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 The Post-Human
Future of
Brands
Based on Kozinets, Robert V. (2015), The Post-human
Future of Brands, in Susan Fournier, Michael Breazeale,
and Jill Avery, Strong Brands, Strong Relationships, New
York, Routledge, 149-158.
With additional material added August 2015.

1
1. Predicting the Future
There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know
how to look for them. Although I cant tell you how; its a non-
rational process. William Gibson, in Johnston (1999)

How would we predict the future

of brands? How would brand
management change if we could
predict the future? What is the
future of brand management?

In this chapter, I use a cultural

history perspective to create
projective understandings, and I
also assume two things. First, that
the brand experience is becoming
increasing tied into the
entertainment experience. And,
second, that the entertainment
experience is becoming more
immerse, more powerful, more
responsive, more omnichannel and
more digital. Across both of these
elements we have notions of
brands as archetypal personalities
with stories co-existing with
notions of brands as identity tools and resources for peoples collective and individual
identity creation maintenance and transformation projects.

If we accept this, then we accept that brands have become: (1) popular culture, (2)
immersively digital, (3) essential to consumer identity, and (4) archetypal identities in
themselves.

The question then becomes Where should we look to project these changes in brands
towards the future? The use of professional futurists by corporate interests has, as
Andrew Ross tracks in Strange Weather (1991), a long history. Many of these professional
futurists have been, understandably, science fiction authors.

2
This chapter looks towards science fiction visions as sources of projective ideas
regarding the future of brands. Three books, composing William Gibsons Bridge
Trilogy are used as an idea source. Using them as raw data leads me to other sources
and theories. Through this process, part of a much larger research project, I seek to
perform future-oriented pattern recognition that can inform our understanding of the
trajectory of brands at a macro social and cultural level, one that tells us about concepts
in historical trajectory, a form of both research and development prognostication and
theory generation.

2. Gibsons
Prognostication
/agitation
William Gibson is best known, and highly quoted,
for his genre-defining novel, Neuromancer (1984),
which coined the term and concept of the
information universe called cyberspace. This
notion also became expanded through the highly
conceptual and philosophical Wachowski
Brothers film The Matrix (1999), later expanded
into a trilogy. In Gibsons Neuromancer Trilogy
future, information astronauts were blasted into
cyberspace using various drugs and implements.
The link to classic science fiction is fascinating, in
that launching people into interplanetary outer space becomes launching peoples
conscious awareness into notional digital computer space. In Neuromancer, we also
witness the next major evolution in our planetary species. The complex AI computer

3
program Wintermute slides its expansionary subprograms into the Internet to
become a fully conscious self-aware being.

This paper considers another book, centrally, William Gibsons 1996 novel Idoru. Idoru
takes place in what can now loosely be called the Bridge sequence [trilogy] of Virtual
Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties (Murphy 2003, p. 72). This trilogy takes place in
the time between our own time and the much technologically-socially sophisticated,
almost magical technology time of Neuromancer. Idoru is thus the second and thus
bridge novel of this sequence of books written to bridge the time between present and
future, and it offers the reader a subtly complex engagement with the post/human2
tapestry of presence, pattern, simulation, virtuality, and digital/corporeal embodiment
(Murphy 2003)

The book deeply engages with the idea of celebrity as brand, and brand as celebrity. It
takes a hard-hitting stance towards the interaction between popular culture, digital
devices, and individual shallowness. Global culture is incredibly complex, people are
extremely good at producing technologies, and individuals are more stereotypical
corporate puppets than actual human beings. The key mantra for this future is "popular
culture is the testbed of our futurity. Everyone lives to be a brand, and every brand is
the key to social being.

3. Digital Embodiment
In Gibsons future, the digital is becoming embodied.

We see a perfect example of this with Rei Toei. Rei is a virtual creation, an idoru, which
is a loose translation of the Japanese word for idol-singer. Toei is described as "a
personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the
creation of information-designers, she is akin to what I
believe they call a 'synthespian, in Hollywood"(Gibson
1996, p. 21). Gibson does not invent the word or concept
here, but borrows this word from others. In fact,
synthespians already exist.

dk-96 was the creation of Japanese entertainment software

conglomerate HoriPro Inc. In 1996, this project was
released as Kyoko Date. Dk, or Kyoto Date recorded her
own music single, released on CD as Love
Communication. The content also included videostream
of her walking along major urban streets in Japan and the

