The Personal Brand Is Dead. Gen Z would rather be anonymous online.

Good read on how the kids wanna avoid all the social media trappings now-a-days. Good for them. I have really enjoyed getting the hell off of instagram and facebook and all that crap. I’ll just hang out here in my own little backwater of the internet, thank you very much!

Something has shifted online: We’ve arrived at a new era of anonymity, in which it feels natural to be inscrutable and confusing—forget the burden of crafting a coherent, persistent personal brand. There just isn’t any good reason to use your real name anymore. “In the mid 2010s, ambiguity died online—not of natural causes, it was hunted and killed,” the writer and podcast host Biz Sherbert observed recently. Now young people are trying to bring it back. I find this sort of exciting, but also unnerving. What are they going to do with their newfound freedom?