Buying something used to be the end of the story. You liked it, you bought it, you used it. Now buying is the beginning. The real work starts when you film the unboxing. At least according to Lucinda Bounsall. Writing for Print Magazine, she argues that platforms have turned everyday life into a continuous production set:

Platforms have normalised a way of living where everyday life is quietly organised around being watchable. Bedrooms become sets, bathrooms become studios, private routines become content addressed to an imagined audience. The effect can feel faintly dystopian; a distributed Truman Show, in which people are advertising products, habits, and lifestyles to unseen cameras, without ever being cast or paid.

Bounsall traces an inversion that anyone who’s worked on a brand should pay attention to. As brands become more abstract and conceptual, the labor of making them mean something falls on the individual:

As brands move up the pyramid, abstracting themselves into values, worlds, and cultural posture, individuals are pushed in the opposite direction, down into labour. The work of meaning-making, distribution, and identity signalling increasingly falls on the person rather than the company. Brands become lighter, more conceptual, more removed; people become the infrastructure through which those brands are activated, circulated, and made legible.

In a way, Bounsall describes what brand has always been at its core—how customers perceive a company or product. It’s always been in the hands of the people.

In her closing, Bounsall sees people starting to pull back into spaces that can’t be monetized:

This doesn’t signal an end to the brandification of the self, but a growing desire to reclaim parts of the self that don’t need to be performed, optimised, or read. Not everything is meant to circulate. And increasingly, that is kind of the point.

That last line pairs with the Dan Abramov piece I linked previously. Abramov argues for an architecture where your data outlives the apps you create it in. Bounsall is making the cultural case for the same impulse: some things should belong to you and not be put into circulation just because a platform makes it easy.