The Influencer Problem

We love them, hate them, want to be them.

Nov 04, 2025

Let’s begin where the algorithm can’t assess (yet): inside the body.

The ping of the new reel, the little jolt of envy at a shot from a Maldives drone, the relief when your favourite creator says what you were too timid to acknowledge, the disgust when an #ad slides in but you couldn’t tell it was an ad at first.

This is what we’re actually going through, and we need to be honest about it before we move on to anything else.

If you’ve ever hate-watched a GRWM to the final scenes, rolled your eyes during a brand trip, and then sent the itinerary to a friend and said, “manifesting this life lol,” you know the contradiction. We grew up in institutions that told us what to respect. All of a sudden, someone with ring light and vocal fry is telling us what it is we should give a shit about, and worse, we care.

That’s destabilizing.

We mistake the destabilization for moral clarity: “This is trash, this is unserious, this is ruining the internet.”

But if it were all trash, why couldn’t we turn away?

Here’s my diagnosis for this feeling: we’re negotiating with our image of self in public.

Influencers are mirrors. They are mirrors of a public life, and we respond to the thought that the life we live might have been different if it had been staged differently. But the ache under the snark is a counterfactual: If I’d posted a single post in 2017, would I have a book deal and a Birkin by now? That kind of what-if is something our brains really dislike, because there’s no right answer for it.

There is the gender thing, too. For decades we’ve pretended that “taste” is a frivolous soft skill and then rewarded it when a man transforms it into venture, hospitality, or design. A woman converts it into affiliate revenue, and suddenly the room needs a lecture on “real work.” We’re witnessing the public repricing of feminized labor in real time. If we spend enough time on Instagram watching beauty, curation, domestic knowledge, and community become commoditized, our collective brains are going to start short-circuiting. If a haul video can produce what a mid-level manager earns in a given month, then the world is either broken or our old valuation model is.

And yet, compassion. There’s reason so many of us feel protective when men humiliate women creators for sport. Maybe we remember, in our bones, what it cost to be seen and to sell, to keep the camera steady while a million anonymous judges take attendance. We learned that “easy money” is just a fantasy, that behind every 60-second reel is a small cottage industry of pre-production, admin, rejections, late payments and hate management. We know this because many of us ourselves are doing parallel versions of the same work in offices with smaller rewards.

And so we live in the split screen: envy and protection, superiority and dependence, entitlement and anonymity, shame and projection.

Envy x Protection.

The envy is obvious. The protection is interesting.

We recoil from the overconsumption, that fifth tote unboxing, the never-ending beige sofa swaps, and still, we bristle when the dragging turns cruel, because cruelty doesn’t have to do with a bag, but with disciplining a woman’s right to take up space, make money, and be wrong in public.

We can hate the performance and still refuse the ritual humiliation.

Superiority x Dependence.

We believe our “hard-won skills” will outlast the hype cycle. Maybe they will.

But we do save their skincare routines and use their email templates and reiterate their advice in meetings. We pretend that we’re above it all, while actually applying what they instill in us. Because frankly, most of it is useful.

We rely on creators to compress time: try 19 things so we can try one.

There’s a word for that. It’s value.

Entitlement x Anonymity.

The internet conditioned us to believe attention is Monopoly money in an endless, frivolous exchange, not real payment.

So we watch someone’s content and assume they have perfect politics and perfect transparency and essentially are our perfect friend. We get mad when they change or grow, as if they are betraying us.

But attention is not equity. You bought a ticket, not the theater.

Shame x Projection.

This is the ugliest one.

We were taught to outsource our self-story to institutions: college brochures, job ladders, tasteful LinkedIn humility. Now, we outsource it to someone who ships content daily.

“What should I wear? How do I structure my home? What’s a productive morning? What is worthy?” The creator provides the answer, and for a time we get to avoid the restlessness our lack of a self-concept creates in us. When she pivots or fails or sells out, our story shakes.

Rather than updating our own narrative, we project: “She owes me consistency.”

No, we owe ourselves a spine.

Yet underneath all the noise is grief.

