It's really easy to fall prey to this. You become target-fixated on your attention metrics, but it's often the worst content that spikes your numbers. You don't become an influencer; you become a hub of "influence"--a force you cannot really control, the will of which is not always benevolent.
For a while, I was pretty well known within a certain toxic niche. What I learned is that you can't "influence" anything, not very much, and certainly not in the short term (which is the timeframe on which most of us are forced to operate, just to survive). A "brand influencer" can convince a few thousand Pepsi drinkers to try Coke's latest product, but who cares? If any of these influencers actually had something to say, their followers would get fed up and move on to someone else.
It's tempting to believe that the thousands or millions of followers you can get by posting stupid shit will convert when you feel the need to say something important, but conversion rates are astronomically low. All that "influence" evaporates if you have a real reason to use it.
All that said, the good news is that this isn't a new problem. False personalities have been dominant in our psychobiome for decades. In the 1950s, it was the man in the gray flannel suit, the "organization man" who never discussed sex, politics, or religion (or, for that matter, anything else important). In the 2020s, it's insufferable young people trying to make a decrepit, failing economic system appear "cool" and even "woke" (a term no one but Boomers uses anymore). Same shit, new stink. We have lived under economic totalitarianism (whether of the Soviet command-economy variety, or the capitalist "ignore the man behind the curtain" variety) for a century now, and so we've been dealing with phony personalities (and false consciousness) for a long time. If they were going to destroy us, they would have done so by now.
For a while, I was pretty well known within a certain toxic niche. What I learned is that you can't "influence" anything, not very much, and certainly not in the short term (which is the timeframe on which most of us are forced to operate, just to survive). A "brand influencer" can convince a few thousand Pepsi drinkers to try Coke's latest product, but who cares? If any of these influencers actually had something to say, their followers would get fed up and move on to someone else.
It's tempting to believe that the thousands or millions of followers you can get by posting stupid shit will convert when you feel the need to say something important, but conversion rates are astronomically low. All that "influence" evaporates if you have a real reason to use it.
All that said, the good news is that this isn't a new problem. False personalities have been dominant in our psychobiome for decades. In the 1950s, it was the man in the gray flannel suit, the "organization man" who never discussed sex, politics, or religion (or, for that matter, anything else important). In the 2020s, it's insufferable young people trying to make a decrepit, failing economic system appear "cool" and even "woke" (a term no one but Boomers uses anymore). Same shit, new stink. We have lived under economic totalitarianism (whether of the Soviet command-economy variety, or the capitalist "ignore the man behind the curtain" variety) for a century now, and so we've been dealing with phony personalities (and false consciousness) for a long time. If they were going to destroy us, they would have done so by now.