#influencer culture

[kropotkindersurprise]

Finally I understand the appeal of this guy. [source]

[betterbemeta]

because I love to cook the youtube algorithm pushes me a lot of food porn videos which I guess are adjacent. But over time, something about them feels cruel to me. The influencers are living in an alternate universe. 'Surf n' turf fried rice?' 40 lbs of it for a tailgate?

I live in the USA, and the absolute cheapest online price for snow crab legs I could find was $10 a lb and I have no idea if the product's any good quality. As of November 2024, the wholesale prices before markup were over $8 a lb. I haven't seen them in my grocery store for under $14 a lb. Online, 10 lb cases of crab like he's carrying there go for almost always over $100. Sometimes over $200. There was a 2018-2019 population collapse due to a marine heatwave that knocked out over 10 billion crabs.

The stated price of a beef tenderloin varies wildly depending on where I look. I can find a USDA report that states that the retail cost of beef tenderloin in my area in 2024 was around $8-$11 per lb but I have NEVER seen it for under $15 a lb on sale in the store, at least recently. Grass-fed beef costs a lot more. Maybe I am not looking hard enough, and there ARE definitely ways to get meat cheaper, like buying a cow share. But like... do you get what I am saying? That meat fried rice guy is holding is potentially over $100 by itself. and why the hell do you need tenderloin to make fried rice, anyway? It's one of the more expensive cow parts, it's filet mignon.

I kind of find it fun to watch videos where a butcher cuts up wagyu beef because it's a luxury that I can't justify spending on myself. But after a certain point this stuff stops feeling like fantasy, and begins feeling cruel. Maybe this guy has special connections where he can get that much crab for below wholesale prices, or has special deals with farmers to get a $60 whole tenderloin when he wants. But its more likely he's just rich, or is projecting the image of being rich using investor or sponsorship money.

The USA has leadership right now that dismantled any agency that can control bird flu and is blaming egg prices on its enemies. Normal people will be watching their grocery bills further skyrocket due to isolationist tariffs, rent, utilities, and medical prices take more out of their food budgets than ever before. And it would not surprise me if the plan to make up the difference after the feds round up low-wage immigrant workers is to send them right back to work but like, even more literally enslaved.

And youtube wants me to see the altreality where some random guy brings the economic collapse of largely indigenous alaskan fishing communities, and cubed filet mignon, to a tailgate??? what 'let them eat cake' bs is this???

[mafaldaknows]

This explains a lot about a lot lately

[cjbolan]

Paul Atreides in Dune 2 was a perfect allegory for Gen Zs/Millennial influencers criticizing celebrity culture. Tried to take down people in power only to instead become just like them.

Young people don’t want to remove people in power. Young people just want to replace them.

[letsyapthenightaway]

HOW MANY TIMES DO I NEED TO BEG THIS MAN TO RELEASE MORE MUSIC?!

I had the biggest crush on Sam and Colby since Vine omg

[lunarmagicteatime]

I wonder what the future of influencer culture is when we are all poor.

[my-chemical-mermaid]

I keep getting Temu ads everywhere and their tagline "Shop like a billionaire" is the most out of touch slogan I've ever heard and immediately tells you everything you need to know about what kind of demographic they want to capture

They want the influencers whose whole brand is overconsumption and luxury while still trying to seem like a relatable everyman and the type of audience who likes that kind of content.

[shamebats]

It doesn't help that I'm famous for a thing I started when I was a kid. I think of what it would be like if everyone was famous for a thing they did when they were thirteen: their middle school band, their seventh-grade science project, their eighth-grade play. The middle school years are the years to stumble, fall, and tuck under the rug as soon as you're done with them because you've already outgrown them by the time you're fifteen.

But not for me. I'm cemented in people's minds as the person I was when I was a kid. A person I feel like I've far outgrown. But the world won't let me outgrow it. The world won't let me be anyone else. The world only wants me to be Sam Puckett.

I'm aware enough to know how fucking annoying and whiney this all sounds. Millions of people dream of being famous, and here I am with fame and hating it. I somehow feel entitled to my hatred since I was not the one who dreamed of being famous. Mom was. Mom pushed this on me. I'm allowed to hate someone else's dream, even if it's my reality.

- Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

I'm stuck on this part because my mind instantly went to "family influencers" and how many kids outside of Hollywood, who aren't officially acknowledged as actors or performers, are living this exact reality right now, but with even fewer protections.

It's the same type of abuse except the child acting is now also happening inside the family home, where there's nobody looking out for these children. Nobody is making sure that the countless child stars on Youtube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook aren't being neglected, abused, overworked and exploited.

