The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media

I’ve been thinking about the enduring, perhaps increasing currency of personal recommendations (practically artisanal craft now if you think about it!) as well as the value of connoisseurship and curation in a culture where unthinking automation has left us feeling drowned in a deluge of content.

I suspect that’s the core appeal of all the influenc... See more

As Austin Robey and Severin Matusek put it in their report,

“After the Creator Economy”: “We want work to be financially valued without compromising our integrity. We want to make meaningful work that we're proud of, not please an algorithm. We want to share work in ways that feel right to us, not compete for attention on a feed. We want to feel see

... See more

When incentives are tethered to status and gaming attention as the mechanism for building an audience, we have a serious fucking problem.

We’re living in a sea of low-quality influencer content, which I believe offers an opportunity to create something better — something that emphasizes the signal over the noise, that’s slower, calmer, and personal.

As influencers try to monetize, they are bringing all the old off-line tools to make it happen. Selling everything from makeup and swag to exclusive "how-to" guides, the playbooks all rhyme. But is slapping your name on a t-shirt in your Shopify website, selling new age self-help courses, and slinging sponsored posts all we really got?