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Since 2020 many influencers have become more and more outspoken…at least in their Instagram Stories and more shortlived content like tweets. But overall influencing is pretty apolitical in nature. Might be in part because, just like attaining a uni degree, the closer you are to the middle class, the easier it gets to become an influencer as a full-time job.

There are three things I think about in all of this: the privilege to be able to be apolitical, the fear of becoming unmarketable as someone who lives off of marketing themselves AND most important of all how influencing (just like almost any other job) is connected to creating suffering somewhere else in the world.

I feel like we already read enough about the privilege of being able to be apolitical, so I won’t be covering that part in this piece, but the other two are interesting points.

If you follow me elsewhere you will know I’ve been content creating for half my life and more recently I have started diving into shortform video content to challenge myself because, yes, like many others that are both politically on the left AND neurodivergent, I’d prefer self-employment on my own timeline over making someone else money. I’m thankfully at a point in life where I’m prioritizing being myself in videos over being the most ideal version for marketing, but I would be lying if I didn’t occasionally cut out the extra curse word or shade that I’m throwing at an industry. I’d also be lying if I said that influencing isn’t feeding consumerist culture to some extent depending on which niche you’re in. You’re certainly fueling the platform you are posting on in their endeavors. The thing about that is, and I will use my typical point again, social media the way it is right now is a symptom. Arguably one of the most direct symptoms of the 0.1% since only those own major social media apps.

An ideal influencer would pull a YouTuber move by just being themselves, not being in fashion or beauty content, and making bank off of advertisers putting ads on their video. Which brings me to a little bit of a pause. Why do we judge influencers for working with a fast fashion retailer but are fine with them letting YouTube put ANY type of ad on their videos since the dawn of AdSense? Sure, one involves a more direct choice, but HYPOTHETICALLY you can get sponsored by a retailer and only get pieces you really needed anyway. That is a possibility and it undoubtedly is how majority of western “sub-middle-class but also not quite poor” people live, one or two small clothing hauls a year. That’s it.

Yes, environmentalism tells us it isn’t just the elite, it is also us, but let’s be so for fucking real, nobody average will inconvenience themselves enough in life to NOT do several consumer behaviors that still harm people. Some people don’t buy fast fashion but still eat meat. Some are vegan but will use AI. From the moral absolutist lens that many have this combination is still horrible…as if there is one perfect life of anti-capitalism that everyone can live were you aren’t inherently alienating yourself from community or society.

I simply don’t find it in me to judge the beauty and fashion girlies that keep it within reason for doing what they do. Because even if you worked a corporate job, your company would to the same damage, maybe even worse, to some other people in another country with what they buy and the deals they make. You could work in some type of tech company and it could still be argued that for your job to exist people had to be exploited to get the materials to build servers. Yes, all of this depends heavily on employer, location, type of job, etc. I get it, I’m a social worker. Speaking of, while that isn’t materially exploitative, it still technically makes me a worker of the state and under capitalism the state perpetuates systemic violence. Even social jobs aren’t free of violence. Almost no job is, is what I’m trying to say.

Yes, ideally, there is a life with reduced negative impact. Ideally, that already happens under capitalism. But do you for one second believe that someone self-employed as an influencer creates that much more harm than someone being exploited by an employer that steals their wages from them to do infinitely more evil shit with it with the sheer amount they put into their investments? Believe it or not, but in the grand scheme, I actually believe it would be less harmful to be an influencer unless you look at specifically the 1% of influencers and their conspicuous consumption. But hey, I might be very echo chambered to mostly seeing the people who keep it within reason. I’m not trying to do a whataboutism here. Any harm to the world is still harm, but there is almost nothing harmless under capitalism. “No ethical consumption under capitalism” extends to “Almost no ethical way of existing under capitalism” if we’re being real about it.

I genuinely think this is a conversation that needs to be happening between sociologists, social workers, psychologists and whoever else in the humanities. No job has an inherent moral standpoint and putting that perspective on influencers alone is missing the mark so much. It’s so much smarter to see how the influencer position could be used to transform itself, disincentivize high consumerism and increase cultivation of good communication even with these apps being designed the opposite way. Hell, being in an influencer position is the ultimate tool as we have seen time and time again in the general move towards the political right. It shows that there is space to use it the other way around.

I do think the time of being apolitical as an influencer is coming to an end, the time of moral absolutism from environmentalists with no psychological and sociological nuance is getting its second wind. A second wind that doesn’t do the math of how even influencers that don’t sell their own products can be rather low income and be happy to even get new clothes through a sponsorship because not everyone has 1Mio followers and 10k income months. A second wind that only looks at the outcome, rarely the root and what the root leads to (aka influencers being open to sponsorships from companies that exploit other people). Dare I say, this is something intersecting with my article about AI being way more nuanced than people make it out to be for their environmentalist tantrums that accomplish very little change in people.

Read The Article Here

Everything, truly everything ever that is being criticized right now, is a class issue. And believe it or not, the self-employed influencer is closer to the working class than the elite. And you, working in a cubicle or a random firm/agency probably create a similar amount of harm in the world unless the influencer in question has a market power similar to that of Kylie Jenner who has a crowd buying everything she advertises. The random girl with 100k followers and what your employer spends per year on equally bad shit (investment portfolios including weapons manufacturers and oil companies ring a bell?) instead of paying you is probably not too far off from each other. Yes, one of the two has social impact as well, which is why I highlighted the Kylie Jenner example, but MOST influencers, while being able to create brand visibility (which isn’t nothing in marketing) are at the end of the day not having a 10x impact compared to your employers investment portfolio funding genocides and the supression of free medication for curable diseases like TB.

I’d rather have a girlypop promote a fast fashion brand AND talk about Palestine, than have that same girlypop miserable about life, not having a reach for politics at all, sitting at a desk, probably still getting the same fast fashion for herself. Honest to god, the number of people seeing a fast fashion dress on an influencer and then buying it is smaller than you imagine (but also bigger than you imagine somehow, so I do get the inherent want to become a moral absolutist about influencers and promotion of consumerism). In an ideal world everyone can be a good storyteller AND someone that can make money from just that, but we live in a world where I’m willing to settle for someone getting a mountain of PR while regularly mentioning world politics on their stories and shortform content. That’s basically the whole summary of what I’m trying to get at here.

Anyway. This topic cannot be divorced from the capitalist hell society we currently live in. In a vacuum it is easy to say influencers are just promoting consumerism and they are some level of evil for that, but we don’t live in a vacuum, we live in a world where people buy fast fashion even without its promotion because nobody can fucking afford anything unless they’re middle class (which, don’t be mistaken, still very much exists).

I will continue to write about this as I make my way into creating more content again, because it is such a brainfuck for me personally to balance personality, political views, wanting to make money under an inherently exploitative system and still often needing to make choices that are shitty for the planet.

This is the shit that I need some sociologist to write a book about without just coming to some “influencers are self-centered” statement that ignores literally all of this points everywhere and it’s burning. I’ve seen some academics cut into the topic in interesting ways on Substack before, but we certainly should be looking at it more and with a more political eye too.

Whatever you think about it though, any symptom of declining capitalism is here to stay until class versus class has actually become a thing. You don’t get a fix for any of this until you destroyed the system that it grows from.

The Apolitical Influencer

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