Join WhatsApp Channel
Most people, at some point, want to shape how they will be remembered. The powerful simply have more tools with which to try.
This week on When It Hits the Fan, David Yelland and I looked at three stories about legacy, and the danger of believing that money, fame or corporate power can settle the question of reputation for you.
Big Tech facing the most serious regulatory challenge to its business model since its inception. The quiet, enduring power of a life lived without chasing prestige. And a courtroom ruling that reminded one of the world’s most powerful men that a name on a building is not the same as a legacy.
Big Tech’s Tobacco Moment
When the UK government announced this week that social media platforms would be banned for children under sixteen, the platforms responded with carefully worded statements emphasizing safety, expressing concern about unintended consequences, and warning that a blanket ban would simply drive young people toward less regulated corners of the internet. Meta said it shared the goal of keeping teenagers safe. Snapchat positioned itself closer to a private messaging service than a social media platform. YouTube described itself as a vital educational resource.
But technical competence is not the same as winning, and Big Tech is not necessarily winning this argument.
What the platforms are facing is not primarily a policy challenge. It is an emotional one, and the distance between big tech and the public’s could hardly be wider. On the morning of the announcement, a mother called Lisa Kenevan spoke about her thirteen-year-old son Isaac, who died after being encouraged by a social media challenge to restrict his breathing. No statement from a corporate communications team can occupy the same space as that. The PR instinct, understandable in isolation, is to remove emotion from the debate, to reframe it as a technical question about implementation, to introduce uncertainty, to point toward complexity. This is a playbook as old as the tobacco industry, and the communications firms that built the modern PR business were, in many cases, created specifically to deploy it. It worked for decades. It is working less well now.
The more interesting battle is not the one being fought in press statements. It is the one happening in the corridors of regulators, in briefings with parliamentarians, and in the careful cultivation of allied voices who can make arguments that the platforms themselves cannot credibly make. When Amnesty International describes the ban as the right diagnosis with the wrong prescription, that is more valuable to Big Tech than anything Meta could put in its own name. The mapping of friendly, neutral and hostile voices, and the building of infrastructure to amplify the friendliest ones, is where the real communications work is being done.
What makes this moment genuinely significant is that it is no longer contained. Australia moved first. The UK has now followed. Spain, Greece and Denmark are preparing their own versions.
The question Big Tech must answer is not whether it can stop this wave, but whether it can shape what it becomes. That is a harder brief, and a more honest one, than the statements released on Monday suggested.
Trump and the Naming Game
Donald Trump understands the power of names better than almost any modern politician. Before politics, his name was his product. It sat on towers, hotels and golf courses. It was not subtle because subtlety was never the point.
So when a court ruled this week that his name should come off the Kennedy Center, it was not simply a legal story. It was a clash between two kinds of legacy, one built from national memory and public service, the other imposed through force of personality and the assumption that visibility is the same thing as permanence.
A name on stone or marble feels like a small form of immortality, which is why the impulse to attach a name to a building is one of the oldest reputation strategies in existence. The Smithsonian has carried James Smithson’s name for nearly two centuries. The Tate Gallery bears the name of a Victorian sugar magnate. The Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford and the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, also in Oxford, are among the most recent examples of a tradition that stretches back through Carnegie and Rockefeller to the great philanthropists of antiquity.
But naming rights are not simply purchased. They are granted, and what is granted can be revoked. The most durable examples survive not just because of the money but because of thestory that accompanied it, a genuine relationship with the institution, a sense that the gift serves the building’s purpose rather than the donor’s ambition. Institutions have grown considerably more cautious for exactly this reason. A name that once conferred prestige can become a liability, and the removal of a name is among the more public humiliations available to a reputation. The Trump episode concentrated entirely on the name and skipped the rest. It is precisely why it ended the way it did.
Hockney’s Lesson in Legacy
David Hockney, one of Britain’s greatest artists died last week at the age of eighty-eight, and in the days that followed it emerged that he had declined the offer to be buried at Westminster Abbey, choosing instead to be interred beside his mother and sister in Bridlington, the East Yorkshire seaside town where he had returned to live and paint in the later decades of his life.
Westminster Abbey holds thirty kings and queens and centuries of Britain’s most celebrated figures. It is, by any conventional measure, the greater honor. Hockney chose the smaller town, and in doing so communicated something about himself that no press release could have achieved.
Authenticity, genuinely lived rather than strategically performed, accumulates over time in ways that become almost impossible to replicate or manufacture. Hockney spent years painting the lanes and fields around Bridlington, returning to his mother’s town long before it was fashionable to celebrate northern England, working in relative anonymity in a place that most of the art world had no particular interest in. The decision to be buried there was entirely consistent with that life.
It felt true because it was true.
For a place like Bridlington, and by extension for any community whose identity has been shaped by the presence of an artist, a writer or a musician, there is now a question about what comes next. Art, at its most enduring, functions as something no PR campaign can replicate. It is a press release written in paint or words or music, and it carries a credibility that institutional communications rarely achieves.
Hockney never chased prestige. In the end, he simply went home.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this article/column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of South Asian Herald.
