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hi everyone when the organizers of this conference asked me to participate to stand on this stage and speak uninterrupted for as long as I wanted I got really excited in fact I got a little smug finally someone other than me had realized how scintillating my wit and insight was and realized it needs to be shared with the public and then I panicked I don't know how to use PowerPoint I am the only person in the known universe I think aside from my mother who doesn't know how to use a cell phone and who's never even accidentally turned on the power point function on her computer so I racked my brain there's also I guess the small matter that I have designed and constructed in my life to be an expert in nothing and deferring to those who are while I enjoyed a promiscuously curious nomadic and omnivorous life some people might call that dilettante ish I am a writer a model and an actress I also do a really good cartwheel but only from the left so I racked my brain maybe the organisers thought that I fifteen years of modeling would give you an osmotic understanding of design or maybe more tenuously as a writer I design arguments and stories let's face it writing is mostly about getting the right order of prepositions verbs and nouns I'm also loathe to saying that as an actress you design characters I tend to agree with Spencer Tracy when he said that acting is mostly about showing up on time learning of lines and not bumping into the furniture so I thought about it and then I figured it out I am as I recently discovered and to my absolute horror a millennial and everyone wants to figure out why Millennials do what they do so as far as I can tell and according to countless studies I haven't actually read Millennials are good at two things one blurring boundary between private and public and to commodifying themselves shamelessly and relentlessly we figured out a way of designing our private selves and packaging them so that they're right for public consumption and public exploitation social media and reality programming have made it possible for us to self mythologize by carefully assembling embellishing cropping retouching boasting narrating our private selves in front of an audience but they've also more terrifyingly allowed us to think that that construct is actually real that the playing field has actually been leveled we're all celebrities in our minds right but there's something about what happens with social media that makes it so that that's actually the case outside of our own minds so why shouldn't we be compensated accordingly what's the difference between an actual public figure who has a hundred and fifty thousand Instagram or Twitter followers and a civilian who has just as many I'm connected to people in my social network who you guys definitely don't know nor does 99.85% of the world and yet there are a hundred thousand people out there we're interested in what they're doing every second of their lives that's a lot of people I don't know that many people do you and I also think at this point that those are numbers that advertisers can't ignore a kid with a cool Instagram feed and a bunch of followers is a potential marketing and advertisers wet dream it's direct right I mean you are interfacing directly with a consumer it's authentic it's attainable and it has integrity think about it this way if would you feel compelled to buy a pair of Javan she trainers that you saw or a sneaker sorry whatever you want to call that if you saw them in a bunch of you know pictures of a of people that you follow and admire and they were hashtags and so on and so forth or would you buy them based on a slick ad and a minor when Rihanna's pictures of herself on holiday look kind of like your friends pictures on holiday except that she's like 9,000 times better looking than any of your friends and she named checks a brand bingo I'm friends with a lot of designers and brands can you tell the difference between when I'm just expressing genuine enthusiasm for what they do or being paid to do so and so we all wittingly or unwittingly become shells that may be the aim there's a whole sub sector of Millennials who are forsaking higher education apprenticeship the slow miserable grind of a lifelong career in favour of the instant gratification of social media and reality celebrity the dream is to become a stylist a blogger a DJ a curator whatever you want to call anything where you can exert the self on your environment rather than actually engaging with it the dream of course is and you know we're obviously as I said we're extremely well equipped to actually achieve this because we know how to sell anything and we don't have any real regard for the boundaries between public and private of course the end goal here is the personal brand right we want to be collaborators we want to design capsule collections we want to be style icons we want to provide content you want to be spokespeople but it's a mudslinging concept right because these kids aren't really autonomous brands they're still beholden completely to the actual brands you know the Procter & Gamble's of the world the corporations and conglomerates who are paying them to hawk their wares and whichever ingenious way they've designed it no bloggers no matter how many millions of followers she has is competing with vogue in terms of recognizability reach and raw power Nora is an it girls design like makeup collection or whatever it is it's not competing with covergirl for shelf space we I'm including myself in this are trading on relevance but innately has a sell by date exactly like a models I personally have been a shill my well more than half my life when I was 15 and I started modeling in Paris an adult an artist who had experienced most of the world and had as bad as richer life as you could possibly want and the wisdom to go with it ask me why or what I whether I'd even thought about commodifying my beauty I said I didn't care but I loved fashion and that I wanted to be like those girls that I had pinned to my dorm room wall if I had any knowledge of PowerPoint now I would have that picture on there and you could see it and see how amazing those walls were very spectacular I didn't really realize what she meant until years later like any commodity my valley went up down up again and then plateaued I sold myself day in day out sometimes for the equivalent of a cab ride and a fancy meal I'm on the cover of a magazine right now a major magazine in states that's how much they pay you to be on the cover of a magazine very glamorous I didn't realize that my self-worth was intrinsically bound up with the arbitrarily defined material worth that the market had decreed for me so I quit after a couple of years I went to college I went to that bastion of millennial uber success Stanford and I didn't study computer science I studied comparative literature I actually took a computer science course at Stanford called CS 101 which is allegedly the easiest class to take and I had to force myself to drop it because I found it too difficult to code italics when I graduated I moved to New York I got a job as a reporter at the New York Observer which is a wonderful paper just as print was dying and bloggers with their personal anecdotal relationship with the world were taking over and then something weird happened after a hiatus of like four years I started modeling again there was a brief moment when models with a narrative so we call the multi - it's now like model DJs model engineers model model actresses whatever you want to call it and I apparently had one because I was a I was not just a pretty face I had a job I had a byline and I could fit into a sample size samples are the dresses that get sent down the runway in there and they come in one size and one iteration you know you know I could wear those to fancy parties and do cool things and somehow that was a clever marketing ploy because no one really knew what was going on behind the curtains which was that you know we had stylists and agents and magazine editors are telling us which new designers to wear and so on and so forth the interesting thing that happened as I became more of a full-time model and less of a full-time writer was that I was getting way better writing assignments all of a sudden my visibility in magazines and on billboards and all that kind of stuff suddenly made me way more enticing to magazines and newspapers my writing had definitely not improved in fact it probably done the exact opposite from lack of practice but it was I was it was appealing to these magazine editors the rate went up the stories got longer the paper glossy er the caveat of course was that it had to be personal had to be about me the irony of this kind of a me centric approach is that it's actually focused outward so I have spent my entire adult life designing myself to suit the needs of others according to whichever situation I'm pitching and that's also the problem for me and for people like me every situation personal or professional is an opportunity for a pitch and so I've become more of a persona than a person my container is obviously more interesting than the contents in this context so no wonder everyone's terrified of Millennials you know in the past we wanted to change the world now we just want to change ourselves in the past we you wanted to save our souls from eternal damnation now we want to save ourselves from toxicity of sugar lactose and gluten in the past we wanted to conquer continents and outer space now we just want to conquer ourselves and inner space we're not interested in the greater good we're just interested in ourselves you know the nice thing about a less me centric approach is that you never have to adjust or design yourself for the benefit of others I have a friend he's about as accomplished and recognized as it gets in his chosen field he has never given an interview and he's nowhere on the record he can't find him anywhere in the record talking about himself he has a Wikipedia page that's about three sentences long which is about a twentieth of what a normal DJ bloggers Wikipedia entry looks like nowadays he's in the unique he doesn't have Facebook he doesn't have Twitter he doesn't have Instagram he's in the unique position where he doesn't have to qualify or explain his work he just the work speaks for itself I get it I like it it's humble its valiant but I just wish Henry Kissinger would join Instagram so I can finally see a selfie from the war room because we know he has one thank you