4
USA. Kyoko Date even has a biography that bespeaks her heritage as both American
and Japanese, born at a US Army Base located close to Tokyo (Gaouette 1998). Kyoto
Date is really not a digital creation, but a digital hybrid: her entire look, face and body
came from paid but now anonymous human female models whose faces and body
language were digitized in a recording process known as Full Motion Capture. Very
much like Rei Toei, Kyoto Date inspired a broad male fan following, those who knew a
deep and abiding desire for a perfect woman that they were just as likely to have as any
of the perfect celebrities. This desire was, in a Lacanian sense, perfect. This was a desire
that went on and on, for it could never be fulfilled by any physical woman. They had a
longing for a woman who only existed digitally. According to Lacan, unfulfillable
desire is the perfect, most pure, desire. It may well be that these gentlemen were so in
love with dk-96 precisely because they knew they could never physically experience her.
Perhaps her image play is the strongest play, after all, for them. Or the only play
necessary for becoming a fan.

Gibson plays with desire throughout Idoru, hanging tantalizing hints that all we want is
pure want: that celebrity, and especially Rei Toeis variety, exists as aggregates of
subjective desire. What does this say about brands, and to brand theorists and
managers?

To Gibson there are no doubts about what brand management is at its core, and where
brand managers should be focusing their attention. To him brand work is about
building in consumer society an architecture of articulated longing (Gibson 1996, p.
178). If we need an example closer to North America, we only have to look at Lara Croft
(Murphy 2003), or indeed at so many of the now iconic superheroines on display at
ComicCons. If you are lustily, deeply, and madly in love with Wonder Woman,
Supergirl, or even She-Hulk, then you are set up for the same kind of fantastic desire
disappointment.

What would it mean to have a brand become such as thing? Is a brand already, in some
ways, such a thing?

Might we think of the Old Spice Guy as a similarly unattainable, but also perfect
performance of manhood, something whose interactive response campaign made it
close to an avatar, more like a long interactive advertisement.

Celebrity, in this case of the Old Spice Guy, was directly attached to the brand, yet
interactive, and openly available as files on Youtube, to be watched on demand and as
shared.

What would it mean to think of the Old Spice guy evolving digitally into a virtual
creation like Rei Toie? This could be the future of brands: as AI entities which enact
brand personalities and stories in interactive ways, with particular audiences, perhaps
even in an on-demand manner with particular individuals.

5
4. Post-Human
Branding
We have heard much talk, from scholars like Matt Thompson and Marie-Agnes
Parmentier, as well as by Susan Fournier, among others, of human branding.
Increasingly, the brand is a celebrity person, or a person who becomes a microcelebrity
or other celebrity (Marwick and Boyd 2011).

We can see this process of personal branding, human branding, manifesting through
the other type of digital transformation. In this case, we learn a branding lessons from a
rock and roll figure, much larger than life, a guy who has attained mega-mega startdom
in the rock and roll arena with his band Lo Rez. The singer is named Rex, and he is like
Mick Jagger but much bigger and longer lasting, more like a modern Elvis. He is the
lead-singer of Lo/Rez and an incredibly popular figure in the entertainment and news
media and throughout social media.

However, as we learn in Idoru, Rez is a complete personal brand empire unto himself.
He commands a huge media, entertainment and fashion licensing empire as well as his
motion pictures, videos, and music sales. And yet he is an empty shell of a person,
somehow completely hollowed out. He is like a shadow, an alien, a digital cloud of
static. He is not traceable or even recognizable as an actual human being. He has no
private life at all. He is a licensed image, and in his somewhat inconvenient
simultaneous incarnation as an aging human male he must continually alter and
surgically change his body to try to match the popular and expected image of himself
a trait of insecure self-treatment that seems the most human thing anyone can do.

In these sections, Gibson is already drawing our attention to the implications of

personal and human branding, of taking our personalities and goals and life projects
and making brands of them. The inevitability of the project infuses his future vision. Its
widespread nature is also apparent. To personally brand is commonplace. Everyone
will soon be managing their own brand, themselves, much more carefully and
deliberately soon.

6
5. The Marriage of the Humanized
Brand and the Branded Human
In Idoru, the marriage of
humanized brand and branded
human is physical, not
metaphorical. And therein lies
the struggle.

The digital construct Rei Toei

appears on Lo Rezs system
and asks him to marry her. Lo
Rez is a flesh and blood human
who is so famous he has
become entirely digital, his
every move captured, sold,
and shared online. Rei Toei is a digital construct, made to seem human, interacting with
people as if she were Turing test real, and then seeking, Pinocchio-like, to become a real
girl.

