The NYT Op-Ed I Just Took A Kill Fee For.

Bloody Hell

The New York Times commissioned me to write an Op-Ed about influencers.

I really tried to get behind it.

After numerous rewrites over several months, they just bowled me a kill fee.

Presently, while most people you know have been going perilously broke since 2007, there are plucky teens who have been dancing on Tik-Tok since 6th grade, who could buy and sell your entire family like a bag of sour gummy worms.

These spangled internet whelps are now establishing beachheads in fashion, or something.  By “or something,” I mean they are selling a truly staggering amount of clothing, and by “clothing,” I mean mostly T-shirts with their names on them, otherwise known as “merch.”  Influencer marketing was estimated to be worth $13.8 billion by the end of 2021, according to InfluencerMarketingHub.com — In 2022, it is expected to reach $16.4 billion. 

In September, Forbes even created a whole new best-of list to further adulate the influencers– and their outsized spending power. Branding has consumed everything that used to be human life.  Your personal online presence is the avatar of your platonic brand of self, which doesn’t actually exist.  We are all used car salesmen, and the cars are us.  Influencers just have better lighting, makeup and production teams, all day long, all the time. But there’s also sleazy sides to this grotesquerie – consider Kim Kardashian’s brush with the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the tune of $1.26 million, the amount she failed to disclose she was receiving for shiling for crypto currency and failing to disclose that it was a paid advertisement. 

Influencers sell themselves, but I personally don’t think they know what ‘selves’ they’re selling. I don’t believe these people have had enough off-camera time to know who they really are, especially when they’re not familiar enough with themselves to know the difference between public and private.

One didn’t have to dance like a trained monkey on TikTok to get ahead in the real world, before. 

As a Gen Xer, I cannot be tortured enough to care about these bland, apolitical, self-commercialized, professional personalities and, as far as I can tell, neither can most of my peers. When my crowd was coming of age, we called this sort of thing “selling out. 

We identified with Naomi Klein, who back in 1999 wrote No Logo, the book with which you waged an intellectual war against identifying with any kind of branding. Branding (especially yourself, God forbid) was anathema to Ms. Klein and to us, too. 

Oh how these interesting times have changed for the worse.

 For the most part, influencer activities don’t stand for or represent things that have any actual substance or meaning.  They smile guilelessly in pumpkin patches.  They share sunlit wine on beaches.  Their mythologies are all related to vitamins and skin care regimes, and as edgeless as an egg. Ultimately, they’re painfully, wrist-slashingly boring, and a little frightening, like zombies. 

 Gen X’ers were raised on movies like “Trading Places” that subscribed to the hoary old chestnut that “money wasn’t everything.” We derided Boomers who sacrificed their hippy values to become yuppies.  Now, influencers represent the notion that money actually is everything, and the main way people seem to be getting it now is by becoming full-time tapdancing billboards for the products they’re flogging. 

And yet it’s impossible to ignore: top influencers today are masters of harnessing the 7-second attention span. Take Charli D’Amelio, an 18-year-old former dancer originally from Connecticut who talks about popping her pimples on YouTube, and was the first person to get 100 million followers on TikTok. She has parlayed this attention into, among many other things, a book, a podcast, a makeup line, a mattress, an endorsement deal with Invisalign, a signature drink at Dunkin’ Donuts, a TV show on Hulu, and a winning stint on Dancing with the Stars. Forbes estimates that Charli took in $17.5 million last year, and her sister, Dixie, another $10 million. The entire D’Amelio family has made influencing their business. (And God knows what kind of extensive therapy the kids are going to need, later.)

To be sure, aspirational marketing has been around since the dawn of commerce: the manufactured desire for the thing that one can’t presently afford, but the purchase of which would enhance “self-concept.”  It’s what sells destination weddings, Louis Vuitton bags, breast implants and used Lamborghinis.  Internet creators sell intimacy – an invitation into their gilded paradise, and the delusion that you, by buying the branded hoodie, can be a part of their pool party.  

But what is this influence that influencers are peddling after all, if not the idea that your entire life should be a full-time job?  That even your down time needs to be fluffed, tweezed and monetized?  That you are a corporation, and that you too should be a sharklike apex predator to survive in this new economic climate?  That work, ideally, should never stop? 

The whole talent of influence appears to be the capacity to withstand the exposure and monetization of their entire lifestyles, from pajamas to skateboards to cars to mates - every choice, every privacy invaded. In some ways, it's as oppressive and daunting as living in the movie version of 1984. Your self, your beautiful, complex, hard-to-know self — branded and constantly observed.

In my less-than- scientific polling of friends and acquaintances, Generation X is decidedly sour on the “influencer” phenomenon – actually, we hate these people irrationally. Who knew that while wasting time learning engineering or medical science or other academic or artistic pursuits, we should have been putting wasps all over our faces, forcing our cats into neckties, or doing the Spanish hustle with our other cellmates.

To those of us who grew up in an age before the absurd legal fiction of Corporate Personhood, influencers look like they personally embody brands that are insatiable in their will to market dominance.  We don’t see influencers as quite human, and in turn, influencers don’t really bother themselves beyond Gen Z. 

 I don’t buy the whole influencer thing, or the products that they have turned themselves into.  I don’t think products or corporations are people, nor do I believe they have souls.  I am suspect of people who emulate corporations; people who make tens of millions of dollars on T-shirts and backpacks and coffee mugs while the rest of us toil in ignominy for chump change, all because we couldn’t flap our buttocks on Tik-Tok, or figure out how to drop a brick on our testicles with sufficient panache. 

I  miss the the pre-digital world, where people actually did stuff and got famous because they were talented.  The whole talent of influence appears to be the capacity to withstand the exposure and monetization of their entire lifestyles, from pajamas to skateboards to cars to mates - every choice, every privacy invaded.  

Live it up while you can, influencer kids.  Someday, you too will hit 40, and you will look back at your own internet dominance and wonder: who the hell was I? And where the hell is all my money? 

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Artwork: Adrian 10 x 8 in. oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2020