Beautiful Byron Bay has always had something talismanic about it, as the generations of arrivals imbue it with some greater, grander meaning than merely a nice place to live.
In the 1960s and 70s it was the epicentre of Australia’s dropout, hippie and New Age movement. In the 1990s when Crocodile Dundee producer John Cornell bought the Beach Hotel (since sold for $70m to private equity), Byron Bay began to feel a lot more like Sydney, a second home there becoming a flashy status symbol – the yang to your harbourside mansion ying.
Now, thanks to a disproportionate number of midtier influencers and Instagrammers, Byron Bay has become something else, something also emblematic of our present moment.
That moment could be described as BRAND ME.
The Byron Bay influencers’ accounts broadcast a stream of images, advertising a lifestyle that most of us will have no hope of attaining. It’s free-range parenting (vaccinations optional: Byron Bay is the anti-vaxx capital of Australia), heritage homes with $10,000 ovens, picnics with friends showcasing carefully curated baskets of organic produce, a “surf sesh” with the kids before school, crumpled linens in dusty rose (no stains), no screens, minimal makeup and a scruffy/handsome husband.
Byron Bay has become shorthand not just for the good life, but utopia.
For the clique of “midtier family lifestyle micro-influencers” based in Byron Bay, to have your life the subject of a Vanity Fair article would be an enticing prospect, but this article is damning.
Courtney Adamo, a micro-influencer whose popular Instagram feed merges her family life (she is a mother of five) with sponsored posts selling “chicly lumpy oatmeal-colored cardigan(s)” is representative of the scene. “They make their own hours and dinners and soap. They have their own brands. They are their own brands,” writes Carina Chocano in Vanity Fair.
People as brands are where we have landed in 2019 (Adamo’s son Wilkie’s “entire life, including his birth at home, has been documented online”).
Naomi Klein’s polemic No Logo was published 20 years ago. The quintessential Gen X book was a call to arms against a branded world. It warned against brands colonising our public spaces (think Nike sponsoring a neighbourhood basketball court) and being used to sell a lifestyle or a dream, rather than a mere product.
Reading No Logo now would feel quaint, if it wasn’t so depressing.
We scarcely give brands a second thought now, so successful have marketers been in “flooding the zone”. In 20 years, we’ve seen so many things previously uncommodified, things previously considered private, colonised and absorbed into the market. We’ve shown we don’t care that much about our own privacy, either. Yes, some people left Facebook after massive privacy breaches were uncovered in 2016, but not enough.
But back in the No Logo days it would have been considered too dystopian to anticipate this moment, when we so thoroughly absorbed neoliberal values that we ourselves became the brands. Not only that, but we would envy, admire and aspire to be the branded person.
We could not have anticipated that our scrolling (endlessly, even when we are sated or numb for Instagram is the story that never ends) would eventually colonise our imaginations and become the material of our deepest longings (I want that cardigan, that house, that husband, that salad, that life). That our scrolling and our longing would be so intense and unsatisfying that it would eventually lead us to a place of dissatisfaction, even despair. Says Vanity Fair: “For others, [Instagram] has become a constant reminder that watching people live as though on vacation is the only vacation most people can afford. Instagram makes us sad now. Surveys have found it to be the worst social media platform for mental health.”
And that’s just us, the watchers.
What about the people as brands themselves?
There’s no study or test in the world that can tell you what happens to your soul when you turn yourself into a brand. But maybe your children, whose childhoods have been co-opted into the marketing of hot sauce or onesies can tell you what they think of it when they are older.
As for Byron itself – now the ultimate brand – I can’t help but wonder if this current iteration of the town is hastening the shire’s already shameful record of inequality.
The shire has an increasing number of homeless people. Conversely Byron Bay recently scored the dubious honour of having the most expensive house prices in the country.
There are also fewer houses on the rental market due to the area’s massive popularity with tourists (themselves lured by the shiny, gorgeous images they see on Instagram). It’s more lucrative for landlords to rent out their houses for short-term stays on Airbnb.
But as with any product, once you buy it, it never really fulfils the promises it makes in the ads. Because the ads aren’t true. Have five kids and there will be mess. Buy an off-white couch and eventually there’ll be stains. Eat only salads and sooner or later you’ll get hungry.
It only looks like the good life.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist