When your name isn't only yours

There was a time when googling yourself was an unconfessable vice, intimate and faintly embarrassing. Like stepping on the scales after Christmas. I did it after a couple of flashes of fleeting professional glory, ego up and trigger finger loose, unknowingly re-staging Alec Brownstein’s Google Job Experiment.

I searched convinced the screen would hand me back my own reflection. What it gave me instead was a man in a suit of lights, a cape, and photographs taken from the stands. My vanity took a goring. The problem wasn’t him, of course. The problem was me, and my innocent assumption that my name belonged to me alone.

My own relationship with bullfighting is dismal. As a kid, in my grandparents’ village, my nan would barricade herself in her armchair for every broadcast and banish me from the living room. I grew up associating the whole thing with the kidnapping of my cartoons, which in the late eighties was the equivalent of taking a teenager’s phone away today. Years later I crossed paths again with an old creative hand who explained his ideas through bullfighting metaphors — moves with names I’d never heard, each one precise, each one useless anywhere else. The man had an entire liturgy at his disposal, with its own grammar and its own timing, to stage concepts that had nothing to do with the sand. I’d spent half my life looking for a language of my own without finding it, so all I could do was watch him and want it.

I thought about using the bullfighter thing as a dinner-table line. It was funny. It stayed funny until the darker joke landed. I look after other people’s reputation for a living, and I’d spent a good two decades ignoring the one trench where I had absolute jurisdiction.

An algorithm doesn’t understand souls. It catalogues entities. And an entity isn’t a handful of letters, it’s a firm trail: a domain, a profile, a job title always written the same way. When two men share a name, the machine doesn’t play Solomon. It sides with whoever piles up more evidence, and with whoever more people are looking for. Cold arithmetic. With AI the guillotine drops faster. There are no ten blue links left to rummage through. There’s one answer, confident and final. If the machine picks the wrong man, it sentences you to oblivion in a perfectly written paragraph about somebody else.

For fifteen years my strategy was flawless in its disaster: none. Orphan profiles, job titles written seven different ways, a blog on permanent leave, press mentions with no link, and a website so abstract I wouldn’t have cited myself. I served the machine the perfect excuse to ignore me, on a silver platter.

It took me too long to understand that the battle for my own name was lost. The war was in the words that describe what you do. Communication. Marketing. Brand. Crisis. And in the qualifier you attach to them. There you’re not up against a bullfighter, you’re up against thousands of people as good at your job as you are. The tie-break is fought in the mud of the niche. Football. Pharma. Chemicals. And as the alley narrows, the company thins out, and so do the people circling.

All of this arrives late, of course. Now they tell us search is dead, that SEO is a corpse and nobody types anything any more. The industry’s prophets are stampeding for the exit, announcing the end of the keyboard with the conviction of people who need to believe their own argument. To me that reads as an invitation, not a problem.

On 25 September 2011, Barcelona’s Monumental held the last bullfight in Catalonia; the regional ban had been voted through and would take effect that January. José Tomás was on the card. I was walking down Calle Marina and ran straight into the crowd carrying him out on their shoulders, cheering, turning the whole thing into a protest, leaving behind an image of posthumous resistance very much in this city’s style. I had never set foot in a bullring. I took advantage of everyone leaving to slip in.

Fifteen years later I’m doing exactly the same. Walking in slowly, quietly, into the place everyone swears they’re walking out of. I never could stand a crowd. My thing was always swimming against the current.