Grief for a softer internet. Grief for days when expertise seemed legible and gatekeepers seemed like filters instead of exploiters. Grief for the version of us that didn’t have to perform. It’s easier to cast that grief at a woman with a camera than at the market that atomized our public square into tiny, monetized stages.

But misplaced grief curdles into contempt, and contempt is the worst editor.

So the most annoying truth, from evaluating brands and creators: the feelings are real. And the feelings are not a strategy.

They’re signals. And if envy appears, it’s telling you something about your own ambition. If disgust mounts, maybe your ethics are clashing with your curiosity. If entitlement flares, it’s your boundaries bargaining with your loneliness. If boredom creeps in, it’s your intelligence requesting better inputs. Feelings should be treated as dashboards, not verdicts.

If your body responds to someone like an influencer with a flush resembling “I could do this better,” you have three options, and only one of them is noble.

Dunk and scroll;
Mute and move;
Create your very own little factory of taste and proof.

Only option three alchemises cortisol into craft. You don’t need to be someone who creates to use creator discipline: ship small, measure truthfully, learn in public, update rather than theatricize.

The audience problem is partly an agency problem; we forget that we have any.

But the audience problem is also structural. Platforms are casinos. They lure us to confuse participation with power. “You have a voice,” they purr, while savagely seeking to optimize emotional velocity over thought. That’s why middle opinions die. That’s also why your most favorite nuanced essay gets 2,000 views, and a shameless dupe video gets two million.

The machine doesn’t hate nuance. It simply can’t afford it. Nuance is time-consuming; time is churn, churn is death to a feed that must always seem alive.

So the feelings we’ve inventoried are deliberate engineering.

The product wants you not so far out from the switchboard where you’re most reactive.

That doesn’t absolve us. It clarifies the battlefield.

In order to hold onto your brain, you can’t simply moralize your way out of an attention economy. And you need a chosen diet, a chosen pace and a chosen set of creators who make you smarter instead of louder.

One last honesty before we move on: part of our fury at influencers is that they make visible the two things many of us try to hide. Want and work.

Want, because they say the morally repugnant (to us) part out loud: I want attention, money, status, security, love, proof.

Work, because even the frothiest creator life is repetitive, operational, organised.

We were taught to tuck both behind professionalism. They unfurl both on camera. The dissonance is existential. It asks us whether the life we built can coexist with the life we admire, and if not, what will I change?

Hold that discomfort. Don’t purify it with easy contempt. Let it do its job, which is to make you specific about what you value and what you will no longer consume.

From here, we’ll descend into the machine room. Algorithm math, CPMs, why “sloppification” happens even when smart people are trying hard, and then surface into gender, labor, ethics, and the contracts we keep pretending we didn’t sign.

But if you remember nothing else from this essay, remember this: the influencer problem begins as a feeling problem.

And feelings, named properly, are tools.

The Machine: Algorithm Math, Not Moral Math.

We can argue about taste forever, but the feed isn’t a salon of intellectuals fretting over esoteric definitions. It’s a factory floor. It runs on rules. Not justice, not expertise, not “good for society.” Rules. If you disregard them, you’ll continue to misread a forklift as an instruction program for a philosophy professor, and then act amazed when it refuses to grade your nuance.

Here’s the first rule: platforms don’t reward “good”, they reward signals.

They read for speed, clarity, and consistency the same way a scanner reads barcodes. When your post churns out the right information quickly and consistently, it’s picked up and sent to more people. If it doesn’t, it dies in a dark corner of the warehouse you’ll never see. You can hate that, but you cannot negotiate with it. The forklift makes no concessions to your feelings.

Consider the opening of a video. You and I are trained to call it “hook” but actually it is a binary: Did the viewer’s brain make a question in the first second or not? No question, no latch. The machine keeps moving. “But my video is beautiful.” Great. Was it watchable? Did anyone stay? Completion beats pretty. It’s fair in the narrow sense that machines are fair: they don’t care about why someone watched, just that they did.

That’s why the opinions of the Internet seem sharpened to a spear or sanded into a marshmallow. The middle, a complex paragraph that takes a while to develop trustworthiness, dies on entry. The machine favors edges (fast conflict) or vibes (fast comfort).

