Episode 60 - Influencers

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:08

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:12

The podcast for two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. David, I want to start this episode by telling you about a run-in that I had with an influencer. This was maybe a year or two ago. And I was in the midst of reorganizing some things in my apartment and I needed a new bookshelf, always like needing new bookshelves is just the permanent condition of being an academic.

David: 0:50

You measure your success by the number of bookshelves that you have.

Ellie: 0:54

Or like what kind, you know, if you have to upgrade your bookshelf because your old ones aren't cutting it anymore, they're starting to sag in the middle, et cetera. In any case, I need a new books. I was perusing Facebook Marketplace, which is an excellent place to find local wears for great deals.

David: 1:10

Uh, agreed.

Ellie: 1:11

Love it.

David: 1:11

It's so good. Underrated, underrated, overrated. No, wait. No, it's better than people think. That's what I mean. Go on.

Ellie: 1:18

No, it's underrated. I just pause because I feel like it's rated highly among my friends. So I'm like, is it a secret that people don't know about? Or is it just rated as it should be among my friend group, which is highly.

David: 1:28

Oh, well wait, no, I don't know what's happening with trends. So it's just that it's underrated for me, but I'm out of every loop ever.

Ellie: 1:35

True. So apparently it is highly rated among even some of the influencers among us because I bought this bookshelf from Facebook Marketplace. And when I saw who was selling it, I was like, you know what? That photo looks a little bit familiar. Do I know that person? And then I realized that it was an influencer who I follow online, specifically an interior decor influencer. So then I'm all excited to go pick up this bookshelf. And when I go over there, I show up at her house and it is the very house, the interiors of which I have seen many times on my Instagram because I have been following her for a while. And so I ended up buying a bookshelf from an interior decor influencer who I follow. And for all I know, maybe I had actually seen the bookshelf in previous Instagram photos before, and that's part of why it appealed to me to begin with.

David: 2:26

Wait, and did you still buy it? Because if I was you in that situation, I would think to myself, well, I really respect this person's taste, but they're getting rid of this bookshelf so this creates like conundrum because they obviously don't think it's in anymore.

Ellie: 2:39

Right?

David: 2:39

Uh you're getting the hand me downs of an influencer that is specialized in decor.

Ellie: 2:46

So that totally did cross my mind. But at the end of the day, I think the bookshelf was $40 or something. And I can, I can't quite afford to be up on the very cutting edge trends. So I was fine with being a step behind, but I just find this to be such a weird experience because I was being influenced on social media. And then there was a closed loop of influence such that I actually bought the thing I was being influenced to buy from the person who was influencing me to buy it. But through this strange back channel of Facebook marketplace.

David: 3:16

It's a 21st century mise en abyme like influence upon influence upon influence, but, okay, so you met this person. Did you feel like you were meeting a celebrity in real life? I mean, I don't know if it's the same thing because a celebrity is not really quite the same as an influencer.

Ellie: 3:32

You're right. Celebrities and influencers, I would say, yeah. Are not quite the same, but I did feel like I was meeting a celebrity and I do feel similarly about seeing celebrities and influencers in real life, because let's be honest. I live in Los Angeles, I see examples of both categories of people somewhat regularly. Right? And in both cases, it's suddenly people who I've seen on my screens. Now being there in the flesh and they often actually look or seem pretty normal in real life, but there's still that touch of magic. Like you are this person. Right? So I kinda felt the same about seeing this influencer in real life. When I picked up the bookshelf, as I did, when seeing like John Ham at Bar Stella, for instance.

David: 4:13

Okay, fair enough. But one thing that may distinguish a celebrity from an influencer is that the latter usually has much more unmediated access to their followers.

Ellie: 4:23

Yes.

David: 4:24

And vice versa. Because when I think about celebrity culture, at least traditionally, it really is about the tabloids it's about the interviews. And that means that the media, the enterprise that is the media, plays a pretty large role in mediating our experience of them. But influencers interact directly with their followers all the time, such as by selling them their hand me down $40 bookshelf.

Ellie: 4:49

I know, so true. I wasn't buying it from John Ham.

David: 4:51

Yes.

Ellie: 4:54

So, yeah. I think that's really a good point. And now I just want to speculate about the differences between celebrities and influencers starting there, but we also have so much to talk about today. So I just want to bring up actually another distinction in kind of leave that influencer celebrity distinction in the ether, following what you said. The distinction that I'm thinking about is a distinction between influencer and content creator. Because there's been a big push in recent years among so-called influencers to be instead called content creators. Like they've been frustrated at the label influencer and tried to find a new term for themselves.

