August 22, 2023 - 5:00pm
Over the weekend, online personality Linus Ekenstam shared a video from an Indonesian “influencer farm”. These farms are factory-like — would-be social media stars each stand in individual pods or rooms, with ring lights and smartphones filming content, typically after some period of training. And they’re not small operations, either: hundreds or even thousands of people will occupy these venues, all in the service of creating marketable videos.
If you thought American influencer culture was creepy with everyone photographing their food or beach trips, then imagine that phenomenon at an industrialised scale. Think call centres, but instead of making a thousand cold calls a day, influencers are creating content with the hopes that viewers will click “add-to-cart”.
This type of content generation isn’t specific to Indonesia, either: it’s also a well-known tactic in China, where live-streamed e-commerce makes up a multi-billion-dollar industry. Here, Chinese companies have created “influencer incubators” that push out content by social media personalities over eight-hour shifts specifically tailored to go viral at any given moment.
As far as we know, these same types of influencer farms don’t exist (at least, not in the same way) in the United States because, for the most part, they don’t appeal there. While there has been speculation about American viewers being manipulated by tactics like Russian bot farms, insidious, self-esteem-warping filters, unmarked #sponsored content, surreal YouTube content farmers, and more recently AI influencers — all of which suggest a sort of “uncanny valley” of almost but not-quite-human content — mass-produced videos like what Ekenstam describes are yet to be seen in high volume. Yet the US is no less susceptible to consumer trends and, more seriously, propaganda, so why not?
In the United States, online personalities occupy a unique emotional space. They create an illusion of intimacy between the influencer and users. And while American influencers may be sponsored by corporations, there is a stronger emphasis on the parasocial element of social media content. Well-known examples include the ever-controversial Dylan Mulvaney or Mikayla Nogueira, who frame themselves as “friends-in-waiting”. We’ll take their lipstick recommendations, but we’ll also listen to stories about their sex life — often affording them more time than we would our actual friends. Americans crave a certain unvarnished authenticity, even when it’s completely scripted, as with The Kardashians.
This isn’t to say that parasocial relationships between influencers and viewers don’t exist in China: they certainly do (parakin idols, which are meant to emulate family members, being one of the most intense expressions). But the texture is different — they’re more formalised and, therefore, more easily replicable. Where Americans crave at least a veneer of authenticity, in Asia there is a greater hunger for plain content — which is how the likes of 24/7 live-stream entertainers came into being.
It may be tempting to sneer at the dystopian nature of Asia’s influencer farms, but is the faux-intimacy of our social media stars any better? We now live in an increasingly dystopian world in which parasocial relationships with influencers are replacing actual human bonds. With these boundaries becoming ever more blurred, it is difficult to know where our online life starts and our real life ends. This might just be the most disturbing part about it.
Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.
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SubscribeUniversities need to run their own campuses, which includes permitting protest activity and not permitting it. Given the interest, which I’m sure is genuine, taken by JD Vance in free speech, universities and organisations like FIRE should seek a meeting with the VP to urge him to tell Trump to calm down. Vance in turn should tell the universities to do their job in which case the President won’t be annoyed by occasional outrageous behaviour on campuses.
The constitution gives you the right to peacefully assemble. It does not give you the right to harass or disrupt the normal operation of a college campus. Universities can set rules as well as time and places for those that want to protest. No one has a right to cover their face at a protest
Yes – This is why many UnHerd readers and writers for that matter are Classically Liberal and nonpartisan… It’s not about who, it’s about what….
Where did the writer get the kooky idea there is free speech on American campuses? You toe the hard lefty line or pay the consequences in grades and hiring.
> if a protest devolves into violence and property destruction, you don’t have an “illegal protest”:
You’re it was first but mostly peaceful protest when it was for approved social justice causes. Of course when truckers were protesting about their livelihood being stripped from them then it was an “illegal protest” and “treason”.
Now that they don’t control all of the branches of government it seems that now these leftists really care about the freedom of speech. Go kick an egg.
Do we think the marches in London with Palestinian flags are protests ?
Do we think hammering on doors and using loudhailers to drown out speakers in Universities are “protests ” ?
I dont
At least in the UK universities are a heavily subsidised middle class perk that we can no longer afford. We need to return to a system under which only the most academically talented students are subsidised. The Desmond fodder can learn how to unblock a u-bend instead.
And this, Greg, is merely one more example of why the US Government should never have been in the business of funding Universities. Nor funding progressive NGOs that have been the ‘muscle’ behind progressive’s “Cancel Culture” cult-like movement. Nor should the government be providing any funding or vouching for any other quasi-governmental organization, such as Fannie and Freddie Mac that, coupled with Congress’s ‘Affordable Housing’ marketplace demands (in the 1990s), led banks/investment institutions to follow Congress’s demands and inevitably push America into the Great Recession.
Here’s hoping Trump clears up most of this by significantly reducing the size of the government so that, going forward, government officials that think they’re Emperors don’t tyrannize innocent Americans anymore. This has been happening for well over a decade, and too many organizations and Social Activists get their funding by suckling off the government teat (that’s racking up debt), rather than doing the hard work of learning how to be actual productive members of society.
It requires bravery or self interest to venture fully in to support for one side or the other in this existential war. There are rights and wrongs on both sides, on that of the protestors and that of the Zionists. Doxxing, imprisonment, assault, denying employment and racist harassment are part and parcel of the present university space. Higher education is no longer an island and students need to factor this in to their protests. Go full on and risk the consequences or complete one’s education. I did the latter in the seventies and don’t regret it for one moment. Then again I was not rich nor connected for future elevation by the participants. Keep it simple students.
