tolentino: Thank you for having me on to rant about, rant about the subject. 

Adam Grant: I will take a Jia Tolentino rant anytime on any subject.

This episode was produced by Brittany Cronin. Our team includes Daphne Chen, Constanza Gallardo, Greta Cohen, Grace Rubenstein, Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Hai Lash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Sarah Bruger. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown.