What is Influencer Creep really doing to us?
The Internet isn't just stagnating, it's modified our behavior and identity.
Hey You,
This is a random Op-ed on digital and the culture of the internet.
I recently came across this startling post called Influencer Creep. I think I truly felt this when some of us grew up on a phase on Instagram, where we were gamified by Facebook to sell a persona divorced from our real and authentic self. Back then they didn’t call it a personal brand, it was just part of the game. We were actively conditioned to imitate a very toxic routine, and many young women (mostly females) killed themselves because of it.
THE RIDCIULOUS PERFORMANCE OF EVERYTHING
Depict our lives as somehow better or more awesome than they really were. Now if I had been a teenage girl, this content would have been devastating for me, telling me that to get attention I would have to be beautiful or deemed as having fun, or whatever the equivalent was to my peer group and wider cohort. Whether in travel, exercise or how we eat, the ridiculous performance of everything meant influencer marketing had penetrated our soul.
THE PROBLEM OF POSITIVITY BIAS
Today this positivity bias lure still exists on TikTok or LinkedIn where it’s almost taboo to be negative. “Feel good” content and hyping something up seems to be what the algo wants us to do. People want to be inspired, they tell us!
In the essay by Sophie Bishop of Real Life magazine, talks about self-documenting and self-branding are becoming basic to all forms of work. While I’m not so sure that’s actually true, for a young person growing up on all of these platforms, it certainly could feel like that. Real Life is about all this stuff, and I had never come across it before.
The Lure of 1 million followers
Influencer creep is also young people growing up on YouTube, wanting to make it big! The Creator economy has a toxic element of imitation and being addicted to KPIs we are told are important, like followers.
This search for positive feedback and reinforcement, is creepy beyond belief to me. DO WHAT EXCITES? The Dopamine YouTube generation.
Looks like Influencer creep gets to the best in us. Warping our dopamine pathways beyond recognition. The lust for fame or whatever you want to call it, has it’s signature in our psychology (that has been hacked).
Dopamine Internet Junkies
Influencer creep to me is that disassociation between the fantasy world of the internet (which is not actually real), and who we really are. But what happens when BigTech and Silicon Valley have molded influencer creep into the psyches of young people, where the internet for them IS real?
When Meta wants to sell outfits for avatars in an app in a hypothetical VR Metaverse that is maybe decades in the future, I think it’s super cringe.
Fakeness for Likes
Influencer creep is the fakeness, pressure to conform and glorification of sentiment over idea, of image over substance and of clickbait Op-eds over well researched articles packed with information that’s journalistic content. Literally everywhere I look, I see influencer creep, even in how companies, brands and startups depict themselves. The fake ideology, the PR games, I think it’s super cringe.
No Consent
Just as there are Ads everywhere embedded in everything, our behavior online is no longer authentic or genuine. Influencer creep isn’t just the pressure to brand ourselves or cultivate our personal brand, it’s that our behavior has been somehow alterted, somehow modified, - without our content. We do it anyway!
Years later in the twilight of the hype of the Creator Economy, before the second major crypto winter, PR and the personal brand seems to be all that is left in the ugly husk and ghost towns of our once brave and fresh social media Kingdoms. It’s a brutal internet to grow up in.
Take writing for instance. Listicles that were outdated on Medium to get attention in articles in 2016, now in 2022 parade in 8 of 10 of the LinkedIn posts on my feed. We barely even read the Newsletters we have so carefully crafted for each other.
My attention has been rudely shortened, but I am to blame? I did not give my consent. But it happened anyway. I blame, yes, influencer creep.
The Eternal Time Sink
Influencer creep is an attention economy that sucks you dry, leaving you with less energy and forever craving more stimulation, more dopamine hits, more eye-candy, like a bad video game you know isn’t really good for you.
It’s the doom scrolling, the app addiction, the usage of the “same fucking apps”, literally like three or four apps, that is soul-numbing and yet causes you insomnia and mental health issues you hadn’t even realized you had.
It isn’t just that our image matters or that we must be our own PR channel 24/7, it’s that the internet became so toxic it stupendously became part of our identity. When you are in the Matrix, and a lot of your real life spends its time there, it’s only normal that we would end up considering part of that “real”.
What a gigantic waste of youth. Influencer creep is an ache on the inside, that you can’t just seem to shake.
Individualism on Reboot
It’s gotten to the point where how GenZ socialize, date and fuck is pretty differently frankly, than even Millennials did. All due to some frankly rather robust digital behavior modification.
Many of the cohort of GenZ or Alpha, won’t end up having families or living with significant others. That’s influencer creep at a whole different level. It starts to not only impact social unrest or politics (like foreign states hacking Facebook and Twitter), it starts to cause actual ripple effects of a demographic nature that could have consequences on the consumer economy.
Young professional women who have graduated from influencer creep, more often than not will prioritize their career development over marriage, children and even developing hobbies. Their time on mobile per day? You don’t want to ask. The 90s born women of China, they are the most important trend-setting consumers in the world.
What do they all have in common? Digital indoctrination, growing up on mobile. The internet is more real to them than tradition or even what collectivism once was.
Social Commerce like it’s 1984
Influencer Creep isn’t just about the live-streaming for E-commerce sales that dominates China and increasingly other parts of South-East Asia, it’s also about a paradigm of surveillance capitalism where you feel you are always watched and every behavior online is actually tabulated against you.