It’s not a conspiracy to destroy nuance; it’s a shortcut to oxygen. Oxygen, here, is time. Time is the currency the platform hoards.

If you’ve ever wondered why “sloppification” lives on this is the answer. Cadence is a killer. You are going to prefer the repeatable over the inventive if you need to publish every single day. Templates win. Stock B-roll wins. The same first five seconds wins. You trim the thinking, not because you are stupid, but because the brief, the clock, the comments are tapping their feet impatiently.

Brands don’t help. They email twenty talking points and a 24-hour deadline, and they ask why this sounds like a hostage video. Audiences don’t help either. We say we’re looking for depth, then we click on “10 dupes under ₹999” every goddamn time without fail. The machine spots it, and by next week your explore page is probably just the Home Shopping Network if it’s been captured in somebody’s bedroom.

The creator side also has some machine on the maker’s end, too. The “breezy” account that suddenly “popped” is typically sitting on an assembly line whose layout you can’t see. It’s banked B-roll, a spreadsheet of hooks, saved caption frameworks, an editor who understands how the creator breathes.

The work is repetitive. Operational. Spreadsheeted. If it looks effortless, that’s because someone got a system to make an effort.

If someone wants a creative life that lasts longer than a trend, there’s a lesson in there: romance the craft, mechanise the chores.

The brand math isn’t rosy either. On paper, it resembles a reel, a story set, perhaps some usage rights. In reality, brands are purchasing something far more costly than a 60-second asset: they’re renting distribution trust. Not reach. Trust. Will these people, in particular, treat this particular word from that specific person as “close to me”? If yes, the fee climbs. That’s part of why even a niche finance creator with 150k can charge more per asset than a general lifestyle page with a million. The numbers in the media plan don’t predict conversion. The relationship does.

On the audience side, our behavior writes the commandments of the algorithm. Each like, watch, save, share is a vote. That vote is for snacky, and because you vote for snacky only, snacky wins the election. Depth requires subsidies, if you’re going after depth: time (watch until the end), thought (comment with substance) or money (subscribe to the slow channel, in which thoughtful thoughts are the thing, not speed).

Depth is a bad ad unit and a very good subscription unit.

We continue to refuse to accept that truth because it is a cost to us all.

I don’t say any of this to excuse the mess. The machine industrializes cravings we already had (for speed, certainty, novelty) and then distributes them to us as a lifestyle. That’s gross, because it reduces a human capacity, aka judgment, into inventory.

“Opinion” becomes a thumbnail. “Taste” becomes a SKU. Of course, we recoil. But recoiling is not a plan.

The plan, if you’re a creator, is to publish quickly enough that you still have the space to think. If you’re an audience member (all of us are), the plan is to stop pretending like your clicks don’t dictate policy. The plan if you’re the brand is to purchase point of view, not a face.

And then there’s the small matter of risk. The economics of the platform favor the most straightforward channels of conflict: outrage, dunking, exile. Women pay more for being wrong in public. Men get “brave contrarian” arcs; women get “reckless and unserious.” So creators became risk accountants. So how do you get to say something real without detonating distribution?

The cynical answer is: You don’t.

The smarter answer is: You diversify.

You develop outside the feed (newsletter, website, product) where the conversation is slower and the people in the room have decided to be there. Renting only from the algorithm is like building your house on a conveyor belt, then complaining that it moves.

The polite scams that lurk in the seams should also be discussed. “Gifting” that becomes unpaid ad production. “Insights access” that’s literally whitelisting for three months. “One round of edits” becomes six because the brand has three internal approvers and Legal discovered adjectives. This chips away at what audiences say they love (authenticity), since no one’s able to sound human while threading a legal needle at speed.

The solution is, as far as I know, boring: dated usage, caps on edits, fees for the risk of opinion, a yes-or-no answer as far as being an advertiser’s “business partner.”

Boring saves the soul.

If all this sounds mechanical for an essay about culture, it’s because internet culture is mechanical.

The texture we perceive, the “vibe,” is part of what is at play from the infrastructure. The scroll rate from your thumb. The design of the comment box. That a platform has a greater reward for replies on replies than single emojis; thus posts that provoke dialogue within its audience go further than those that only gather applause. None of these decisions were taken to protect your brain. They were designed to keep the room feeling alive.