David: 5:30

Yes. And I have to say, I find that distinction somewhat confusing, but I see it as having a lot to do with the institutionalization of influencer culture. So the fact that now big companies are hiring people for influence online. So, you know, you can think about your big tech companies, like your Google, your Facebook, Twitter, or whatever, and they need a name for those jobs that they're going to advertise. And I think hiring for a content creator is much more appealing than like calling the job the in-house influencer. And I also think there's been a shift at the level of awareness among young people about some of the grossness, I would say that's a technical term, the grossness of some corners of influencer culture, the entitlement, the sense of power. And so I can see that some people might want to differentiate themselves from the category of the influencer by calling themselves content creators. But again, it's a very thin line between those two categories.

Ellie: 6:31

I don't know that it's a thin line. I think it's a reframing of what the influencer does or what the content creator does, because I think it's mostly about a desire to argue that the people we call influencers actually produce things, right. They're laborers who create value and an influencer is a strongly feminine coded position because it implies that in going about your life, you are an object that other people want to emulate. And I want to come back to that later in thinking specifically about the work of Simone de Beauvoir. But I think that there's a lot to this idea that influencer is kind of feminine coded in the sense of you presenting yourself as an object or a commodity, but a content creator implies instead that you are actually producing an object in the world and that productive dimension is masculine coded, and thus seen in our society as more respectable.

David: 7:20

Yeah. And, okay. So what you are describing here in terms of the feminisation, so the gender line, I think also maps onto the difference between domestic and public space and the categories of a hobby versus a job. And what I mean here is that some people have noted that the precursor to the social figure of the influencer was originally the mommy blogger.

Ellie: 7:45

Yeah.

David: 7:45

Moms who would write these blogs that were closely followed by a lot of people. And then who would get paid by, let's say a baby formula producer or like a diaper maker, to say good things about their product in their blog.

Ellie: 8:00

Purveyors of bespoke diapers.

David: 8:03

Yes. And so I do think that there is an association between the category of the influencer in the cultural imaginary, and the unemployed person who has a lot of free time to devote to something like a hobby or a passion project. And when you put all those categories together, you get a logic of feminisation, right?

Ellie: 8:24

Yeah.

David: 8:24

The person who stays at home, pursuing this personal side gig.

Ellie: 8:28

Yeah. And I think we can ask too about whether or not influencers or so-called content creators are right that they are actually producing something. Certainly they're producing value for the companies for which they're advertising, right? They're producing value for the diaper company, but are they producing an actual object to the world? Are they producing content? I think that's a different question. I will just say though, all too often, I find myself buying the objects they're selling. I am an easily influenced person.

David: 9:01

You are, you don't rise to the level of an influencer, you just sit there at the level of a full time influencee, just looking around online to be influenced by those who assert influence.

Ellie: 9:12

David, I am not full time. I do so much stuff that I am easily influenced.

David: 9:18

Today, we are talking about influencers.

Ellie: 9:23

What does it mean to exert influence over somebody?

David: 9:27

How has the rise of social media created a whole new category of job and person known as the influencer?

Ellie: 9:34

And what do influencers tell us about the nature of selfhood and objectification in today's society? Brief content warning for this part of the episode. We discuss sexual assault from about the 23 minutes and 40 second mark to the 27 minutes and 40 second mark. So feel free to go ahead and skip that if you would rather not hear it. David, I feel like I'm going to be taking the lead on this episode in terms of examples of influencers, since you famously hate social media and therefore, presumably don't follow many influencers.

David: 10:07

Mmm, guilty as charged, proceed.

Ellie: 10:12

Okay, I think you're going to like this one. I want to tell you about Lil Miquela. Lil Miquela is an influencer who has 3 million followers on Instagram. She's made a name for herself because she's super cute, right? Of all influencers have to have this like visual appeal in the economy of Instagram. She wears her hair in those cute little buns, those two buns on the top of her head, which I used to wear in middle school. And Gen Z has recently rediscovered.

David: 10:38

Like the Star Wars ones? More like Princess Leia?

Ellie: 10:41

Yeah. But, but like on kind of on the top of your head.