You behave online as if you were being watched, which changes your authentic behavior. You find yourself scripting yourself, always aware that your future employer or spouse could be watching.
Hyping Something, in the Gutter
Some of us have been trained by algorithms to live as a bot. We didn’t decide to be a bot, but we were gamified to want to be influencers. And for some of us, it did go horribly wrong.
Influencer Creep is also about a gig-economy of low paid Creators (many wanna-be influencers never make it) that are exploited and who can barely monetize while living in poverty, Perpetua tally burnt-out and with otherwise limited earning potential.
Chasing algorithms for few to no rewards became a cult. In that sect of the attention economy, for every 1 YouTube channel that makes it, or 1 big Instagram account or 1 huge TikTok influencer, there’s 1000s (maybe millions) of those who did not.
Hearing about Medium publications dying, or watching Twitter influencers founding Substacks, there’s a certain fatigue from living day to day infected with Influencer creep and in perhaps even the burden of living in real poverty.
Like a crypto scam of pyramid schemes, the winners and the losers in Influencer creep also feel arbitrary and based on luck as much as on skill or credibility. The platform game of thrones feels like an always losing affair, as communities invariably break down and digital trends change. If you could carry around your personal brand like an Email list, well that wouldn’t have been such a problem.
But who are we kidding, churn is real on Email lists too. There’s no permanence in the game of Influencer Creep.
We are all victims in a system of follower envy and confirmation bias. All living with more cognitive distortion due to the manipulative modification of our behavior at scale.
No, this is bigger than Sophie was saying, I am afraid. This isn’t an academic exercise.
The job of influencer, in other words, involves learning how to constantly accommodate oneself to the means of establishing and maintaining visibility. - Sophie Bishop in Influencer Creep.
Influencer Creep is way more pervasive than some pursuit of the ownership economy or people attracted to digital media or building something online.
It’s not a hobby when it’s not a choice.
How apps create reinforcement and dopamine loops is by design.
Post more, respond more, share more. And as with mission creep, there is no apparent way out.
When the platforms owns you, what and who are you working for?
If the internet keeps molding us, what will we become?
If we don’t value our time or attention and independence from digital fiercely, who will stand up for our rights?
Living life when you are the Product
Not Apple, Not Microsoft, Not Meta, Not Amazon, not any business that seeks to exploit us for profit.
Influencer Creep is that business model when YOU are the product.
You! That’s why I called you out in the first place.
Thanks for reading!
POSTSCRIPT
I am part of an insecure labor force, don’t pretend you know what it means to take risks. Those of us who are head deep in the ownership economy, freelancers, fringe creators, forgotten writers, fiction visionaries, and artists without a hope in hell of monetization - well, every second of our lives is a kind of influencer creep. Some of us don’t play the game because we are so far outside the boundaries of even today’s conception of the Creator Economy.
If I jump into your ecosystem, headfirst, don’t forget what I have sacrificed.
Influencer creep can be felt most keenly in sectors that operate on freelance and insecure labor, in which individuals take on a slate of unremunerated promotional work in lieu of job security. - Real Life Mag
Influencer Creep is also I have discovered, the realization that you have entered a gig-economy model whereby you are a digital worker pressed in the canvas of under-employment. Without perhaps the academic requirements of “creating your own job”. You sneak past your own conceptions of the job description (that you believed you had applied for) and peel across new modes of self-expression and creation.
WALKING OFF A CLIFF INTO THE NIGHT
Influencer creep is what happens when that entrepreneurial negotiation of structural risk plays out through social media platforms and their demands for visual stimuli, “authenticity,” and engagement. Boundaries between personal expression and entrepreneurship, between socializing and commerce, are eroded while the routine, mundane, and the everyday are painstakingly aestheticized. Workers must play to audiences, clients, bosses and platforms all at the same time, with no guarantee that any of it will pay off. - Real Life Mag
Entrepnreural risk
Identification with projection
Aestheticized persona
Playing to audiences, sucking up to platforms
Influencer creep has a particular impact on artists, who in some respects resemble influencers: They both try to make a living by translating their aesthetic sensibility for audiences in distinctive or ingenious or familiar ways. - Real Life Mag
Sneaky Art, I do want to buy you a cup of coffee! I’m just so fucking broke right now bro. Watching my fellow Substack writers on TikTok reminds me of the stark demands of Influencer Creep.
Substack hunting for their next big Fish is also Influencer creep.
The WILL TO SELF COMMERCIALIZE
But if influencers are often derided for seeming to sell themselves out and reinforce commercial values, artists tend to be idealized for seeming to drift above commercial concerns and pursue higher forms of expression for their own sake. Real Life Mag
In the ownership economy, there’s no high road. We’re encouraged to sell out in fact. Because that too makes the platform more money. The NFT faeries are actually waiting.
So as far as Influencer Creep goes, what Harry Potter pod do you belong to.
House Gryffindor: Bravery.
House Ravenclaw: Intelligence.
House Hufflepuff: Empathy.
House Slytherin: Ambition.
This isn’t real life, but influencer creep is becoming a big deal online.
Just happened upon this and found it really interesting. Thanks for your time in writing this. I can't help but link some of the ideas with my perceptions of current events. We are being manipulated in so many ways. I do believe that keeping a sense of perspective is vital with all this tech gaming and psychology. Also staying in touch with nature is a great leveller. Thanks again!