In some ways, the influencer industry is more legitimate than it’s ever been. But it has always been precarious, and more than a decade into its existence, it is neither novel enough to be exciting nor established enough to have a real professional code. In an oversaturated market, rage bait is the last sure way to get attention, despite the way it alienates people over the long term. AI is swiftly becoming the dominant way many people get personal-seeming advice about how to live their life, which makes the usefulness of aspirational online content even less apparent than it ever was. And so, although influencers—especially lifestyle influencers—have never been universally respected, they lately seem to be openly reviled.
Naturally, much of the influencer backlash lives online. A few months ago, someone asked on Reddit, “What’s an industry that provides zero value to society but makes billions of dollars?” Among the 5,300-plus responses: Ticketmaster, sports-betting companies, multilevel marketing schemes, private prisons, and—several times over—influencers. A hilarious number of people have found internet fame by making content about how much they hate other people who are internet-famous for making content. (“Everyone Is Finally Turning on TONE DEAF Influencers” is the title of one recent video, made by an Australian YouTuber with nearly 300,000 subscribers and a clothing line.)
But the juiciest fights play out in the physical world, which is where influencers very literally bump up against the people who can’t stand them. A few years ago, a coffee shop in Brooklyn banned photography after too many influencers clogged the café with tripods and handheld lights; earlier this month, Indonesia indicated that it would crack down on people creating content for pay while on tourist visas.
Last week, the scene of the debate was a gift shop in Nantucket, an island that has recently been overrun by vacationing influencers, just like Bali, Iceland, and Santorini before it. The store’s operators, evidently fed up with the stream of people filming inside, had a sign made that read No Influencers, hung it up in the store, and posted a picture of it on Instagram. There, it drew the attention of thousands of people, including Paige Paul, who has about 2 million followers across platforms, is married to a famous tennis player, and has been spending time on the island since she was a child. Paul, previously known as Paige Lorenze, declared the sign a misogynistic slight against an industry that is overwhelmingly female. The store’s owner, John Sylvia, said it was meant as a joke for locals, but the sentiment clearly came from an earnest annoyance: “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” he told New York magazine.
The fight felt freighted. Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.
But influencers are unique in how they seem to be everywhere, particularly in places where people are trying to do things other than be on their phone to watch influencers. Of course we love the game and hate the player: It’s much easier to be annoyed by individuals than by concepts, especially when those individuals are, often, pretty annoying.
You’d need to be pretty clueless to not feel a little weird about the online attention economy and all it entails—the vanity; the grift; the slop; the desperation; the calculated intimacy; the endless consumption; the creeping sense that everything and everyone is actually just there to make you feel kind of bad about yourself and then sell you something. Social media can, of course, unite like-minded people, but it can also reward the kind of tribalist reactionaryism that can conflate disliking some women with disliking all women, or make an anti-consumerist folk hero out of a store that sells $2,750 baskets. The industry that Paul and her cohort belong to is unquestionably grim—but the industry isn’t walking around town with a selfie stick. There’s a reason that the sign doesn’t say no influencing, but rather no influencers.
by Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Atlantic/Getty
[ed. I'm a great fan of guitar instruction videos because they teach you something. I guess you could call that a form of influencing. Some instructors have a wide audience and are influencial because of their teaching technique.The opposite (and there are many examples) are so-called "reaction videos" where someone listens to a song and simply records their "reactions". Who cares. Bottom of the barrel. Same goes for opinion influencers, foodies and tons of other niches (Mukbang videos?). If all they have to offer is distraction or entertainment they're a waste of time.]
