Cozee
Cozee is the second track in an emerging concept of "life as we know it", exploring our relationship with technology. It follows on from the nightmare of Smart Thing which looked at the nature of the mirror on society that Ai presents.
In Cozee I try to hint towards the vulnerability of desire and the exploitation it leaves us open to.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s we experienced branding as a kind of livery, or at the extreme as a kind of idealised or cartoon characterisation (the Bisto kids, Tony the Tiger). Branding was just a mark of distinction, a supposed shorthand for quality. The likes of IBM and Coca-Cola introduced the idea of 'brand identity' - but really only in terms of packaging and advertising.
Then in the 90s corporate 'Brand Identity' started to seep in to culture with the likes of Nike and Apple reframing brand-as-label to brand-as-lifestyle: aspiration.
In the 21st century, with social-media, Brand-Identity infected the individual - eschewing personality for simple ideals. Pretending to be something simpler, smaller, than we are because it is safer... and easier to sell. Just ask Lorraine Kelly - is it easier to be a complex, imperfect, human being or a neatly packaged set or regressive ideals?
By definition of purpose, branding must be: Instantly Recognisable, Repeatable, Consistent - all characteristics that enforce reduction
Branding is backward looking - it relies upon what has worked, what has been seen before, what has become expected. Branding freezes identity. Locking us into the now, which quickly becomes the past.
And branding is a filter, of our ambiguities and contradictions (the very things that help us grow).
Branding has a danger. Its charm lies in how easy, friendly, and familiar it feels.
But the more we cosy up to the palatable, the more open we become to being guided, nudged, and shaped.
Comfort lowers our guard. Simplicity makes us easier to handle.
The internalisation of a Brand Identity (whatever that identity may be) makes us predictable. Reduces our demographics to stable psychographics. Leaves us segmentable. Such that the BigTech-FinDoms no longer need struggle with the vagaries of their users. Instead of trying to predict and monetise the behaviour of complex human personalities — which is very difficult — they aim to drive the behaviour of consistent, brand‑identified user units Because Brand Identity becomes a self-imposed behavioural straightjacket.
Conscious or not, we create ourselves as Brand Identities within their platforms acquiring likes, shares, impressions, REACH, so that we can feel seen. Platform provisioned (controlled ) metrics of self - an algorithmic simulation of free-will.
A world where personality is product, relationships are friend-nodes, creativity is content, and attention is labour.
This is the core trick of BigTech:
convert human life into monetisable data streams.
Brand Identity is the ideological lubricant that makes this feel normal.
Brand doesn't care for mutuality, reciprocity, solidarity - it feeds on followers, consumers, engagement. Brand replaces community with audience. Because audiences don't resist, organise nor tend to exert collective power.
Whilst telling us: You are your own brand; You are an entrepreneur of the self; You are building your audience - the BigTech-FinDoms are feeding their platforms with harvested data-labour; making exploitation feel like empowerment.
But the thing to remember — is that we are not brand identities.
A brand is a reduction: neat, repeatable, predictable. It freezes identity, filters out contradiction, and makes us easier to sort, target, and monetise. That’s why the BigTech‑FinDoms love it. A branded self is a compliant self.
But we aren’t compliant.
We aren’t tidy.
We aren’t consistent.
We remain chaotic, contradictory, evolving humans — full of impulses, ambiguities, and whatever free‑will really is. Branding wants coherence; people generate noise. And in that noise — unbranded, unrepeatable, unmarketable — is the part of us that can’t be captured, packaged, or sold.