With #AmazonCart, the Junk You Buy Is Now Part of Your Personal Brand

Artist Barbara Kruger’s 1987 appropriation of Descartes’ Cogito—“I shop, therefore I am”—hasn’t lost its inherent conceptual vigour with age. In fact, Amazon’s new #AmazonCart marketing stunt, which launched yesterday and allows Twitter users to add products to their shopping cart without leaving the Twitter platform, is a good indication that Kruger’s clever anti-slogan remains as relevant as ever in the 21st Century. In the social media age, people are commodities, just like the products they buy.

To use the hashtag, a person or company tweets about a product they’re trying to sell and includes a link to its Amazon product page. Then, if you’ve linked your Twitter account to your Amazon account, you can reply to the tweet, include the hashtag, and the item will be instantly added to your cart.

More to the point, your followers can see what you’re purchasing, so now your social network knows you plan to buy Sex and the City: The Complete Collection. Amazon will even tweet on your behalf to be sure everyone witnesses the transaction.

At this point you may be thinking, why on earth would anyone want to share that they’re stocking up on t-shirts with their trove of Twitter followers? But then again, I wondered the same thing when people started sharing pictures of their food online, and that trend blew up. There’s plenty of theories on the cultural phenomenon of oversharing, but my hunch is that in this case, it’s all about self-branding.

The “personal brand” is a somewhat nauseating trend that’s gained currency as the social web permeates society, and the internet is full of advice columns about how to build your own personal brand. To be a successful self-promoter, you have to think of yourself almost as a mini-corporation that’s forced to distinguish its unique identity in a vast marketplace of other, similar businesses.

You build your brand by sharing the right things, liking the right posts, and following the right people. And now, by buying the right products.

This should be a pretty insightful read: http://t.co/7aNJFjx7yO #AmazonCart

— Richard (@RichardEscobedo) May 6, 2014

Want to be perceived of as corporate-cool, youthful, and personable? If there’s a special offer on a Starbucks mug, you can now advertise to all your followers and potential employers that you’re on-brand by tweeting #AmazonCart. It reinforces both your personal brand and the company’s. How long will it be until a celebrity tweets “#AmazonCart” in reply to a product, only to have it go viral? Is this sponsorship 2.0?

But let’s not forget that PR hashtags are fickle things, as the recent #myNYPD hijacking demonstrated. Once a Twitter campaign out there, the trolls and jokesters have as much claim to use it in any way they please as Amazon’s official account. I could see some bored web denizen tweeting the hasthtag to call out some really weird left-field products ripe for mocking. Or for the more politically minded who love a good détournement, it could be used to satirize companies who peddle war machines or take part in global injustices.

This is already happening to some extent; there’s a handful of cringeworthy joke tweets making fun of the hashtag.

12-pack of extra-strength odor eaters, "family matters" season 2 and a pound of potato salad #amazoncart did i do that rite?

— furf™ (@furf) May 6, 2014

#amazoncart immortality

— Ross Miller (@ohnorosco) May 5, 2014

Butts. A million butts. #amazoncart

— FWB of Frankenstein (@newageamazon) May 5, 2014

But it doesn’t look like the early hijacking of #AmazonCart is actually challenging the primacy of the brand or the product online. Satire and joking may even be a self-branding strategy. There are layers to this thing.

Amazon’s new marketing ploy reinforces the idea that Twitter is increasingly about consumption, spinning vortex of circulating commodities, promotions, and promotional discourse. The platform is already being tapped by Hollywood studios and the financial sector to map trends and consumption habits. Now it seamlessly integrates the actual act of purchasing, not just promotion, into the flow.

Welcome to the new world of “social” media, where the commodity is everything, and everything is a commodity—be it a person or a cheap DVD boxset. People and brands reinforce each other as products in an integrated circuit of consumption, like a snake eating it’s own tail.