The resolution in some sense of everything in this tension between the natural and the
digital is epitomized in the marriage of Rei Toei, the media industry constructed
software celebrity, and Rez, the media industry constructed human celebrity. Can the
two truly unite in holy matrimony: the computer construct and the aging rock star? A
man and a program of a woman?

In one place in the novel, science fiction guru Gibson speaks through rock god Rezs
guru voice of new modes of being and the alchemical marriage (Gibson 1996, p.
229). This allusion to alchemy invokes his higher referents for the union, what mystical
psychologist Carl Jung called the Mysterium Coniunctionis, the sacred marriage or union
of opposites. This mystical union of digital humans and human digitality is a perfect
metaphor for our current evolution: we meet in the nether grounds of the numinously
technological attention market and marry our images, our self-creating brand images
which are co-created by and co-creating us.

What is the link between the digital world, and the world of physical human beings?
The key is held in what we currently call 3D printing, but which is really a set of
technologies still to be more fully defined and named. Nanotechnology is involved, a
nano-assembler that is the future, military grade, highly top secret and in limited
supply nano version of the 3D printer, which can create matter from digital instructions.

7
In the resolution, Rei does indeed become human and physical, manifesting through
nanotechnology into a real, live body. However, she does it in a way that displays that,
although she is now materialized, she is clearly not human. For she arrives in many
places at once, exact and perfect digital duplicates. From being zero, suddenly there is
not just one being, as with humans, but many Rei Toeis.

Now, as many, is she more attainable? And less desirable? Or, because her humanity
still eludes her, is she even more desirable? Desire for the unattainable is at the very
heart of contemporary consumer culture, and thus it is at the very heart of brands
their unspoken, almost never realized and, ultimately, paradoxical secret (Shakar 2001;
Brown et al. 2003).

When a brand assumes human form, it enables a paradox of desire: it can become both
more desirable and more attainable. Its attainability, if limited to the digital world of
screens, still places it as out of reach as a Hollywood star. But the brand becomes much
more intimate, much more complex, if it is also a product or a service, a place, an idea,
or a human brand.

6. We Crave our
Supergods
Archetypes are everywhere. Can we see the Jolly Green Giant as an archetypal and
folkloric figure, as Sullenberger (1974) does? Wrapped in leaves, giant and green, he is
clearly as fertility figure of the kind mythologically identified by James Frazer in The
Golden Bough (1922). The giant is an ancient European harvest figure, long established
and associated with the color green, the garland, the wrapping in leaves, the way he
paternalistically presides over the bountiful crop. And as Sullenberger (1974, p. 55)
clearly explains, the campaign works. It worked in 1974. It was already an established,
if formulaic, economic success, a standout of early brand building in the competitive
world of food marketing. And it is still working today. The brand remains a viable
brand. The Giant is still quite limited in his repertoire, still not very active or interactive.
He ho ho hoes on cue at the end of the commercial. His mere presence is almost his
story. But ho ho, he does have mythological potential.

In service, think of figures like Ronald McDonald and his retinue, and Chuck E. Cheese
in the United States, which truly pioneered and continues, along with Japan, to pioneer
such branding experiments. Experiments in which brands become simultaneously,

8
human, mythological and commercial. They become
ways to enact great human themes on the level of
marketplace decisions and purchases.

As Grant Morrison explains in Supergods, we live in

the stories we tell ourselves. In a secular, scientific
rational culture lacking in any convincing spiritual
leadership, superhero stories speak loudly and
boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and
highest aspirations. Theyre not afraid to be hopeful,
not embarrassed to be optimistic, and utterly fearless
in the dark. (Morrison 2011, xvii).

Hopeful and powerful, yet enacted at the level of the

marketplace rather than explicitly at a mystical level
of religious or spiritual elevation, brands offer us
opportunities for certain kinds of super-heroic
transformation at a cost. Plastic surgery, adventure
travel, a new car: all offer certain kinds of identity
transformation, available for a price.

What happens when we marry such potential to

interactive AI agents, who take over as the voice of
brands, similar to the emerging voice of brands that
is required when social media accounts are managed, such as for personified food
service brands like Taco Bell or Wendys. Such is the modern Marketplace. Such are the
promises of Brands.

7. Five Convergences
The following is some speculative historical theorization, drawn from Idoru and
Gibsons Bridge trilogy.

There is currently emerging a meta-convergence of five already major social and media
convergences:

1. communicative media,
2. the internet of things,
3. the maker movement
4. collective intelligence
5. and artificial intelligence

9
 As a result of these convergences, we
can no longer think of brands as
linked to products, to consumer
markets, or to even to exchanges
of matter. The net effect of these
technological convergences has
been to unlink brands from
matter entirely. Brands are no
longer products, of course this
has been the case for a long time,
ever since the first brand
extension was discovered, back
in Paleolithic times, perhaps.