When we forget that we begin to attribute moral failure to outcomes, which are mostly product design.

I’m not asking you to worship the machine. I’m asking you to stop expecting it to be a church.

It’s a market that prices attention in real time and distributes it through people who have learned to signal well. If we hope for better results, we cannot just scold the sellers. We must intervene as purchasers (of posts, of products, of narratives) because we can see our purchases. The system is watching us shop.

Hold one sentence as we step into gender and money and the muddy ethics of “authentic” at scale: the feed is not a meritocracy; it’s a signal market.

If you want it to work, tweak the signals you send.

The Gender: Pricing Feminized Labor in Public.

If Section II was the factory tour, this is the HR meeting no one’s ready to attend. Because then, once you realize how the machine moves pallets of attention, you have to ask: Whose pallets? Whose bodies? Whose work is immediately being priced and punished?

Influencing sells feminized labor in a way that the culture can clearly perceive. Women’s labor for many years, often for free, is now marked by rate cards and SOWs. The instant the invoice hit the table, the courtroom opened.

We’re not neutral jurors. We hold a century of scripts about what “good women” do with money and voice and attention. So when a woman gets paid to do the same stuff we used to call “hobby,” we turn it into a moral issue. A softly lit skincare routine is not merely skin care; it is an argument about seriousness. A wardrobe haul isn’t a product category: It’s Exhibit A in a struggle over virtue. At the same time, a man in a McLaren is depicted as a business case study. Same status performance, different stomach.

Why the Hermès Birkin causes an internet meltdown:

It’s not the leather. It’s the anxieties. The Birkin packs six anxieties into one shiny object:

Price transparency. You can Google it. No myth to hide behind.
Gatekeeping theater. Appointments, sales associate “relationships.” We pretend we hate gatekeeping until it flatters us.
Respectability politics. Female consumption is character evidence; male consumption is ambition.
Conversion incentives. Hauls convert; envy sticks; platform boosts the rooms where people fight.
Class slippage. A woman can speak into a phone and purchase what families could not. This disrupts existing hierarchies.
Projection. If she can, why didn’t I? The bag is a reflecting device into our unlived lives.

So we litigate the woman to prevent us from litigating the world.

Feminized labor: now in boxes

Let’s give her what we call the work, cause “she films herself” is a lazy lie.

Taste as synthesis. Knowing what to decide on is knowledge work: sampling, discarding, patterning. (When men do this in VC we refer to it as “deal flow judgment.” When women do this in beauty we call it “vanity.”)
Domestic R&D. Recipes, cleaning hacks, storage optimization, kid logistics. This is operations. Whole startups put this IP to use and raise seed rounds.
Emotional hosting. Keeping comment rooms secure, defusing pile-ons, replies to DMs at 1 a.m. All moderated community labor.
Relational choreography. The dance with brands, legal, usage rights, audience trust, the most difficult to outsource.

Historically, all of this occupied the charitable wing of women’s lives: service, unpaid, required. Influencing pulls it toward Accounts Receivable. The backlash is about pricing.

The respectability tax

Women creators don’t just pay GST. They pay the tax of respectability: a vague surcharge for being loud, visible, and paid.

Disclosure asymmetry. Women are policed for clarity of #ad as if they are filing public IPO docs. Men, in the meantime, slide affiliate links into “gear lists” and are lauded as resourceful.
Opinion asymmetry. A wrong one costs women sponsors, while this very mistake gives men an anti-hero arc.
Consumption asymmetry. Her bag is “tone-deaf.” His watch is “motivational.”
Safety asymmetry. The price of a post includes catcalls, doxxing threats, body policing and family-shaming. Pretending that doesn’t distort content is fantasy.

Respectability tax plays out in the content form too. Notice how many of the largest women creators describe consumption as care (“I tried these for you so you don’t have to”) and success as gratitude (“We did this together”). The feminine performance that is most often rewarded is generous, well-behaved, never threatening the air. We applaud “authenticity,” and then punish any version of this that appears powerful.

