What exactly is the deal with Influencers?
What exactly is the deal with Influencers?
I am curious as to how capitalism either exacerbated or created a group/subculture of some of the most insufferable and obnoxious people known to man.
These are result of fame and money that is promoted in capitalism to be the most important thing in life(due to the capitalist to feel like important and worthy in their mind).
The influencers of today are result of this culture being on the current algorithm driven capitalist social media that promote them as they are the perfect people that cater to normal people for all there attention with most abnoxius ways for the fame and chance to make money. This behaviour is promoted by the social media and it's the norm for being a influencer, for people to being the new influencer they redo it and more braindead as to cater to those influencer audience. All this being promoted as brainded content by social media for our attention and money.
This is natural for these influencer as capitalist social media gives fame and money while it takes away your humanity.
My take is it is basically advertising, and for the most part they probably dont make much money, they just have access to some things. Tik Tok for example will get more traffic, which advertisers like, brands will like people seeing their products in use. When theyre done with they get tossed aside.
Theres a cool film called The Joneses from before influencers were a thing.
Economically they are rent seeking. You pay a subscription to them for further access to their brand. They also fill the market niche created by alienation, serving a social and economic function here. They qualify as petit bourgeoisie I think.
They are absolutely petty bourg and many hire writers, editors, videographers, marketers, managers in either semi-prole waged positions or as inter-bourg contract services. Many are outright capitalist to Imperialist when enlisting proletarian, colonized, or neo-Colonial labor to produce their merchandising.
None of them are proletarian (unless they primarily support themselves with wage labor for a capitalist).
I think a lot of them are just in a position to have the imaginary class position of being petit boug in the same way a guy with a retirement package and a mortgage has the option of convincing himself the stock market and real estate's ability to Maintain Value are the most important things in the world.
The petty bourgs, semi-proletarians and labor aristocracy (so-called middle classes) in the core are crowdfunding a petty bourg strata of micro-celebrities with their Imperialism bucks