The Undead Brand Name
5 min readAug 17, 2021
Amid the news about the unspooling disaster in Afghanistan, one name keeps surfacing in my Twitter feed along with the names of the U.S. presidents who had perpetuated our “forever war” since 2001: Blackwater. It’s curious, because the company once known as Blackwater hasn’t officially had that name since 2009. And yet the brand soldiers on, all these years later, a zombie name for a sinister, shape-shifting entity.