India’s specific sting

Layer India’s caste–class–gender stew and the story sharpens. The internet has transported domestic labor, the kind outsourced to women in families and to other women in the informal economy, into IP for public consumption. A tiffin hack turns into a million-view reel. An organization trick for at home is turned into an affiliate storefront. A mehandi-night moodboard turns into a turnkey wedding business. Some of this is an incredible democratic transformation. Some of it is extraction with new packaging.

We like the parts that flatter aspiration (“see, anybody can”) and pretend that the others don’t exist (“who has the means to be public, to venture, to take harassment, to buy the time to build?”)

The wealthy, English-speaking, high-bandwidth women who can shoot in fully lit houses are not “anyone.” They are the tip of a pyramid built on many other women’s labor. That doesn’t mean we’re delegitimizing their work; it places the price at which they may conduct it in context, and our guilt we project into their shopping bags.

The Authenticity Trap

We demand “authenticity,” which often translates to: “Make your private self a public utility I can consume without discomfort.” When a woman’s life is content, we want the mess, but only the cheery kind; the politics, but only the agreeable kind; the success, but only the humbly narrated kind.

She owes us transparency up to the point that it makes us jealous; then she owes us restraint.

Men can transition between modes (slick operator, silent builder, loud contrarian) without redesigning their “essence.” Women have to pick a lane and die in it.

And the algorithm exacerbates the situation: audiences favor legible characters; platforms encourage repeatable arcs. So the woman who wants to grow must now become a brand; the woman who refuses gets branded inconsistent.

Heads you lose the level of distribution, tails you lose nuance.

But what does “inconsistent” actually cost?

Let me give you the real numbers. A lifestyle creator with 300k followers who decides to talk about politics loses, on average, 40% of her brand partnerships within six weeks. Not because she’s bad at politics, but because brands price safety, and consistency is safety. The same creator who stays in her lane - morning routines, Zara hauls, skin care - can charge 15-20% more per post than someone who might occasionally express an opinion.

The “consistency premium” is real. Brands will literally pay more for predictability.

Here’s how the money actually moves when you’re successful but not famous. Take a 50k creator doing four sponsored posts a month at 25k each (this is mid-tier, not superstar money). That’s 100k a month in theory. But watch what happens:

The brand pays 60-90 days after the content goes live. So January’s work gets paid in March or April. Meanwhile, you’re paying your editor (5k/month), your virtual assistant (3k/month), your thumbnail designer (2k per post), your accountant because this shit is complicated (2500/month). If you have a manager, they take 20% off the top. Then there’s GST (18%), income tax (30% if you’re profitable), and the “float” - you’re essentially a bank, financing brand content while waiting for payment.

That creator making “100k a month” might actually be operating on 15-20k cash flow, hoping nobody pays late. One brand bankruptcy (which happens more than you’d think) can wreck six months of planning.

But we don’t get angry about the hustle. We get angry about what they buy with it.

The Birkin thing, again

When that creator finally has enough saved to buy a Birkin, the internet melts down. But why that purchase and not others? A male creator buying a Tesla gets celebration emojis. A woman buying a handbag gets think pieces about overconsumption.

Follow the discomfort: it’s not about the money, it’s about who we think deserves to have it.

The Hermès bag makes visible something we’d rather not see: that talking into your phone about moisturizer can generate more wealth than a Masters degree. That performing femininity pays better than teaching. That someone without our credentials, our struggle, our particular form of suffering, can simply... buy the thing we thought was reserved for a different class of person.

The bag isn’t really a bag. It’s proof that the old rules about who gets what are breaking.

Who can afford to be authentic?

Want to know something fucked up? The creators who can afford to be “authentic”- to pivot, to take risks, to say no to bad brand deals- are usually the ones who didn’t need the money in the first place.

Starting as a creator costs about 15-20k minimum if you want to look professional. Good camera, lighting, editing software, maybe a backdrop that doesn’t look like your room (but just a little bit better). That’s before you’ve made a rupee. Then you need six months of content creation without income while you build an audience. Then another six months of small deals that barely cover costs.

The creators who can weather that have other income. Family money. A spouse with a tech job. A savings account from their consulting years. The “authentic, effortless” girl talking about slow living? She can afford to be slow because someone else is paying rent.