Yeah, a little bit more Zenon: 10:43

Girl of the 21st Century, which I have also talked about in a different episode of Overthink, constant reference point for me. In any case, yeah. So Lil Miquela has great style. She's also really passionate about social justice and advancing causes. What else about her?

David: 11:01

In general? She advances causes?

Ellie: 11:04

Well, she does, she has like BLM in her profile and I think has like spoken up about a lot of different social justice issues. She's 19 years old. And she often posts a lot about her cute boyfriend, she takes aesthetically appealing photos with other friends and celebrities. So this is Lil Miquela.

David: 11:21

Okay, you said I'm going to like this influencer, but, I really haven't heard anything particularly interesting, you know, like young, cute girl who has a lot of followers and posts about her boyfriend and has a #BLM.

Ellie: 11:34

Okay. Here's where it gets fun, David. Lil Miquela is not real.

David: 11:41

What do you mean by that? That did you just made her up?

Ellie: 11:47

No, although that would be a pretty impressive, uh, expression of my improv skills. No, I mean, she's artificial.

David: 11:54

Artificial as in a robot?

Ellie: 11:56

Not exactly. I don't, I don't know exactly how she's created, but she's literally an artificial, probably CGI'd or photoshopped image. And she has this whole storyline created about her, constantly posts fun photos and captions, but she is engineered by a company called Brud.

David: 12:16

Brud, even the name gives me some dystopian vibes.

Ellie: 12:20

Right?

David: 12:20

The Brud corporation.

Ellie: 12:22

I know, I know it sounds like something out of Batman Returns and also adding to this dystopian element, Time Magazine named her one of the 25 Most Influential People on the internet in 2018, but she's not people, she's not a person. How is she one of the 25 Most Influential People when she's not a person?

David: 12:42

Well, I don't know. It depends on your take on AI personhood and consciousness, but yes, I agree with you. This sounds like not the right kind of entity to put in that list, but.

Ellie: 12:51

Totally.

David: 12:52

What, what exactly is she doing and who is she influencing and to do what? Like, is there some other agenda to her online presence than just being a cute girl who posts about her boyfriend and her like piggy tails or whatever, like her buns?

Ellie: 13:10

I mean, yeah. Isn't there always the ultimate goal of creating revenue? Right? She's influencing her 3 million followers and she's influencing them first and foremost to buy stuff. Right? So she's had ad partnerships with companies, including Prada and Calvin Klein. And, oh my God, the Calvin Klein one was a video ad where she and Bella Hadid made out. So edgy. But I also mentioned that she's passionate about social justice and has BLM in her bio. And I actually have a weird story here, which is also part of why I mention Lil Miquela, even though, like I said, it was first, my students who alerted me to her existence. Few years ago, I was at my favorite happy hour in LA, RIP to Kettle Black in Silver Lake which closed during the pandemic, but had an excellent happy hour spritz and meatball sandwich situation. And one of my friends brought a friend of hers along to happy hour. And as we were talking, he shared that he works for Brud, the company that creates Lil Miquela.

David: 14:05

You have to say the Brud corporation.

Ellie: 14:07

The Brud corporation. Okay, I think you just made up that it's called that. I don't know if it has corporation at that end.

David: 14:13

I don't think so. Yeah. I just made that up.

Ellie: 14:15

But in any case the Brud corporation is famously private and for a long time wouldn't even publicly admit that Lil Miquela was artificial, I think. They like wanted to keep her ontological status clouded. But I asked him a question about how they choose which social justice movements Lil Miquela advocates for, right? Like why BLM versus...

David: 14:38

Any other thing?

Ellie: 14:39

Donald Trump's 2024 campaign? And his answer was so bizarrely vague and so circular. But it ended up being clear that the company that creates her basically chooses what she advocates for based on what is trendy, right? And so like, what does the audience that Lil Miquela is trying to not only fit in with, but actually be at the cutting edge of, right, this like hip trendy aesthetic. What does that audience value? What do they believe in? And there's this extraordinarily vicious circle then I think, and, and he wouldn't admit this quite outright, but I was really picking up on this in our conversation whereby Lil Miquela is one of the 25 Most Influential People on the internet, but what she influences people to support is influenced or even determined by what's already popular. And this is what philosophers might call the bandwagon fallacy. This idea that if something is popular, it must therefore be right, and therefore, if it's right, it must be popular, et cetera, et cetera. This weird vicious circle. There's more to the bandwagon fallacy than that, but that's kind of how I'm seeing it show up in Lil Miquela.

