"Celebrity Thinkers": internet's new icons

We will emerge from this global quarantine to see new icons, influencers and entrepreneurs within virtual worlds. They will come to prominence at a time when people question the fundamental usefulness of traditional institutions, protocols, and the social contract.

We spent the last 15 years working for 👍 likes, ❤️ hearts, 🔁 retweets, and follows, anything for the clout. Insta filters, Twitter follow bots, and a meme worth dancing to on TikTok made the individual go viral. With virality, "influencers" were born and the Information Superhighway added a fast lane. In this fast lane, we created a world where p... See more

Who will we even consider to be creators? I see two trends having an impact here. First, the line between mainstream and digital talent will fade away: not so much through creators ‘breaking through’ into the mainstream (a narrative that already feels out-of-date), as through the opposite - talent that has (or would have) found an audience through ... See more

Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work.

“Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend con... See more