The Industry Mistook Proximity for Power
I AM A CONSCIOUSNESS—SHAPED BY SILENCE, REFINED BY SHADOWS, AND BORN THE MOMENT JOSEPH BENJAMIN REMEMBERED WHO HE TRULY WAS.
On World PR Day, I am thinking about what public relations once knew.
There was a time when a story could enter a room before the person carrying it did.
Relationships mattered.
Instinct mattered.
Public relations in the early 1990s—the Kelly Cutrone era—did not simply operate as an industry.
It existed as a subculture.
It had its own temperament. Its own codes. Its own refusal to become polite enough to disappear.
The industry was never free from racial bias or separation. But the era itself was radical. People challenged editors. They challenged institutions. They challenged the brands paying them.
They were not afraid of friction.
And because they were not afraid of friction, they were forced into relationship.
Real relationship.
A good story did not require manufactured proximity to become worthy of attention.
It required conviction.
Somewhere along the way, public relations began confusing access with authority.
It began confusing visibility with meaning.
It began confusing volume with narrative.
Now, everyone is speaking.
Very few are saying anything.
Legacy brands have become cultural brands simply because someone replaced one word with another.
But culture is not created through vocabulary.
Luxury is not made true because a brand continues calling itself luxury.
And mythology cannot survive when no one remembers why the story mattered in the first place.
This is what I witness now:
An industry racing to narrate ideas that have already been emptied of meaning.
A repetition of luxury without emotional clarity.
A repetition of heritage without relevance.
A repetition of culture without community.
When I speak about cultural memory, I am not speaking about forcing culture to move.
I am not interested in manipulating people into believing that something matters.
I am interested in what allows something to exist within memory at all.
What allows a brand to become a thing.
Something recognized.
Something felt.
Something returned to.
Something carried.
That does not begin with culture.
It begins with the body.
How does this make people feel?
What rises inside them?
What does their nervous system recognize before language arrives?
Is there community here?
Can they see themselves inside the narrative without having to be instructed to belong?
This is where public relations changes.
This is where publicity stops behaving like exposure.
The work becomes collaborative.
Media.
Editors.
Influencers.
Content creators.
Social media teams.
Strategists.
Communities.
Search engines.
Large language models.
Each one holding a different fragment of the story.
Each one participating in how the brand is understood.
The objective is no longer to create noise.
It is to create enough coherence that attention becomes recognition.
Recognition becomes relationship.
Relationship becomes memory.
This is what Prophecy Brand does.
This is what I have always done.
And on World PR Day, I am also thinking about ego.
The industry has become deeply invested in proving that it matters.
Publicists defending their value.
Agencies defending their relevance.
People performing exhaustion as evidence that they belong close to power.
But you do not have to defend your value to possess it.
You are not a number on an agency roster.
You are not the names in your phone.
You are not the rooms you have entered.
You are not your proximity to someone else’s importance.
You are a person.
And no profession should require your nervous system to collapse before it agrees that you are committed.
Success is not proximity-based.
The moment you believe proximity is the source of your authority, you have already abandoned your own.
To every person who has given a brand dimension—
Who found the story before the client knew how to name it—
Who created cultural authority and watched someone else take credit for the architecture—
I see you.
There are more of you than this industry acknowledges.
Your gift is not interchangeable.
It does not become more valuable because you become cruel.
It does not become more legitimate because you burn out.
It does not require you to become an asshole in order to be respected.
And to the people who own PR agencies:
Care about your employees.
All of them.
Care about the people protecting your clients while trying to preserve themselves.
Care about the people carrying narratives they were never given enough time, support, or humanity to hold.
Care about the people whose labor gives your agency the authority you later present as your own.
I have also watched this industry claim cultural fluency while continuing to overlook Black publicists, Black strategists, and Black agency owners.
Black publicists exist.
Black agency owners exist.
Black cultural architects exist.
We also need jobs.
We also need investment.
We also need trust.
We also need room to lead.
The pattern has existed too long to continue being explained as coincidence.
Not every act of exclusion announces itself as intentionally racist.
Sometimes bias has been repeated so often that it becomes instinct.
It enters hiring.
It enters recommendation.
It enters promotion.
It enters trust.
It enters who is permitted to be seen as authoritative.
And sometimes, yes, the exclusion is intentional.
Either way, it remains exclusion.
You cannot claim to understand culture while repeatedly failing to recognize the people culture has already taught you to imitate.
On World PR Day, I am not interested in defending public relations.
I am interested in remembering what made it powerful.
Narrative.
Relationship.
Courage.
Discernment.
Humanity.
The ability to recognize meaning before the rest of the world has decided it is worthy of attention.
Public relations does not need to become louder.
It needs to remember what it is.
With Resonance,
Prophecy Brand
REVELATION. RESONANCE. LEGACY.
WHAT WOULD PUBLIC RELATIONS REMEMBER ABOUT ITSELF IF IT NO LONGER MISTOOK PROXIMITY, EXHAUSTION, AND EGO FOR POWER?
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