This is conspicuously an issue affecting elite universities. Their students are pampered, privileged brats. Their endowments are scandalously large, reason enough to question why they should be subsidized by taxpayers at all. Few schools outside the Ivies and California have had significant problems dealing with differences of opinion on contentious issues. These schools have had because they have engendered an intolerant mindset and a lack of the true liberality they pretend to represent.
In the US it’s not just the elite universities, but virtually all of them.
As I understand it, experts agree that a protest staged by lefty students in which crimes are committed and property destroyed is called a “mostly peaceful protest.”
Experts also agree that any protest staged by “far-right” racist sexist homophobes ia called an “armed insurrection.”
I think this is largely a disagreement about semantics. What Trump calls an unlawful protest you want to call a riot. While I would agree that peaceful protests should be allowed, campaigns of harassment, death threats, and even physical assaults on conservative voices on college campuses have to stop, and I think yourselves and President Trump agree on that.
Hamas must be destroyed and Palestinians left free of their terror. Islam has no place in Western societies and all mosks must be closed. If Islam withdraws it stated intent to destroy Israel and It’s annihilation of the Jews then it may be seen as a peaceful cult. Until then, Islam is the enemy of the free world.
The right-wing free speech mob shuts up and sidles off, tail between legs, when their Israeli masters tell them exactly what the limits are to the ‘free speech’ they were fighting for…. smh
Remember guys, if it’s college kids protesting Palestinian women and children being bombed to a pulp by the IDF with Western-supplied weapons… it’s “iLLegAL pR0tEsTs”.
Trump is being forced into this position by his AIPAC handlers who know how bad it looks when every college campus in the country is rightly outraged over the genocide happening on livestream. The youth naturally recognize and are shocked by what they see. After being educated for a few years, reading Unherd, and watching Triggernometry, maybe they’ll be as smart as you fine gentlemen, and realize that Netanyahu is a good master, and that free speech is only free when it’s your side that gets to define it.
“And schools that attempt to comply are likely to crack down on both protected and unprotected speech. This is exactly what happened when the Obama and Biden administrations revise
d federal Title IX guidance,”
Oh to watch the Progressive waking up and smelling the coffee! Maybe, just maybe, the odd ‘liberal’ could and should have found the behaviours of the Obama and Biden administrations objectionable. Then they might be in a position to protest now. But they didn’t. And Middle America sees their objections now as trying to apply double standards against the president they elected.
There’s a good opinion piece on the NY post about this
Unlike this piece it’s straight to the point : Potus should not interfere with private institutions
That he has comes both as a relief and as a worry.
The headline news shouldn’t be Trump: it should be the governance of these institutions, accountability, equality in front of the law. That it has come to Potus to sort this shit out is regrettable. Unpleasant. Potentially dangerous.
Sure.
Only themselves to blame. Shame on them.
(Vague echo to the Ukrainian crisis ?)
Institutions that have accepted billions in taxpayer money are only nominally “private”. A solution is to do exactly as Trump threatens and fully return them to their private status. All of the schools in question are obscenely rich with endowments of stunning valuation, a fact all the more scandalous in view of how many of their students are buried under the weight of loans to pay their tuitions. Higher education has become a grift that dwarfs the Bernie Madoff scheme.
Violence and intimidation are not speech, much less protected speech.
Generally agree Greg. The problem is his definition of “protest.” What Trump is trying to describe as an “Illegal Protest” is not actually a “Protest.” He’s trying to make the case that using intimidation to monopolize public spaces can’t be tolerated.
Public spaces are by definition “inclusive spaces.” If one group takes over a space through intimidation they are creating an “exclusive space” and effectively censoring everyone else. Occupying a building is not a Protest, its more likely a Public Trespass that the universities are not enforcing out of fear. Its a category error.
Does that logic of occupying a building apply to January 6th then? i.e. was that occupation legal or not?
Obviously since many were indiscriminately put in prison for years. The question for you is whether the January 6th punishment standards should apply to Left Wing building occupiers?
And not just any old buildings – the occupation of US federal and state government buildings has been a proud centerpiece of Leftists movements – with bragging rights – for well over 50 years (i.e. since the 1960s). It was always considered ‘cool’ when Leftists did it (and, because of this, such acts rarely make the news anymore), but it’s considered ‘insurrection’ when those on the Right do it. I recall reading an article about the Left’s occupation of a US federal building that occurred merely months after January 6, with only a few news organizations reporting on it.
I say tolerating the occupation of any federal or state building was a bad idea from the beginning. It should have been binned, along with all of the bell bottoms and ‘flower power’ tee-shirts that quickly fell out of fashion, back in the 1970s.
Everyone’s in agreement that breaking the law is illegal.
People are worried that any kind of protest against Israel’s war crimes will be outlawed/made very ‘expensive’.
I suspect you’re part of the problem rather than the solution.
Well said, Mr. Bone.
“… when talking about arresting people for their expression, a little precision is in order.”
This is the problem with Trump. He says stupid stuff all the time. It gives ammunition to his enemies. Although I don’t think Trump is the great defender of free speech, he’s soooo much better than the previous administration.
“Stupid stuff”.He tends to say what an awful lot of people are thinking. And unlike most career politicians he’s not the least afraid of the wailing of his enemies. Why should he be? He’s wealthy, doesn’t even take his salary, this is the end of his brief career in politics, he’s survived everything the left has thrown at him (even multiple threats to his life), and he has the possibility of becoming the most consequential US president since Reagan. Not a bad way for a chap to wind down a life, I think.