Apologia to the Influencer

Influencers are human product too!

In lazy Marxist circles, or the stickers I see on the streetlamps, “alienation” gets thrown around. Alienation from the product, from the craft, from art, from culture, from society, the list goes on. Yet, probably as a testament to the sheer poverty of dialogue, alienation has become some sort of underhanded tactic against other more digital alienations, mostly late capitalism created ones. Alienationception has led to it now leading to that one twitter dude who keeps arguing with people about service workers and who gets a union. Fair does, he makes some point but out of all of it; There’s a group that has never been a thrown a bone, and oft more of a target of derision:

The Influencer.

Perhaps this is too hard to explain in a simple opening, but what inspired all this influencer pondering was a rather silly little video about influencers and critiquing them on several layers. The video itself is not interesting. Mostly as noise fodder for when you are in the World of Warcraft mines farming gold because one’s mother got their account hacked, but there are snippets in it that made me alt-tab. Snippets of understanding and covering themselves that the commentator gives, but a deeper, more interesting snippets of the position of Influencers and their identity.

I’ve tried to add some punctuation for a basic starter example, take the unease of the youtuber on the topic:

“Just so we don't get it twisted, again, this is not a game of whose problems are worse, this is not a competition of who's struggling more. I understand that one person's smallest problem might feel like another person's biggest problem and I am not here to police what people are allowed to feel upset about in their own lives”

There are many many more repetitions of things like this, and for the record, I do think there’s a level of easy fruit picking of “entitlement” critiques here that they could just be going for. Nonetheless, the commentator chooses to cleanse their mouth first, clearly feeling uneasy - this is a choice. The youtuber shows understanding here, that themselves - that is themselves as youtuber/commentator - is a part of product (un)like the Influencer who is the product. Keep this separation and ease of a choice in mind for later. God, life would be so much easier slinging boxes of makeup or blogging about your family holidays but what is missed in the video, is that every single case she looks at shows a type of alienation towards self/product/online-self that is then wagered against the normal wage-slavery alienation. For the youtuber, who can dictate the level of para-social, dictate the level of “powerlevelling”, there is a control between youtuber-person. Remember, with these influencers, they are the human-produce without the produce-control that a youtuber has. Yes, a person’s charisma or self is a part of the “youtuber” sphere but Vtubers, music artists, gameplay channels or even just video editors have the content less on the nature of the person. 

I’ve been a big fan of, but also hesitant in an “it’s too late” way of Hans-Georg Moeller’s idea of age of profilicity; in short, where people curate transient “profiles” for themselves that are verified and validated by the “general peer” and this is different than the age of sincerity (based on duties, families, culture etc.) to the age of authenticity where the goal is to show that your mask is not a mask. The nature of influencing seems pretty clear here, right? You screw up saying something dumb on twitch/X/Instagram and you get labelled something and the excuse of doing a bit/authenticity is no longer enough of a defence. Most people get away with “avatarism”, which I have recently learned is a term used quite keenly by prometheanism philosophers, but I mean it in a more general Internet (that’s uppercase I) way, people understand they are not their profile pictures and understand a filtered photograph is still a filtered photograph. Rigging the mirror is not for you, but the gaze of others. This long explanation is for this one point:

 For influencers this profile becomes the product. 

Influencers are not “avatars” themselves; they must replicate the truth of the age of authenticity but within the age of profilicity. This isn’t always the case, but you can see this split between the current state of the American influencers shown in the video compared to other countries. Indonesia and other countries have influencer office-blocks, and still on the boundary of sincerity and authenticity. Firstly that there is a split between person (identity mode) and worker (influencer mode); Secondly that, culturally, sales are more likely to come from sincerity based relationships. In the American style, this means one must conflate the profile with themselves, to create the authenticity-based profile, instead of a sincerity-based profile because that is at the core, the "product". Ultimately meaning the influencer has their identity folded into themselves, not their duty which can be kept distinct.