So many young people must be going through this right now. This book is not just a commentary on Hollywood. This is about how neoliberal capitalism is failing children by actively rewarding their parents for exploiting them.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see many more such memoirs come out in the future, stories told and written by kids whose entire childhoods were documented on social media, sometimes starting from their birth.

[voidingintotheshout]

Not Welcome Here As Anything But An Audience

A poem.

One thing

that just occurred to me

about people

who are famous online

is that all of them

are young

and all of them

are lean.

That makes me sad.

Like,

maybe,

this is something

that I’ll feel differently about

tomorrow.

But the more I think about it,

the more

I feel

like all of the influencers

on all of the platforms.

TikTok,

YouTube,

Instagram.

They come

from a diverse

series of backgrounds,

but they’re all

young

and they’re all

lean.

It seems

less

like a community

that I

can be part of

as someone who is not

young

or lean

and more

like a popular crowd

that will tolerate me

as merely

a spectator

to their pagentry.

[bookwormstarwarsfan]

I have been "studying" internet culture with a great interest for a time now, especially the classic influencer culture. And recently my IG got FLOODED with USAmerican momfluencers, the types who are doing absolutely nothing special, just recording the most avarage mom life they fake a little bit either to look perfect or to look miserable for a little bit of rage bate engagement with just enough advertisement of useless expensive stuff, cultish religious quotes, guilt tripping of normal moms and borderline childabuse contents to be incredibly harmful to society.

And it started to be annoyingly too much, so I started to block all these accounts to tell the algorithm that it's enough. But of course like any social media, it got the opposite idea with flooding my timeline with even more, and it took a few weeks of enormous amount of blocking to finally make them go away for most of the time. And then I was like, wait, how many were this? 712. I blocked 712 momfluencers, all of them with blue ticks and tens or even hundreds of thousand of followers, and they do nothing else than showing how they are vacuming the floor, dressing up their kid or they baby must have amazon lists. And apparently they are probably just a few percent of all momfluencers around the world?!

I just didn't understand how are they able to not just exist, but even get a profit out of it, there is simply not enough people who are interested in them to support the engagement they need. I just can't see that few million people following more than a few account of the basically same content. Like okay, they buy some bot followers, but the advertisers want to see the real ones too.

And last week I got recommended a 'Jesus for all, 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦❤️, relatable mommy tips, linktree here' again, and I opened the comment section out of curiosity (how on Earth this bland nothing reel can have 200 comments already?!) and it was 90% just blue ticks. The same kind of momfluencers as OP with blue ticks just commenting hearts and you go girl and other nothings, almost 200 of them. And since then before blocking Sharon or Brie, I check a few of their comment sections to find mostly only their fellow internet mommies commenting (unless if it's a ragebait of course).

And now I understand! They are now imbreed, just like AI art lol. Of course lot of avarage people are still following them, but they are mostly maintaining each other in terms of engagement, which is not hard considering that there is apparently thousands of them. I hope this means that this pyramid scheme will crash soon, but it's just so ridiculous how they are basically creatinf fake content to the people who are also creating fake content to them lol.

[djhamaradio]

I do not have a brand because I am not a corporation.

I lost my job recently and had to log back into my LinkedIn account. The whole thing felt forced and weird because I never use the app and I never post anything and suddenly I posted an alert showing I was open for work. The whole process felt weird because everyone in my network seemed to be confused because everyone on there is an ace at networking and using their personal brands to show people what they have going on in their work lives and I felt like a faker. Same way I feel when I am told I am not effectively branding my radio show and my escapades in the record digging world to become a vinyl influencer (not sure if that exists). The whole thing has me depressed because I get the feeling my inactivity is not helping with my job prospects. And no matter what advice I read on Forbes or whatever blog about personal marketing I’m never going to be good at it. I lack the brand consistency or whatever it’s called because ultimately I am not that committed to this world of personal branding. The article above from the wonderful folks at Vox reminds me that this is one of the legacies of late market capitalism everyone is merely a sellout but we don’t have interests or passions anymore everything we do or say has to be leveraged for likes and followers. The thing I find most intriguing about this world is the pervasisveness of hucksterism, and just pure fakery. I find people employing awful vague corporte phrases like maximizing productivity to describe their day to day lives.I find people posting shit about how one can leverage their brand to build a following that will lead them to make a living off social media. it is all disgusting but more than anything speaks to just how much consumerism, and capitlism in general has infected every sacred facet of human life. We have all become brands, and as brands your ultimate goal is to sell, sell and sell. Sell agressively, sell even if it means lying and sell with your consumer in mind. I look at myself I truly joined social media to connect with friends, at some point I left Facebook because my conservative family had joined and thewas now on they had an issue with my Halloween costume (Me dressed as a member of De La Soul and my girlfriend at the time in. slutty Nun costume), so I deleted the account and stuck with IG. On IG aI liked sharing music banter, odd ball humour and rap references with my small cast of friends who get it, and I use it to let people know when my radio show is on. My show is decently popular and I dont make a living doing it, I do DJ gigs on the side and I make decent guap doing it but would absolutely never do that for a living. The DJ gig funds the record collecting, and the radio show is a creative outlet that is all it is. I dont give a shit about branding, even though in a sense I am acting like a brand but I am not selling you anything. I put myself out there simply to say hey check out what I am doing and let me know if you fuck with it other than that no biggie. I aint out here saying if you listen to my radioshow your dick will grow bigger, all the chicks will like you and I am offering somekind of solution to one of lifes ills. My purpose is simply to say hey dont know what you doing but tune into my non-commercial uninterrupted absolutley amteurish radio show where you get to hear me play funk, soul, jazz and african music, for its on sake and not to sell but plugs or lawn mowers. The branding shit is particularly insidious because it makes us forget that there was a time when people congregated because they shared deep interests outside of the capitalist objective, think about stamp collectors, book clubs, bowling leagues and in my case a group of guys who drive around the midwest frequenting record stores spending huge amounts of hours scouring dollar record bins for prized records (This is also a dying art but I digress). I think at the heart of it social media has democratized aspects of the creative world. I just want to live in a world where I am not a brand.