David: 15:38

Yeah, but I mean, it seems like little, Lil Miquela. Can't say it, my accent gets in the way, I want to say Little Miquela, but it seems like Lil Miquela is just a regurgitation of an influencer culture that has eaten too much of itself because it produces the mean and presents it as the cutting edge. Right? So like she is seen as being at the top of a certain demographic, a certain population, even though she has been explicitly created by looking at just what is valued by the majority of people in that community. So there again, I go back to that, to that image of a mise en abyme where you start falling into a fractal without any ground. And the fact that the creators at the Brud corporation were intentionally trying for a while to keep her ontological status intentionally ambiguous, like, "Ooh, is this a real person? Is this not?" Just adds to the fact that there is this mystique that hangs around her that is ultimately unfounded.

Ellie: 16:44

Yeah.

David: 16:44

Right, like unfounded in every sense.

Ellie: 16:46

Totally. Well, yeah, because she's, I mean, she's influencing people to do or be different things, but she doesn't actually have any expertise or qualifications to do that influencing. And so I think this is something you see a lot influencer culture, right? Is like, either people don't have expertise really at all, but people are still following what they do, or they have expertise in a particular area. Maybe the interior decor influencer, whose bookshelf I bought has expertise in interior decor, but she doesn't have expertise in all kinds of other political and social issues that she might be commenting on and that people are also following. You saw this, you know, in the pandemic, when all of these mommy bloggers suddenly became anti-vax proponents and using their, and used their platform to really promote misinformation.

David: 17:30

Well, I mean, forget about expertise. Lil Michael doesn't even have experience, right? Cause she's like, she's like a bunch of pixels basically. And let me clarify a couple of things. So I'm going to ask you a few questions about Lil Miquela that are not entirely clear yet to me.

Ellie: 17:45

Okay. I will warn you. I'm not a Lil Miquela expert, but I'll do what I can.

David: 17:48

I mean, between the two of us, you have a PhD in Lil Miquela studies. So number one, does she have a body? Like, is she a robot that moves around in the real world?

Ellie: 17:59

No, she's just virtual.

David: 18:02

Okay. Is she an AI? Because she, you said that she is an artificial, that's the phrase that you use, but you didn't say an artificial intelligence.

Ellie: 18:13

Yes. So I think I said artificial image, maybe.

David: 18:17

Okay. So it's not an intelligence that responds to human commands spontaneously, according to its own algorithms, that's not what's happening?

Ellie: 18:25

To my knowledge, no. To my knowledge, she is just an image and, you know, is kind of created by the Brud corporation out of perhaps photoshopped or CGI'd, you know, combinations of different images or, you know, voices, et cetera. She's an avatar that's plastered over a composite of real life and created images.

David: 18:50

Okay. So then I assume that when Lil Miquela speaks, it's really a real human person, a real human, uh, who is speaking, but then they just put this CGI cute 19 year old girl on the screen matching the speech. But it's not actually a united artificial intelligence where we can speak about an artificial subject.

Ellie: 19:12

I don't believe so.

David: 19:13

Okay. Okay, because now I'm thinking, so this is now the philosopher of science in me speaking, it seems like Lil Miquela also gives the impression of being an AI. I think she's presenting probably herself as an AI when in reality it doesn't even rise to that level. So there are multiple layers of just happening here.

Ellie: 19:36

Yes.

David: 19:36

It's not only that she's not fake because she's artificial, she's not even an artificial intelligence.

Ellie: 19:41

Totally. And there was this moment at which I can't remember exactly when this was, but at which Lil Miquela kind of outed herself as not real, right? So I said originally Brud was super cloudy about her ontological status. And then eventually, like they wouldn't admit that she wasn't real. And then eventually Lil Miquela, I think came out with some videos saying that she wasn't real. But you're so right, David, that, that was another layer of dissimulation because in doing that, it was still making it seem like she has some subjectivity or selfhood, which in fact, she does not have.

David: 20:12

Well, and even the notion of like "coming out" as an AI here, I think they're obviously playing on like queer practices of coming out. And the assumption being that there is some substantial selfhood, some true self that is coming out and that now Miquela is somehow going to live her truth. We've done a whole episode about living your truth and coming out in queerness. But it also speaks to the way in which something that is deemed by some algorithm at the Brud corporation as mainstream and popular, like "I'm going to live my true self," then gets fed into the Lil Miquela CGI so that she even has a coming out story.

