The Cultural Wreckage of Neoliberalism and PR: How Authenticity Was Replaced with Optics

The Cultural Wreckage of Neoliberalism and PR: How Authenticity Was Replaced with Optics

In the late 20th century, neoliberalism promised a new golden age of free markets, global opportunity, and individual empowerment.
But what it delivered, culturally, was something far more hollow: a world where every human impulse is filtered through the lens of branding, public relations, and the ruthless management of perception.

At its core, neoliberalism deregulated not just economies, but meaning itself.

Institutions that once anchored society—churches, schools, unions, even families—were rebranded as "service providers" in a competitive marketplace of attention.

In this vacuum, PR didn’t just polish reputations; it became the primary way entities related to the public.
Authenticity, accountability, and even truth itself were demoted, replaced with strategic messaging and manufactured sentiment.

The Commodification of Identity

Under neoliberalism, identity became a market asset.
You’re no longer a person—you’re a personal brand.
Movements that began with real grievances (civil rights, feminism, labor rights) were swiftly appropriated by corporate PR departments, stripped of their radical edge, and re-sold as hashtags, ad campaigns, and corporate responsibility statements.

Brands learned to "speak human" without ever being human.
Companies apologized for injustices they actively perpetuated—but only when trending hashtags or news cycles forced them to.
Activism itself was gamified into optics, where success is measured not by changed conditions, but by favorable "engagement metrics."

Crisis PR as a Default Mode of Existence

In a neoliberal landscape, everyone is always in a state of low-grade crisis management.
Individuals manage their LinkedIn personas as carefully as CEOs manage press briefings.
Universities, cities, and even nonprofits now maintain crisis communications teams—not to address deep structural problems, but to spin them.
PR becomes the balm that papers over systemic failures, allowing the machine to roll on without real reform.

The result?
A cynical public that increasingly senses that everything is fake, everyone is selling, and nothing is what it claims to be.

The Collapse of Trust

The wreckage left behind is everywhere:

• A hollowed-out journalism industry, beholden to ad revenue and clickbait.

• Political campaigns that substitute slogans for platforms.

• An epidemic of burnout as people realize they must "market" themselves relentlessly just to survive.

Neoliberalism turned trust into a resource to be harvested and exploited.
PR became the harvester.

Today, rebuilding genuine trust—in brands, institutions, and even one another—will require a reckoning not just with bad actors, but with the entire system that incentivized deception over honesty, spin over substance.

Final Thought

Public relations, at its best, can be a bridge between authentic human communities and the organizations that serve them, fostering real connections. However, under neoliberalism, PR often devolved into a tool for shaping optics and maintaining illusions, prioritizing perception over truth. There is a rightful place for an aspirational enterprise and a vision of becoming, but it must be grounded in an honest assessment of an organization’s actual capacity to scale, deliver, and embody the values it projects.

To move forward, PR must return to its ethical roots—championing transparency, honesty, and accountability—not just in word, but in action. Rather than merely manipulating the present, optics should become an aspirational reflection of what we are becoming, grounded in genuine growth and transformation.

Only by doing so can we restore integrity, trust, and meaning, and begin to clear the cultural wreckage neoliberalism left behind.