Meanwhile, the creator getting dragged for doing too many spon-cons? She’s probably supporting her family. The one who can’t pivot from beauty to books? She’s got employees she can’t abandon. The “inauthentic” ones are often the ones for whom this is actually a job, not a hobby monetized.

We built a system where authenticity requires wealth, then we shame the non-wealthy for being inauthentic. It’s a neat trap.

The class scramble

There’s this moment that happens in every creator’s career where they cross the line from “relatable” to “unrelatable,” and it’s fascinating to watch the audience turn. It’s usually a purchase. A vacation. A house tour where the kitchen is too nice. Suddenly, the comments shift from “yasss queen” to “must be nice” to “I can’t relate to this anymore.”

What we’re really saying is: I was comfortable with you when I could imagine myself in your position. Now that you’ve moved beyond what I can imagine for myself, you’ve betrayed the deal.

But what deal?

The creator never promised to stay at our income level. We projected that promise onto them because their initial accessibility, where their bedroom looked like ours, their struggles sounded familiar, felt like kinship.

When they outgrow that accessibility, we read it as abandonment.

The money makes it worse because we can track it. We can calculate how many #ads bought that renovation. We can reverse-engineer the vacation from the rate cards. The transparency that we demanded becomes the very thing that makes us uncomfortable. We wanted to know how the sausage was made until we saw the price of the meat.

What the mirror shows

Our discomfort with influencer money reveals something we don’t want to admit: we’re more comfortable with invisible wealth than visible earning. Old money doesn’t post about compound interest. Tech executives don’t show their RSU vesting schedules. But a creator shows exactly how talking into a phone becomes a handbag, and that transparency breaks our brains.

We see the labor (it looks easy). We see the payment (it seems too high). We see the purchase (it feels undeserved). The whole chain is visible in a way that traditional wealth never is. And that visibility asks us uncomfortable questions:

Why is this work worth less than consulting? (It’s not, the market has spoken.) Why does her bag bother me more than his car? (Gender stuff we haven’t dealt with.) Why do I feel betrayed when she succeeds? (Because I thought her struggle validated mine.)

The creator economy makes transparent what was always true: that value is arbitrary, that women’s work was always valuable but underpriced, that authenticity is a luxury good.

We hate influencers for showing us the game, not for playing it.

The escape velocity problem

Creator starts small, builds audience on reliability, gets to maybe 200k followers. Brands start paying real money. She hires an editor, maybe an assistant. The content gets better but less personal. She can’t pivot because she has overhead now. The audience says she’s “changed.”

She has. She’s running a business.

The ones who escape this trap usually do it one of two ways:

They were rich enough to not need brand money, so they could stay “authentic” (read: they could afford to turn down deals that didn’t fit their vibe).
Or they built something beyond the feed - a product, a course, a newsletter - that freed them from the sponsored content treadmill.

But building beyond the feed takes time and money and risk tolerance. It means saying no to guaranteed income while you build something uncertain. Most creators can’t afford that gamble. So they stay on the treadmill, getting more successful and less happy, while the audience watches and judges and wonders why they don’t just “be themselves.”

Being yourself is expensive. That’s what we don’t want to see.

Why We’re So Fucking Angry

The anger is so specific and so intense that it has to be about something else. You don’t get this mad at strangers unless they’re showing you something about yourself you don’t want to see.

Here’s what I think is happening: influencers are doing in public what we do in private. Wanting things, trying to be loved, performing for approval, calculating our worth. They’re just getting paid for it. And that payment makes visible the economy of attention and validation we all participate in but pretend doesn’t exist.

When she posts her morning routine, she’s monetizing what you do for free: the performance of having your shit together.

When she shares her relationship, she’s selling what you give away: the story of being chosen.

When she shows her apartment, she’s pricing what you’ve been taught has no value: the labor of creating beauty in domestic space.

The anger is: why didn’t I know this was worth something? Why didn’t anyone tell me I could charge for this? Why did I give it all away?