Consider older boundary crossing with legacy media. With the slow death of print media, one would maybe assume that the death of the paparazzi hounding has at least diminished to lazy blind clickbait articles. However I think this has vastly more accelerated; What used to be the “celebrity without makeup” gossip magazine nature of peeling behind the character, or “OMG ELLEN IS ACTUALLY NOT A  HAPPY TV HOST ON A TRAIN HAVING A FAG AT 6AM???” youtube-exposes have evolved as people shift from authenticity to profilicity. No longer is the mutualistic “my mask is not a mask” understanding becomes something more violent, more consuming down to the person. The only difference nowadays is that the hatred of the paparazzi and virtue-signalling about them for one’s own profile, means there’s less overt encouragement. But you know, capital demands expansion so what doesn’t feed the goose is good for the gander. Your profile – therefore your influence – is in our hands, our gaze verifies it, our gaze labels it. You no longer get to be caught with your authentic mask off, we get to create and destroy the mask. 

So the Influencer who no longer can split their mask and self, has to reabsorb their own profile autocannibalistically, blossoming into a corpse for their flock to feast upon. That’s including the entire ecosystem of carrion eaters; trolls, hate, spam, creepy comments on top. Most of which are designed to not eat at the corpse of the human, but infest it with parasites for the maggots to come. 

Returning to the youtuber splitting this difference and encouraging the consumption:

“When I see influencers complaining about their jobs, I immediately think about my brother who works 12-hour night shifts in the ER. There are people out here working to change and save lives and you really think creating makeup Tik Tok videos is the hardest job there is? It's just so classless especially coming from someone of her caliber with 15 million followers who has afforded an ungodly amount of money and privilege given to her by those followers by that platform. And once again I'm not saying she's not allowed to have aspects of her job she doesn't like, we all do, but it's all in the delivery. This is a very very bad look for her this next one kind of fits into that same theme of influencers not having a sense for what US normal people…”

The point is something that everyone can understand with variable degrees of agreement. After what we have seen before, we find the unsatisfying middle part, a gaping hole. After justifying what the commentator has said, a consumer line is drawn. Note that there’s a conflation here – money (Resource), privilege (Personal), Platform (Service). Perhaps this is controversial but these three things in most other groups are separate – there’s a difference between harassing a McDonald's worker over the company's support of Israel and boycotting the company. And yes, I know at a bottom level demand creates supply, the customer keeps the service/job alive, but it would be considered almost Karen if you walked up to a Wal-Mart employee and screamed at them that their job is owed to you. At least with Wal-Mart, the uniform gives a distinct separation between person (worker) and person (person).  This idea of worker-person split goes so far that it’s considered a trope across American to Japanese literature. Yet as with everything in our late capitalism society, the split collapses in on the social self horizon (read: profile, read: getting fired from Home Depot because you followed a bad X account.). Note the use of “not a good look” emphasises this collapsing into the influencer to be socially labelled like this as if it’s her.

So then doth the youtuber allogrooms towards the influencer whose entire “profile” -whose identity- has been consumed down to eating hotdogs and mustard:

 “I just do not like the way she said “my little 1 million ". It was so condescending, girl, you have 1 million followers. 1 .7 million followers by this point are the followers that have given you a platform, made you relevant and contributed to your income. Have some humility and respect for those measly 1 million followers”

The influencer in the video does actually expand on their idea of the scale of what she goes through as a low rung influencer compared to a major celebrity. Missed in this scaling are two things: Firstly what I stated above, the era of paparazzi-in-dustbins seems a million lightyears away from hundreds of social media comments; Second is the simulacra of scale, it’s not like tiktok numbers have ever been accurate, but there’s no telling how many are just swipers, or are engaging properly or the actual worth of that number. These two things are a bad combination mixed over, you can’t demand humility from someone who has no idea whether a jump off their perch would kill them or not.  

Sure, it must be nice to eat hotdogs and have one million followers, but there is a true alienation here in almost every regard. Not even your product – the engagement or entertainment depending on whose point of view – is measured accurately to give you a scope of the worth of your profile. This ambiguity means you’ll never get the catharsis of, say, a popstar seeing a stadium of screaming fans or people buying your book. Under layers of simulation of signs with no real utility outside of the money that comes out of the end, one has no way to recognise (in the Hegelian sense) their service, time or their own identity. Again, their own peer-verified "profile", which has been autocannibalistically eaten into a simulation of the watcher’s own recreation. Any attempt at segregation between avatar and person is held hostage by the consumer – which the youtuber even tacitly endorses: “because you're a content creator people follow you for the content not to hear you complain about how your job is so hard.” Where is the line drawn here, between the factory worker alienated from their product when the product is the human themselves? There’s an essay in #Accelerate from Marx, Labour Of The Machine, on the nature of the machine, and there’s a funny little term that keeps cropping up:

“In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself.”