As a consequence, brands have

become unbound from material
substrates in exactly the same
way that thought unbinds
minds from brains.

What are the two brand trends

that Gibson is relating to us
through Idoru? First, brands are
changing into and inhabiting
human beings through evolving
information software and AI.
Second, human beings are
digitally extending and
reinventing themselves into
higher order constructs of
strategically managed personal
brands, social brands, which have semi-autonomous agentic elements of individual
power and influence.

In the future, Brands may be governed by AIs. They may become sophisticated,
responsive, intelligent personalities, tied to products, services, places, notions, and
people.

Not only might brands become personalities, but they would also become sites, nodes,
of data processing and intelligence gathering. A brands would not only be a
transmitting, processing, and thinking-deciding personality-imbued intelligence itself,
but it would also serve, in archival fashion, as a vast space of play, information, and
decision-making for popular society itself, the next evolution of popular culture.

10
This particular reading of William Gibsons Bridge Trilogy reveals five interstitial areas,
five key convergences in the worlds of mass mediated communications and information
technologies. Because these alterations change matter into mind, and mind into
spectacle, they elevate brand personalities to AI celebrities. To enfold human
imagination, these AI forms will be assistants in the hero stories and mythic tales that
we write for oursel(o)ves, that we use to structure our tales, the tales we tell others of
our self, that we wish others to share, the tales we love to use to sacralize our
consumption and everything else we do every day in our everyday life.

8. The Interdependence of
Digital Man and Living Brand
Are people also brands, and brands also people? To what extent are they or were they
ever independent? Many people already are, and many more will be brands. And
many brands will be people.

We talk about anthropomorphized brands,

brands such as Mr. Clean, or the Blendtec
guy, or the Old Spice Guy. But will brands
one day have the potential and power to
court us? To manifest in our information
systems? To alter to our likes and dislikes,
learning how to make us love them more
and more, simultaneously fulfilling and
stoking our desires? To begin dreaming,
generating new images, taking actions such
as manifesting to someone and proposing
marriage?

What Gibson suggests to us is brand are

transforming into unique, higher-
dimensional constructsa medial middle
ground, a digital interstices in which human
beings can evolve into code, and code beings
can evolve into something more human, a
convergence built upon other convergences.

Using personal branding concepts and

personal technological devices, smartphones,
apps, laptops, movie screen, computer screens, video channels like YouTube,

11
microcelebrity fan payment plans, and digital television, people will increasingly
become empowered to transcend their limitations and become part of the
technocapitalistic money-and-status- machine sold by media industries. Even Google
will promote your personal brand for micropayments.

9. Our Story: My Story and Yours

Using the most sophisticated science and intelligence and technological reality creation
tools ever available, we are creating all sorts of social informational experiments. The
central novel form these narratives increasingly take is that of the collective dream,
visible clearly through science fiction, comic books, and in self-help psychology.

Beneath it all, Hero Myths abound. This is the collective dream, a narrative heart. This is
Our Story, a story of good and evil which clearly beats beneath stories like The Lord of
the Rings and Game of Thrones as well as Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrows
Partiesthe three books of the Bridge Trilogy.

Casting the Bridge Trilogy as one would a set of casting stones, I see a human future
where brands are at least as real as the people who use them, and human-brand
relationships draw us to a new digital reality where we meet in between, in the realm
of the human brand where brands become human and humans become brands.

In this burgeoning reality, each of us will also be a brand manager who manages the
value, capital resources, narrative flow, and public image of our own personal brand, or
even a stable of other brands, owned by people and corporations of various sorts and
stripes.

Ordinary people may be less so, but extraordinary ones, people like you and me, will be
candidates for courtship and proposals by large corporations. When we blog and have
impressive Klout scores, and social media influence, we are really somebody. We are
other peoples heroes.

In some sense, this digital future might be good, and also a bit wrong. Yet it may turn
out that having our biological and social fantasies professionally managed, edited, and
played back to us endlessly in story form will turn out to be all that we will ever need.

12
10. The Search for
Natural Culture
To be a person today is to be part of a Collective Human Effort to understand ourselves,
who your really are, what really matters to your self only, and what matters to all of us.

I can call this the search for Natural Culture. We all want to know what we really
believe. What we really care about. What we really need. What we really love. The
really part is the really important part. This is the widely recognized search for truth,
for the genuine self. We are looking for authenticity. Our Authentic Selves.

