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.
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SubscribeWhat a colossal waste of time social media is. Further evidence for my thesis that the internet was introduced into the world by Satan to drive mankind mad.
Deuteronomy 28:28
Revelation 18:21-23
Revelation 18:21-23
I’ll defend the internet the way it existed for about the first decade after it came into public use, but it’s been one long careening downhill slide ever since Facebook. Future historians, assuming there are still people around civilized enough to actually record it and care about it, will probably place social media in dubious company with chemical weapons, torture chambers, telemarketing, and shock therapy as things that should never have been invented, being both unreliable at the tasks they were invented for and contributing greatly to human suffering besides.
Deuteronomy 28:28
I’ll defend the internet the way it existed for about the first decade after it came into public use, but it’s been one long careening downhill slide ever since Facebook. Future historians, assuming there are still people around civilized enough to actually record it and care about it, will probably place social media in dubious company with chemical weapons, torture chambers, telemarketing, and shock therapy as things that should never have been invented, being both unreliable at the tasks they were invented for and contributing greatly to human suffering besides.
What a colossal waste of time social media is. Further evidence for my thesis that the internet was introduced into the world by Satan to drive mankind mad.
AI will replace this soon.
AI will produce the content and bots will follow it.
AI will produce the content and bots will follow it.
AI will replace this soon.
I *knew* this would happen. UnHerd Post writers have all turned into albino mutants, in desperate need of the Omega Man vaccine. All except Noah Carl, who has clearly taken the vaccine already.
I *knew* this would happen. UnHerd Post writers have all turned into albino mutants, in desperate need of the Omega Man vaccine. All except Noah Carl, who has clearly taken the vaccine already.
Got followed around by this creepy Indonesian guy who works in one of these. One of the downsides of having lots of chest hair.
On the plus side, he has suggested products for hair grooming.
Got followed around by this creepy Indonesian guy who works in one of these. One of the downsides of having lots of chest hair.
On the plus side, he has suggested products for hair grooming.
Apparently there is a whole world out there that I’m not a part of. And that’s just jake with me.
…so far. The problems will start when these people or their followers are the ones running your local shop, or the nearest GP surgery, and you can’t understand the lingo. This will happen, trust me.
…so far. The problems will start when these people or their followers are the ones running your local shop, or the nearest GP surgery, and you can’t understand the lingo. This will happen, trust me.
Apparently there is a whole world out there that I’m not a part of. And that’s just jake with me.