“In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital's] requirements.”

This objectified labour becomes relevant when the situation is inverted. Once the autocannibalistic cycle of the Influencer and their personhood has completed, what remains is a machine and an abstracted alienated-from-identity-and-person body. This falling down of the machine and worker begins to almost switch, amusingly. Before I stated about the worker using a uniform as a separator between home/work, between worker and person – even as superfluous as their work maybe. But without this separator, you end up with the person’s identity becoming the machine and their body, self-hood, becoming superfluous to what the profile requires. You have no factory “place” to put screws in along the conveyor belt. Do you even know where hotdog eating is along any sort of production line? 

I always bang on about the Hedeiggerian objective and subjective switching meanings around the time of the enlightenment and age of mechanisation; how the Internet (uppercase) has followed suit into the (lower case) i internet, where it now revolves around the user; and their projected wants, their data, their cultural schizophrenia, their algorithms. So this nature of objectified labour and subjective people also begins to switch. All of it objective, metric-driven, models-for that are imposed upon the influencer, eventually shaping them into becoming an objectified machine, in the unification of their “authentic” “profile.” Worse still if you go deeper into Marx’s commentary about value in this way, the social value that gets turned back into more capital value so even the human value becomes human-product. This becomes a level of machine-simulation of the non-machine every time a user gets frowny and demands a validating relatability from the influencer.

All of this is really emphasised by the Youtuber’s critique of a different influencer, struggling with the difference between person and influencing. She complains of her phone time/usage, and that she feels detached from her family and wants a reset: this “reset” being a cancelling of over 30 brand collaborations, a one way ticket to Australia with their kids pulled from private school to remote learning and a month gallivanting around. The commentator goes hard against this lady, but the word “choice” throughout is of great interest. Let alone the ladies' own use of the word “reset”. I’m going to post the entire chunk of transcript because it’s interesting to pull apart, I’ve broken it up and added some emphasis for readability:

“How do I know this you might ask because she didn't actually take a break from influencing at all she documented every single day of this entire trip still posting content still(1) posting commissionable links still on her phone all day every day .

It looked to me like she was still working she was just doing it from a more romanticised setting, how nice that must be to be like ‘oh influencing is feeling too hard these days I don't feel like working this(2) month clear the schedule let's book the tickets let's take our family of five on a one-month Australian vacation’. Honestly good for them, couldn't be me, but it looked like they had a blast. I just find it out of touch because it's so clearly not something her average follower has the ability to do themselves, most people can't just put a pause on life to go spend likely tens of thousands of dollars on a last minute vacation(3) when they don't feel like working anymore and remember influencers are able to live this way because of the money they make off of their content and platform when you watch and follow an influencer you are funding their lifestyle(4)”

Let us recall what the lady in the video had actually claimed; she lost control of her work-life balance, and she had 28-30 collaborations to post in the month of summer. Her “reset” and “break” from influencing might not have been through the general, loose term of “influencing” (I.E. posting photos with a link in.) but they aren’t brand collaborations. Conflating person, personhood and the brand is done at (1) so unknowingly by the commentator, the entire process feels rather malicious. They aren’t scripted brand-products collaborations, the entire situation would be far more dire, cynical and corrupted if they were. “Reset” is trying to pluck out these botflies of companies and the commentating maggots from the feet. Photos and videos of her at fucking zoos with her family are not the same as reading a script and selling your authentic-profile self and then engaging. 

Remember – and the youtuber in question oft talks about this in regards to sponsors – that it’s in the influencers ball court, they have to organise products and then follow/negotiate what to say on the script. Why do you think so many gaming youtubers make a joke after the sponsor? It is to decompress, to split that scripted, profile, controlled version back from the negotiated state to avoid autocannibalisation. “Haha I’m shilling” is a defensive reflex that pulls you back. Worth noting that said youtuber has a manager and an editor as extra degrees of separation. Most likely the influencer in question has neither of these or simply has a mass network manager at best forwarding her emails/opportunities. This reset she wants, appears to be more of reclaiming her humanity from the objectified self. 