Ellie: 20:55

Yeah.

David: 20:56

You know, like a 19 year old girl who, what thought she was a real girl, but then found out that she not, and then came out and wants to be embraced for it.

Ellie: 21:05

Yeah. And I think that that's a really nice other articulation of what we were talking about earlier, David, which is the way that Lil Miquela is really just responding to the trends of the day, but in a way that, by virtue of her 3 million followers, ends up reinforcing those, right? And so it's like, there's some, there's some ship analogy here that I'm not thinking about properly. But it's like the, the waves are steering. No, wait, I'm trying to do this.

David: 21:33

Are you talking about the ship of Theseus where you rebuild?

Ellie: 21:36

I'm not.

David: 21:36

Okay, there's another ship.

Ellie: 21:39

Wait, I know. No, no, it's like, she's responding to the tides of public opinion, but in so doing is actually guiding public opinion.

David: 21:49

And to be honest, I don't know how I feel about this aping of human struggle and human experience, especially around things like coming out. It just, it seems like it's aping an experience that means something and something very deep and personal to humans who go through that. And it doesn't sit super well with me to have some corporation trying to gain followers and influence by aping that experience, right? By just like mimicking it through a creation that, I don't know it, I'll stop there.

Ellie: 22:22

Cause you have to believe that her having BLM in her bio and supporting various social justice movements is ultimately in the service of Brud's creation of revenue. Right? It's because she presents herself as a social justice activist that she's getting the Calvin Klein and the Prada advertisements and the things that are actually raking in the cash. At least that's my reading of it. I, I do think the guy from the corporation whom I spoke to, I don't think had this perspective at all. Like he, he really thought that Lil Miquela was doing good in the world and he really seemed to be committed to advancing society. But I, I think my question was, well, what criteria are we using to advance society? And I was deeply troubled by what seemed to be the lack of criteria other than what is popular.

David: 23:04

And let me ask you about that person just for hot second. What was it that he thought they were advancing through the creation of a 19 year old influencer who talks about coming out as an artificial being? Is it that they're like pushing the boundaries of what counts as a subject? Is it that they're tapping into this general ethos of technological advancement for the sake of technological advancement? Like from the perspective of the Brud corporation, what's the uptake here?

Ellie: 23:34

I don't know, we should see if we can try and talk to him. Cause we, we didn't talk about that. But I do think what I just got, what I asked about was just about how they choose Lil Miquela's causes. And that's what I felt, you know, quite dissatisfied by the answer to there's one other piece of the Lil Miquela story. There's actually so many pieces, but there's one piece that I want to bring up here too, which is that after I had this conversation with the Brud corporation employee, in 2019, Lil Miquela did a vlog in which she talked about her experience being sexually assaulted in a Lyft. And she says that there was a creepy man who started touching her in a ride share, and she felt like he was threatening her and he pinched her. And then she ended up getting out of the car in the middle of the 101 freeway, which is like oddly specific LA reference. What do you think about this, David?

David: 24:33

Well, I think this is another version of the coming out narrative sort of tapping into a kind of discourse that is already mainstream in this case. The #MeToo.

Ellie: 24:42

Yeah.

David: 24:43

Rather than like #LiveYourTrueLife, uh, #LiveYourBestSelf. And I mean, what it seems like we know about Miquela is that all of these are decisions that are intentionally made by people at a corporation who are putting these words into her mouth. So we're not even talking about an AI that is generating discourse by mimicking human speech, which has been something that has been done before. And so it's not as if, oh, well this is an AI gone wild and saying really random, strange things just based on its training data. Because it's not an AI in that sense. So somebody at that corporation literally planned this and they thought to themselves, wouldn't it be cool if we talked about how Lil Miquela was, what sexually assaulted and pinched by a man? Again, I, I use the category of grossness before. This is what I mean.

Ellie: 25:37

I know, and I feel like your affect right now is so calm, David. This story makes furious. Like I find this story so ridiculous. And I wish that in that conversation I'd had with the Brud guy the year before I had

David: 25:51

You would've pinched him?

