Fabricated Reality: How Capitalism Turned the "Influencer" into a Commodity
From Leading Opinion to Marketing Products
Years ago, the term and concept of an "influencer" (Mu'thir) was ascribed to an opinion leader, thinker, or intellectual, given their natural role in influencing people and changing convictions, orientations, and ideas to guide societies towards positive change. In our present day, standards and concepts have drastically loosened, and influence is no longer what it once was.
Ever since capitalism entered the concept of "influencers," it completely altered its meaning and transformed its concept. The functional and utilitarian connotation of the term became different from before, and the word turned from a description into a profession! The lexicon of capitalism has coined a new definition for the word "influencer," defining it as "collaborating with brands and influencing others to prompt them to buy products." It seems capitalism has succeeded in disseminating this concept, as the old standards and concepts of influence have become a thing of the past. Today, we face a new concept tied to capital related to image, based primarily on visuals, viewership rates, and follower count. This is the dominant and thriving aspect in the capitalism of influencers, which has become a massive industry generating billions of dollars.
Manufacturing Illusion: How Do the Unknown Become Influencers?
In a revealing social experiment documented by writer and tech journalist Nick Bilton in his documentary "Fake Famous," the mechanism of manufacturing influencers was uncovered through two fundamental steps: fabricating fame followed by fabricating a lifestyle.
Bilton began his experiment with a public invitation for anyone aspiring to become an "influencer," and was surprised by the response of thousands. Most answers revolved around personal utilitarian motives, self-perception, changing lifestyle to resemble one of consumption, not for benefiting people or feeling a sense of community responsibility.
Bilton chose three ordinary, non-famous individuals from Los Angeles with few social media followers, and began by buying followers through websites specializing in selling fake followers. These bots inflated follower counts and automatically distributed likes and comments. Bilton suggests that many famous influencers follow this approach to inflate their accounts and secure better deals with advertisers.
The second step was fabricating a lifestyle, where the production team set up professional photoshoots depicting the three individuals in a luxurious lifestyle to deceive followers. This ranged from drinking apple juice presented as champagne, to faking luxurious airline flights using simple props. Surprisingly, these practices worked; the fake followers began attracting the attention of real people, follower counts skyrocketed, and brands began contacting them, sending free products.
https://youtu.be/oX7OduG1YmI?si=VdmL19Dw1fQ7EAz8
The Psychological and Social Effects of the Fabrication Industry
Impact on Mental Health
Influencers live under constant psychological and nervous pressure, perpetually compelled to fabricate their lifestyles and display an unrealistically perfect image. Even when showing details of their lives, they pretend to live a wonderful life different from others. This gap between reality and illusion causes serious psychological problems for many influencers.
Impact on Followers
While people follow and interact with influencers, it doesn't stop there. It extends to believing the false meanings these influencers carry and interpreting life and reality through the illusion of screens. This leads to constant comparison between the illusion they watch and the reality they live, generating feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy, and resentment towards their personal lives.
Threatening Culture and Identity
The influencer phenomenon is no longer just about displaying products or a lifestyle; it has turned into an ideology imposing itself, seeking to instill new values and beliefs. This ideology threatens national culture in the face of capitalist culture, where superficial illusion replaces authentic substance.
More dangerously is the effect of this phenomenon on younger generations who now aspire to become influencers more than any other profession. Amid a fragmented cultural scene and a lack of proper family and social guidance, this ideology finds its way to the young, threatening the loss of original identity and raising a generation on illusion and confusion.
The Theoretical Framework: From Person to Product
The transformation of influencers into commodities is deeply rooted in the logic of digital capitalism, which applies age-old economic principles to human identity and social relationships.
The Commodified Self: Under capitalism, aspects of life that were once considered personal and inalienable such as virtue, love, conviction, and knowledge are brought into the sphere of commerce and exchange . An influencer, through the practice of intense self-branding, constructs a public persona with a fabricated set of values and interests specifically to create economic value. In this process, the individual effectively sells their personhood to be used as a marketing strategy, thereby turning themselves into a commodity .
Emotional Labor and Alienation: This form of work requires the influencer to manage their feelings and exploit their own personality to provide a service, a concept known as emotional labor . This leads to alienation, where the worker becomes estranged from their own labor, other people, and their own human essence. For influencers, this means becoming alienated from their own emotions and selfhood, as their genuine feelings become conflated with the commercialized "feeling rules" of their brand partnerships .
The Factory of the Self: Social media platforms function as factories where the primary product is the self-as-commodity . Influencers labor to become "interesting" and "relatable," and their success is reduced to instrumental metrics of attention (likes, followers, views). This system creates a stark divide: those who gain attention are deemed valuable, while those who remain unseen are considered failures .
The Human Cost: Psychological and Social Consequences
The relentless pressure to commodify one's identity has significant negative impacts on well-being for both creators and their audiences.
Impact on Influencers: The constant commercial performance infringes upon an individual's privacy and intimacy . This, combined with the pressure to maintain a fabricated lifestyle, leads to significant psychological distress . Many influencers experience burnout and a sense of emptiness, feeling trapped in a "golden cage" where their private lives are entirely subsumed by content creation .
Impact on Society and Culture: For the audience, this system fosters a culture of comparison and inadequacy. The curated perfection of influencer lives can make followers feel that their own lives are lacking . Furthermore, the algorithmic promotion of sameness leads to a loss of cultural diversity and individuality, as unique subcultures are quickly stripped down, branded, and resold until they lose their original meaning .
In summary, capitalism has turned the influencer into a commodity by applying the principles of factory production to human identity. Through mechanisms like emotional labor, performance of authenticity, and algorithmic flattening of culture, the personal self is transformed into a marketable product. This process, while profitable for the platform and marketing ecosystem, carries a significant human cost in the form of alienation, psychological distress, and the erosion of authentic culture.
I hope this detailed explanation is helpful. Would you be interested in exploring potential alternatives or resistance to this system of commodification?