Sneakin' In: Branding as a Commie
One of the more significant issues as a Marxist who critiques Direction Brain™ (left/right dichotomy) is that people do not know how to take me. Well, that, and I like shitposting. Here’s a fun one: I woke up this morning to the realization that my haircut is reversible and lets me look emo. (Honestly? would)
Basically, I don’t really act much like other people do in the “Marxist Content Space,” and that is a good thing. I think that is a very poisoned way to act (I don’t think it’s particularly Marxist, either). I am not someone who just sits on Twitter all day. I am a parent, I work, I write, I make things. If I acted like people do on Twitter, where one isn’t allowed to have a perspective (or sense of humor), I would lose my mind.
My Very Important Documentaries has simple branding. It’s not off-putting or weird, but it’s bold and eye-catching. Nothing about this says anything politically extreme and it plays into a fairly “media”-standard expectation. My documentaries get great feedback, often from people who do not know me or my work.
Since last November, I have been making new videos on my personal channel, simply labeled “Peter.” It is accessible by putting “peter” or “peter coffin” after “youtube.com/,” but I really haven’t known what to do with the brand there in a very long time. Communists generally hate “brands” and “marketing,” too, so it’s not something that’s easy to talk to people about.
Because I have the address “Peter,” I decided to lean into that. Fuck it, I AM YOUTUBE’S PETER. However, my last name, Coffin, is pretty awesome. So I wanted to find some way to retain that, without going full vampire (remember, I think being normal is good, lol). With all that in mind, I found a funny frame of myself and put this together:
I also went back through my recent videos and added a simplified “P” in a coffin in the upper left corner of my thumbnails. I haven’t done this with all of them yet, and I’m not sure if I will (because I don’t know if it matters with videos people aren’t really going back to), but there’s now something unobtrusive but unified in my thumbnails that says, “This is a Peter Coffin video.” There just flat-out wasn’t before.
Several creators follow me, possibly communist ones, and I kind of wanted to just show, “Hey, it is actually a good thing to think about and have some fun with!” I have been a very successful “internet socialist” before, and honestly, it is probably more alienating than being something else. All these people are perhaps the most competitive and secretive simply due to the idea they’re not supposed to “do capitalist things.”
The truth is you and I live in capitalism. If we make content about communism, guess what? It’s a commodity. We should be mindful about how we cultivate a community so it doesn’t become an obsessive fandom (a consumer cult – and it will by default), but we shouldn’t not want people to see our content. We will have to do marketing, or we will end up an island.
Content will obviously never be the revolution, but there is no reason we can’t use it to tackle contradictions and try to find resolutions to them, to at least some extent. And that is ultimately what dialectical materialism is supposed to be.
So… I guess that’s the debut of my new branding. Let me know what you think.