Two stories this week should be read together, even though one is geopolitics and one is a product launch. Trump has added his face to the US passport, described by Hyperallergic as an "audacious escalation" of branding public resources with personal likeness. And Netflix has launched Clips, a vertical video feed designed to convert its content library into an endless scroll of highlight moments. One is state capture as personal brand. The other is IP capture as personal feed. The logic is identical: every surface becomes a distribution vehicle for a recognizable face or franchise.
Sincerity, Camp, and the Aesthetics of Power
The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, writing about Broadway, observes that camp has become the default aesthetic and that the radical move now is sincerity. This reads directly into the passport story. Stamping a leader's face on a travel document is camp in the classical Sontagian sense: it is serious about itself in a way that invites disbelief. The Michael Jackson biopic reviewed in the same New Yorker issue faces a similar problem. The film puts fresh varnish on a troubled legacy, performing sincerity while managing iconography. What happens when the iconography belongs to a state rather than a pop star? The discomfort is the same: the face in the frame is doing too much work.
Vertical Video and the Architecture of Attention
Netflix's Clips launch is the business-model answer to the same cultural question. If every screen is an identity surface, the company that owns the most recognizable faces and stories wins distribution by default. The Verge's smart glasses survey this week noted that wearables are multiplying but there is nothing compelling to do with them yet. Netflix is trying to make their catalog the thing worth putting in front of your face at all times, in all formats. The passport, the feed, the glasses: all fighting for the same real estate.