This search effort is, by definition, relational. It involves our relationship to one another
as well as our relationship to what we find to be the World around us. Each of us is on a
collective Quest to find an understanding of our own individual relationship to Nature,
and also to Culture.

Human relationship consumption is, at its core, the source of all other consumption,
and motivating all of this is our collective modern quest for a sense of who we are in
this moment: our Natural Culture.

That distinct element, culture, is that one thing which we do not ever forget not to take
for granted. Culture is the difference that differentiates. It is the difference that is
entirely and eternally the same across all of us, every one.

Now, in this age, Natural Culture is found by embracing technology. Technology is our
most natural manifestation. We are fully artificial beings, and thus concurrently fully
genuine in our artifice.

Consider that our times are times in which digital technology is necessary to be cool
and social. Digital technology is required to be a productive worker and a good
consumer. A member of society. Technology itself has become not only indispensible
but natural. Speaking of this in relation to national culture, speaking for the robophilic
techno-embracers of Japanese culture, Idorus brilliant creator Kuwayama explains

"We [the Japanese people] have never developed a sinister view of technology,
Mr. Laney. It is an aspect of the natural, of oneness. Through our efforts, oneness
perfects itself." (Gibson 1996, p. 314).

Certainly since industrialization began in the UK, we have not seen rise of technology
based capitalism spread as quickly or as successfully as it has today, through so-todays

13
age of high technology, which combines entertainment, information, communications,
and social systems. This is the natural form and language of our global civilization, a
still-developing, contested, conflicted, complex network of competing and coordinating
interests and influences.

Conveyed within them all is an age of amazing images, amazing selves, and amazing
personal brand self-images. It is from within this deeply cultural sphere that Gibson
chooses to immerse us in images of brand images become human, and humans images
becoming brands.

In conclusion, this chapter contemplates the future of brands in technocapitalism and

technoculture. It also seeks to do more than this. It prognosticates them as future
actualizations of entertainment and media descriptions of the future. The methodology
or method of prediction comes not from some statistical flavor of argument, not from
some mathematical but instead a cultural extrapolation.

Science fiction is assumed to be type of Einsteinean thought experiment. Moreover, it is

one in which the stock market of popular culture population ecology has had the effect
of elevating the best work and the most evocative predictions. We can look at these as
successful professional fictional extrapolations of possible technological and social
futures. Science fiction is the testbed of brand futurity. This chapter and its method have
assumed that science fiction books can help us adapt to and shape our understanding of
brands.

In that future, human beings increasingly extend their personal brands into digital
spaces, and corporate brands simultaneously seek to manifest their influence in human
social worlds. The two meet in the realm of digital branding and human brands,
converging in four separate technology developments and accelerating the
interweaving of corporate and organizational influence with ordinary human social life.
It is a world we already see in development. It is a reality that could be greatly changed
by the emergence of AI brand entities, brands that think, relate, and speak back.

Brands that we genuinely know, and that truly know us. Could this truly be the post-
human future of brands?

14
Think about this last, if you dare. If the realm of imagination and
fantasy is subjectively no less real than that of the material and
physical, then we can easily appreciate why cyber-life and its
digital subjectivities seems to stimulate and offer opportunities
for the expression of both sexual and violent desires. As Freud
notes, the uncanny occurs where the accepted structure of a
world is violated, when the boundary between fantasy and
reality is blurred (Freud 2003: 150), and so to challenge the
accepted structure of the world, which clearly has no adequate
narrative for either contemporary violence or the sexual, the
realm of cyberspace becomes a particularly fruitful context in
which to blur such boundaries and perhaps stimulate better
intellectual understanding. In Lacans (1982) formulation, desire
is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque), and
desire appears as a social construct because it is always
constituted in a dialectical relationship. Re-theorizing desire
therefore requires not so much the unpacking of Lacanian
analysis of late-capitalist subjectivity, as incorporating a better
appreciation of how desire may be constructed in other cultural
worlds, including those of cyberspace. In this way the notions of
Deleuze and Guattari (1983) about the nature of desire as being
productive rather than imaginary (not theater but a factory)
and about the desiring-machines which we
become as a result of these productive and socially situated
desires, seem more appropriate to the interpretation of changing
subjectivities and the elaboration of desire evident in on-line
worlds. (Whitehead 2009, Post-Human Anthropology, pp. 2-3).
And the road to desire seems to lead directly through, or perhaps
to, the post-human brand.

15
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