"we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all"
There's a local "influencer" in this shitty town that runs a food blog and posts about sneakers. He's also a massive chud and posts shit like "jacob blake deserved it because he had a knife". He's an awkward, goofy motherfucker in real life. I've tried to make conversation with him whenever he'd come in when I used to work the register at local coffee places but there was just nothing there. People really be out here manufacturing entire personas on social media and then you meet them and they're like the human equivalent of ordering something from wish dot com
The inner life of most people is a cold, barren desert. What a grim thought
It's one of the most pure manifestations of late capitalist weirdness. Instead of labor for the purpose of consumption you get people whose labor IS consumption and the rest of us unhappy proles relate to this not only as advertising of the things the influencer consumes but also vicarious enjoyment of their consumption. Can't wait to see how abstract this gets in my lifetime.
huh, never heard of this thought experiment, interesting:
First described by Bostrom (2003), a paperclip maximizer is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) whose goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in its collection. If it has been constructed with a roughly human level of general intelligence, the AGI might collect paperclips, earn money to buy paperclips, or begin to manufacture paperclips.
Most importantly, however, it would undergo an intelligence explosion: It would work to improve its own intelligence, where "intelligence" is understood in the sense of optimization power, the ability to maximize a reward/utility function—in this case, the number of paperclips. The AGI would improve its intelligence, not because it values more intelligence in its own right, but because more intelligence would help it achieve its goal of accumulating paperclips. Having increased its intelligence, it would produce more paperclips, and also use its enhanced abilities to further self-improve. Continuing this process, it would undergo an intelligence explosion and reach far-above-human levels.
It would innovate better and better techniques to maximize the number of paperclips. At some point, it might transform "first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities".
- https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
(And it need not be said, the implications are pretty clear when you replace "paperclips" with "capital")
The implications really need to be said more often - people who've heard of paperclip maximizers lean libertarian. And it's one of those threads you can pull on that turns them into market socialists lol.
Yeah, I think if anything, libertarians are more easily radicalized then libs, there's already a large overlap with anarchism, and you just need to convince them that rational behavior within capitalism is often destructive to the greater whole of society.
Remember this? https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/youtube-myka-james-stauffer-huxley-adoption.html
Un-Adopted: YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer shared every step of their parenting journey. Except the last.
Myka began framing the couple’s decision as a step they were being called to take, saying she was “so excited to open our hearts and see what the Good Lord has in store for us” — a sentiment frequently echoed by the often white and Christian community of adoption influencers. Adoption, Myka said, was “something that we really want to be part of our story.” After speaking with adoption agencies, they decided to focus their search on China.
later she did a Will Menaker:
An online petition with more than 154,000 supporters demanded that Myka’s monetized videos with Huxley be removed from YouTube. Followers appeared angry not only on behalf of Huxley but also because Myka had committed the ultimate influencer sin: ghosting on those who’d become invested in her story right when the plot twisted.
After their announcement, Myka changed her social-media profiles to reflect that she is the mother of four kids, not five, and then deleted content featuring Huxley.
There’s a part in the article taking about “family vloggers” in general , who title videos shit like “shopping for her first bra!”/“my first shave!” featuring their preteen daughters and that’s just so fucking grotesque. These kids are gonna need so much therapy when they grow up.
Edit: Here’s the quote:
In marketing their videos, the Riches were perhaps simply chasing the same formula other family vloggers were exploiting. Ruby and Kevin Franke, considered in the top tier of family vloggers with 2.44 million subscribers to their channel, 8 Passengers, earned almost 2 million views on a video titled “My First Shave,” which includes an image of their tween daughter on the edge of a bathtub with shaving cream on her bare legs; a video of their son named “Officially Hit PUBERTY,” with a description advertising “voice cracking and sprouting,” has almost 3 million views. (According to YouTube, the videos do not violate the company’s community guidelines.)
Fuck.
I really wonder if she would have tried to adopt a child if she wasn't an Influencer.
I hope to whatever is out there that if Youtube and vlogging wasn't involved, things would have turned out the same.
Advertising but we make it someone's whole personality so it's New and Different this time
It fucking kills me that is what so many people aspire to.
Take away work as we know it and humanity's creativity will flourish.
As it is know it's a constant appeal to nostalgia, combined with capitalism's obliteration of the masses desire to do anything other than buffer the grindstone slowly flattening them out of existance.
"Hey, it's your boy Karl Marx, just want to show you guys this new flat tummy tea I got"
OP is kinda doing a pop-culture liberalism and letting nazi's define words for him.
Karl Marx and Alex Jones had the same jobs just different backers. Influencing on behalf of capital makes it evil, influencing on behalf of workers is righteous. OP confused the rightwing, corporate content that influencer-shills post with the baseline concept of "being an influencer".
Pop culture is the CIA. You don't have to pick the options twitter shows you.
except your framework ignores the fact that bernie sanders is an influencer. and noname is an influencer. there are leftist and anti-capitalist influencers and they are having a net positive effect. Leftists and anti-capitalists NOT joining them is the reason why bot armies can push rightwing/corporate agendas as easily as they do. You want Joe Rogan to be something different than Socrates and maybe he's not. You wanting influencer to have moral implications instead of strategic implications is why the left has no meaningful presence on the internet. We've talked ourselves out of trying.
Socrates, Shakespeare, Seinfeld. They're all just pop culture influencers that we give different levels of deference to based on elapsed-time. But Marx, Carlin and Sanders were also influencers. The idea of influencing isn't the problem. The agenda they're serving is the problem. Influencing on behalf of workers is community organizing, doing it on behalf of wealthy landowners is not. The tactic and methods are the same the only difference is who you're trying to help.
What if you were just hired by Big Communism to be our head of social media? What would you do? Okay, now go do that. Multiple times a day, every day, for the rest of your life. This is the rest of our lives. Good luck!
I dont understand how you can say "this word only means the bad version of this thing and we don't have a word for the good version". A person who influences others on social media is an influencer. Things aren't binary. Good luck.
Aren't influencers just independent entertainers for the era of social media or is there something I'm missing within your analysis.
I'd rather people be interested in random people on tik tok than the astroturfing that was done to make the Kardashians famous.
Influencers are just new-media. They're part of the new digital printing press.
The capitalists hold the keys to the best and widest reaching influence as always, but there are some good ones out there. Yes, it panders to reach audiences, those behind every printing press did also. That's the media for you.
This is why ChapoChat is critically important. The biggest and most powerful of the new digital printing presses are social-media. Building our own throws a real wrench into their power.
They are selling parasocial relations that can be very unhealthy but can also be fine If they genuinely help people and are responsible.
I wouldn't right off all of them as bad.
It's all part of the hustle. What are people supposed to do, work?