The want/hate spiral

We consume them compulsively. We screenshot their outfits while calling them vapid. We save their recipes while saying they contribute nothing. We watch their breakdowns and breakthroughs and breakups with an intensity we don’t even bring to our actual friendships.

It’s a kind of emotional edging, getting close to feeling something real, then pulling back into snark before it gets too vulnerable. Because if we actually admitted how much we want what they have (not just the bags, but the permission to want things publicly, the confidence to say “look at me” without apology, the ability to turn the mess of being human into content people choose to watch), we’d have to admit something about our own hunger.

This parasocial relationship is disorienting because we know it’s not real, but we feel it anyway. You can know someone is performing intimacy and still feel intimate with them. You can understand you’re being sold to and still feel chosen. The knowledge doesn’t protect you from the feeling. And that makes us angry too - that we can’t think our way out of wanting connection, even synthetic connection, even commodified connection.

The fuck/fuck you dynamic

The parasocial relationship operates like desire because it runs on the same psychological infrastructure: partial reinforcement, projection, and the gap between having and wanting.

The algorithm literally trains us into addiction patterns. Variable ratio reinforcement (will she post today? will she reply to my comment?) creates stronger attachment than consistent reward. Casinos know this. So does Instagram. The “pull to refresh” is a slot machine lever, but what we’re gambling for is acknowledgment from someone who’ll never know our name.

There’s an erotic charge to the power dynamic. Not sexual exactly, but using the same circuitry. They perform availability through radical visibility (here’s my morning routine, my relationship drama, my mental breakdown) while maintaining total control. You can watch them in bed but never touch. Know their skincare routine but never their actual skin. This managed intimacy built on maximum exposure and zero reciprocity creates a kind of consensual voyeurism where both parties understand the terms but pretend they don’t.

The anger comes when the performance slips and we see the transaction. When she pivots from “bestie” energy to luxury hauls, we feel cheated on. Not because we literally thought we were friends, but because the parasocial contract was broken. We were paying (with attention) for the feeling of intimacy, and now she’s showing us it was always transactional.

Why we punish and return

The unfollow/re-follow cycle mirrors the push-pull of dysfunctional attachment. We leave to punish them (they’ll notice the number drop) but really we’re punishing ourselves (they don’t know we exist). We return because the synthetic intimacy still feels better than no intimacy. At least in the parasocial space, rejection isn’t personal. They can’t actually leave us because they never actually chose us.

This is why breakdowns and vulnerabilities get the highest engagement. When they cry on stories, the fourth wall breaks just enough to feel dangerous. Maybe this time it’s real. Maybe this time we matter. The algorithm rewards this trauma performance, creating a marketplace where emotional wounds are content opportunities.

The class rage underneath

But I think the deepest anger is about class and the lies we were told about how it works.

We were told: work hard, get educated, be professional, don’t show off. They said: Watch me put on makeup, and I’ll buy a house at 23.

We were told: expertise takes decades to build. They said: I learned this yesterday from TikTok and now I’m teaching it to millions.

We were told: money comes from suffering, from sacrifice, from doing things you hate for forty years. They said: I filmed myself shopping and made your annual salary.

The rage isn’t really at them. It’s at the system that lied to us about how value works. It’s at ourselves for believing it. It’s at the fact that maybe the game was always this arbitrary and we just couldn’t see it before.

When someone makes six figures talking about their skincare routine while you’re struggling with student loans from your Serious Degree, it’s a sense of existential vertigo. The rules you organized your life around were fake. The suffering wasn’t necessary. The credentials were just paper.

Why we can’t look away

We hate-watch because it feels better than not watching. The anger is still engagement. It’s still feeling something in the direction of someone who can’t hurt you back.

And there’s something honest about the anger. More honest than the performance of not caring. More honest than pretending you’re above it all. The anger admits: this matters to me. These strangers performing their lives matter to me. What they have and what they show and what they withhold - it matters.

Maybe that’s what’s most unbearable. Not that they exist, but that we care so much that they exist. That we’ve let strangers on the internet become the mirror we check ourselves against. That we measure our lives against their highlights even when we know they’re curated. That we feel genuine emotion about people we’ve never met living lives we only partially see.

