End of the Influencer Era

Influencers never influence influencers.

We are fast approaching the end of the “Influencer Era” where pretty know-nothings and ugly paid shills are now facing the end of their financial updraft. The days of product over prescience are over. We are through with these unknowable experts opining on their latest fire sale in the social media shop.

The thing that wizened us up against these “taste experts” is precisely what birthed them. We used to live in an Era where gatekeeping mattered in that there was at least someone, or some entity, that decided who and what was worth sharing with the world. Sure there were downfalls, and favorites-playing, but at least there was the semblance of some kind of higher arcing idea of quality content.

With the rise of the influencers over the last decade or so, gatekeeping died. While, in theory, that might be revelatory — hey, everyone can now be a writer!, or a broadcaster!, or a self-decided expert! — the very opposite of that is what happened and here’s the why, and the how…

Using social media, overnight, everyone was an expert on everything. Every voice was equal. Every experience was no longer shared. Anyone willing to push the envelope of “fame” and “attractiveness” could overcome the new gatekeeping — in that there was no longer a gate, let alone anyone keeping it. A free-for-all is not a good way to learn something new.

And, so here we are, with a world full of expert influencers ready to influence — nobody — because there’s no bodies left to influence!

Influencers never influence another influencer! That’s the real “cancer culture!”

The echoing canyon of expert voice against expert voice nullifies all voices shouting for attention. Nobody is anything and everyone is now somebody and that creates a cyclical silo of lonesomeness and loss of identity. In a castle filled with Kings, nobody rules; everyone is sentenced to be beheaded.

Now, if the influencers had their way, they’d now quickly want a return to gatekeeping access to products and social media and shared opinion to lock in their status. They don’t see equality in their influencing, they only see endless competition, and the only way for us to rise above their din is to become quieter and to cultivate meaningful relationships with the others of us who have no interest in being influenced; or they, the influencers, will just get louder and more cruel in order to gather more negative attention.

There was a time when an influencer could sell a product, create a meme, or even help people. Now those moments are few and fading fast because we have become smarter — in no small part because our influencers now invade every niche of our lives, they are now our bosses, our politicians, our neighbors and our extended families.

A world without influencers is a return to a place where there was meaning in the unique and the sustainable — but when everyone is shouting “look at me!” and “I’m smarter than everyone else!” — it all becomes the same, boring drivel, that let to the first Era of the Influencer.

Let’s hope we don’t have a second.

There is a value in a return to thought-about hard science, curious self-investigation, and an independent want for a quieter world in which to contemplate our own private role in the always expanding possibilities of tomorrow — without the burden of being told what to buy, how to think, and why we must remain inert to give others power.