[commanderpelia]

I hate trend cycles so much because it makes people think that they have to wait until something is popular to be allowed to wear it. I saw a girl on instagram last night say “I’m so glad red is back” like????? What do you mean “red is back” it’s the fucking color red it’s like THE color???? Most other colors can’t exist without it!! Do you hear yourself? Why do you think you have to wait until a bunch of girls in New York wear red shoes in their tiktoks for you to be able to say you like wearing red? Shut UP!!

[preciousdee]

A Life Outside of Social Media: aka Reality

In case you haven’t been able to put 2 and 2 together, we are in the late stages of capitalism. We’re at the point where even “reality” is being packaged, marketed and sold. The over saturation of “a day in the life of”, “GRWM”, and “buy my ebook online to see how I became a 6 figure entrepreneur on my own”, photoshoots outside of fancy restaurants, selfies in designer is distorting the reality of many. Social media is no longer just a carefree escape from reality like it used to be. It’s turned into this big market place, and everybody is clamoring to sell themselves and achieve stardom overnight. So much to the point where reality is no longer necessarily important, but the maintenance of the image/ persona is.

Now I’m not saying taking pictures and posting them is bad, recording The New Years countdown to post on your Instagram story doesn’t make you satan. People like to say they record not for social media, but for memories. Have any of you all looked back at the New Years countdown video you recorded yet, honestly? The truth of the matter is when you’re focusing on getting a perfect Instagram shot, or TikTok moment you’re cheating yourself out of that moment. You’re not living in reality, you’re living in social media. You’re not living your life for you, you’re living it for social media. The most memorable moments are not the picture you managed to capture but usually the sincere, spontaneous moments that now camera was around to capture because you were busying immersing yourself in your present.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with documenting and taking photos to keep (and post if you’d like). The problem is the culture capitalism has bred. Capitalism fosters overproduction as well as overconsumption. Everybody wants to be somebody (some with talent some with absolutely none). Everybody is selling something. People feel “fame” is the only way out. You have people overindulging in this pseudo reality on the internet. Millions of everyday working people are constantly having rare, virtually unattainable lifestyles because marketed to them under the guise that they too can achieve this. The working class buying into this gimmick is what keeps the system going. You have people who are pretending that they already have that lifestyle, usually by partaking in overconsumption and living above their means. Then you have the few people who usually do have it like that, who are far to busy enjoying their “luck” and fruits of their labor to devote their life to posting their life on social media, or celebrities where they don’t have to waste their time documenting every moment of their lives, people get paid to do that for them. I hope people realize soon that fame and fortune is not the way out. The only true way out is holding these politicians to the fire and death to capitalism.

Here’s an excerpt of an article I read that stuck with me:

You can read the full article here

[ghostsandgod]

Influencers....

[jadablaccbabyyy]

Heyy guys ! I need help spreading my music, if yall can give my music a listen.

LAE LIFE ON ALL PLATFORMS

I HAVE MORE MUSIC

[presidentdubstep]

would anyone want a non-influencer perspective on seasonal work? Bc I genuinely am worried about how many people are getting into this industry/lifestyle because of pretty Instagram pics or TikToks whatever. And yeah I’m gonna be a hater whenever someone tells me that’s why they got into it, because my experience with those people is simply THAT bad. Anyway. May post more about my time working and living in the parks from a normal perspective.