The influencer problem isn’t that they’re influencing us. It’s that they’re revealing we were always waiting for someone to tell us who to be, what to want, how to live. They just made it visible. They put a price tag on it. They showed us the performance we were already doing for free.

And we’re angry because we can’t unknow it. We can’t go back to pretending that taste and beauty and self-presentation don’t matter. We can’t unsee the economy of attention. We can’t unfeel the want.

So we stay angry. It’s easier than admitting we’re implicated. Easier than acknowledging we’re not above it. Easier than accepting that maybe we’re angry because they’re doing what we wish we could do - turning the mess of being human into something people will pay to watch.

The anger is really grief, I think. Grief for who we might have been if we’d known the rules were fake. If we’d known you could just... decide to matter. To take up space. To charge for your thoughts. To believe your morning routine was worth documenting.

They didn’t steal something from us. They showed us what was always available and we didn’t know we could take.

That’s what’s unforgivable.

The Contract: What We Do With What We Know

So here we are, having named the feelings, mapped the machine, and priced the labor. The influencer economy isn’t a moral crisis, it’s a mirror crisis. We’re angry at the reflection, not the glass.

The real contract isn’t between us and creators. It’s between us and the truth that value was always performed, labor was always gendered, and authenticity was always expensive. The internet just made the invoice visible.

You have the same three options you always had, but now you can’t claim ignorance:

Participate cynically (know it’s all performance but play anyway).
Withdraw superior (pretend you’re above it while secretly screenshotting).
Engage honestly (admit what you want, pay for what you value, create what you wish existed).

The feelings we’ve mapped (envy, grief, rage) aren’t symptoms to be cured. They’re signals about the distance between the life we’re living and the life we suspect is possible. The machine we’ve examined isn’t evil, just indifferent. The gendered labor we’ve priced was always valuable, we just couldn’t see the market.

The influencer problem was never about them. It was about what they revealed: that we’re all performing, we’re all selling, we’re all hoping someone will pay attention and tell us we matter. They just found a way to make the algorithm say yes.

The question isn’t whether you’ll participate in the attention economy, you already are. The question is whether you’ll do it consciously. Whether you’ll use the feelings as information rather than verdicts. Whether you’ll create or just consume. Whether you’ll admit what you want or hide behind contempt.

Because mirrors only show us what’s already there.

Addendum:

You can choose not to read this! But I feel like my essays are rarely complete without actionables 🙂

Actionables (steal these and go)

If you’re a creator:

Set your pace ceiling: publish at the fastest rhythm that still lets you think (for most: 2–3 posts/week). If you can’t think, you can’t compound.
Price the invisible: separate usage, whitelisting, and exclusivity on every quote; add an opinion-risk fee for health/finance/sustainability.
Disclosure like an adult: “This is paid. I earn from links.” Put it in frame or line 1. Trust is a compounding asset.
Mechanise the chores: spreadsheet of hooks, bank 10 B-rolls, caption templates, pinned FAQs. Romance craft; automate everything else.
Say the boring no: “I don’t make claims without substantiation.” If Legal won’t print it, you won’t say it.
Own one ‘durable’ post weekly: non-trend, searchable, rerunnable in 6–12 months (reduces ad money dependence).
Build off-feed: newsletter/site/product so a stance ≠ starvation.
Cash-flow like a grown-up: 50% advance, dated POs, late fees in contract, monthly tax accruals.

If you’re a brand:

Buy POV, not a puppet: brief outcomes; let the creator write the sentences.
Fund pre-pro: pay for concept time; you’ll buy fewer assets and more results.
Rights in daylight: date every usage/whitelist window; price renewals up front; kill “perpetual” portal defaults.
No claim laundering: if compliance won’t host it on your site, don’t route it through a woman’s mouth.

If you’re the audience (hi, all of us):

Spend attention like money: if a post leaves you dumber, close it. If it teaches you, pay with time, comment, share, or subscription.
Practice quiet exits: mute/unfollow without a goodbye tour. Don’t be a free media buyer for what you hate.
Reward correction: when someone says “I was wrong,” keep them solvent: watch, save, share.
Curate a grown feed: 5 staples that teach, 3 that broaden, 1 dessert. Refresh quarterly.