I placed (2) here, because it’s interesting that she continues this mis-appropriation. In traditional labour, at least there would be holidays or some sort of reprieve – it’s something that she tags on MLM-huns who are at funerals or their child’s birth still doing the #bossbabe grindset – but is not given to those the viewer deems as privileged. An almost funny contradiction. This needless, aggressive appropriation of the influencer's surplus labour time, for a use beyond actual downtime/person time. Surplus time, as Marx would call it, is converted into value-use by the youtuber, and by the algorithms, and by the consuming values in their free time. An ouroboros of time consumption formed through a vulture centipede ritualistically encircling this corpse in the middle. If i were anymore cynical or malicious i would say this is the bell curve midwit filter.

In (3), we see something we could all agree on at first, it is out of touch and about 1% of people could truly be able to do it. What I want to focus on here, is the nature of “put a pause on life” when, as I’ve covered before, it seems to appear she is doing the complete opposite. Which is amusing because a bit after the entire passage the youtuber even conflates the profile-virtue-signalling as a consumer with the influencer-alienation-signalling: “It would be one thing if she said, ‘I want to go travel you only live once I want to give my kids these great experiences here we go we're doing it’”  and the youtuber chastises her for instead playing the influencing-is-difficult card, but it would not be a reclamation of herself. Frustrating that is oft a critique levelled at the cult-like mentality of MLMs, where someone’s identity gets wholesale bought into to align with the company’s profile – hell there’s more than enough MLM stories on this very channel of people admitting they had fully sold themselves. There’s creepy recruitment stories of people in cars eating their own brand food and listening to their own-brand motivational tapes for three days straight  – all of that is needed so the profile and identity together meld into the business’s profile and becomes a singular identity. In this collapse of work-profile/home-person into a steady machine ready for any part of their surplus labour to be milked. 

All of this is afforded with sympathy and claims of victimhood, which I do agree with wholeheartedly, let us not forget that a lonely world makes fish easier to catch. But to the influencer, what is levelled at them is “instead of just taking a few days off like anybody else would, you're having a full blown lavish extended vacation”. What wealth is it, that one has lost their surplus? To continue from the same Marx article: ”Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society”. Yes, this is the same lazy Marxism I reference at the start of this article, but I wish to try to articulate why sometimes I err on the side of assigning maliciousness more than ignorance. The youtuber is more educated than me, in a better position than me, in a job that is comparable to the influencer but offers no modicum of recognition. They are aware of potential profile damage by saying it’s not about suffering-olympics, an awareness of the social stake, but only insofar as towards their own profile. Which ironically, shows the separation of person-profile that is denied to the influencer.

That is why (4) is such a salient point against the entire rant about this lady. 

Consume the influencer’s corpse! For the sake of your cultural schizophrenia, you must consume and move on to the next fad, as she cannot do with her identity on a daily basis. She is rich, privileged and does not suffer the same way, say,  lower-caste Indians going through trash for pennies does, and that makes this all an easy out. Social-suffering is still suffering. Identity isolation, destruction of the person into the gaze, is still suffering. We afford this to celebrities in the 20-20 hindsight of trash magazines, but hide under classism when who is still underneath the blankets of the elite suffer. As the middle-class is being subsumed into an all encompassing crab pot but with every crab constantly saying “I’m not a crab! Get me outta here!”. Culminating in a different type of hyper-suffering that is chokeholding and consuming down to even the way one interacts with your kids. 

Distinction between these worlds has never been most people’s strong point. You are asking the mobile generation of the Internet, who have never known the Internet, but only the post social-media internet. Who are prompted to hand over their real name and identity on every page, whose dealing with an internet that’s already filled with trepidation but would have no consideration for the wilderness of the Internet. Lest they end up like me playing Runescape at age 12 and getting killed in the Wildy, led on by cool dreams of friendship, trust and an unfamiliar culture. The reverse then happens in the real world without this distinction - people who have never known privacy or separation no longer have the struggle of social or profile. In over-socialisation one can schizo-out into a re-codification that makes one immune to the social-shaming/social-control. That’s the influencer’s great “reset”. This war of profiles-against-profiles, this complete competition of who can alienate themselves harder and faster is only going to push us further into the algorithmic hands.