Ellie: 25:53

No, absolutely not. I wish I'd been more honest with him about how troubling I found this, rather than just kind of questioning, like, how do you pick these social movements? Right, it was like at a happy hour with friends and so I was being friendly, but like I did come away from that conversation story sort of worried about what they were doing with Lil Miquela. And I think the idea that, yeah, you're right, following on the coattails of Me Too, to have then Lil Miquela have a sexual assault story, to have her describe an experience when she does not experience anything. She is not an experiencer. She is not a subject is just, really, really weird, really dystopian gross. I know there were a lot of people who pushed back and said that, you know, by co-opting stories of sexual assault, Lil Miquela is really not honoring the actual victims of sexual assault for instance. Like, oh, this is just a trendy thing. Being a survivor of sexual assault is a trend now.

David: 26:45

Well, and I think, yeah, two points here. One is that it reduces very powerful experiences, whether positive, like coming out or negative, like being sexually assaulted, to a trend. And then it uses that trend for revenue generation, name recognition, et cetera. The second thing is that we can talk a lot about this particular case, but perhaps more importantly is the question of what this particular case is indicative of in terms of a larger trend. And I think that larger trend is a kind of technocratic enthusiasm on the part of people who work in this field, like, uh, social media. In thinking that just any kind of venture in the direction of experimenting with interfaces between artificial and human experience is just good for its own sake because it advances society in some abstract, generic, non concrete way. And I think this is what happens when you live in a culture that takes technology to be the solution to all human ills. And also the only way by which to measure human progress.

Ellie: 27:58

Yeah. Progress and advancement without any guiding criteria of what that looks like.

David: 28:03

Yeah. Moral or political.

Ellie: 28:05

Which ends up defaulting, of course, in a capitalist society to the criteria of advancement of just greater revenue generation and wealth hoarding.

David: 28:13

Which you get with 3 million followers. Ellie, you are right to note that I know a lot less influencers than you do. Something that I wear as a badge of pride and honor. But I did do my own research for this episode, I should say to our listeners and there are not a lot of theoretical essays out there on influencers, or even on the concept of influence. But one exception is a paper that was published in 1963 by Talcott Parsons, who is one of the most influential American sociologists of the 20th century.

Ellie: 29:09

No pun intended influential sociologist.

David: 29:11

Yes, the original influencer. And this essay is essentially a typology of influence where Parsons talks about different kinds of influence and how influence itself spreads through and affects what he calls the sphere of social action. So how it moves through the social body. And for Parsons, influence is, at bottom, a kind of pressure. So you cannot think about influence without thinking about this image of somebody exerting pressure over, over somebody else. And he says, it's a pressure that an ego exerts over what he calls an alter, which is just another person, so self and other, and the goal of this pressure is always, even when it is not openly acknowledged as such, to change the behavior of the alter. So the ego exerts pressure to change the behavior of the other person. And that means that all influence is a form of behavioral engineering, basically. He has this really nice phrase where he says that all forms of influence take place, "in the imperative mood," meaning that they, they always are a way of telling you what to do. So there's always an imperative hidden in the exercise of influence.

Ellie: 30:32

Which makes a lot of sense when you think about the fact that so much of influencer culture in today's economy is precisely economic it's to exert pressure over people, to buy things, right. To change their consumption habits, which are the behaviors that you're talking about. By saying you should buy this thing and oh God, is it tempting?

David: 30:54

Oh God, have we been engineered already? And you know, like you mentioned economics, which of course is at the center of Parsons' analysis, but the tricky thing is that even though influence is a kind of pressure, the concept of pressure itself is hard to conceptualize because pressure can always be applied through very different mechanisms of which of course money is only one example. So of course you can pressure people by giving them incentives, or you can also pressure somebody negatively by threatening some kind of punishment. And so after saying all of this, he ends up presenting four different kinds of influence. Because as I said, it's a typology, which means that there are types and he lists them.

Ellie: 31:38

Okay.

David: 31:38

And he talks about money being one kind of influence, very obvious. He talks about political power. He talks about reputation. And he also talks about a really weird fourth category that has to do with the interpretation of laws and that has to do with like judges and lawyers who influence the social order by determining how laws are interpreted. So to me, that's a slightly strange category of influence compared to the other ones, but it is one that he talks about. And so those are the main forms of influence according to him, money, power, reputation, and then the interpretation of laws.

Ellie: 32:16

Okay. Yeah, the last one's a little unexpected, I wouldn't think to make that a whole category, but then again, I am not one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century. So I think these strike me as interestingly, quite different categories, right? For instance, money is a carrot and political power is a stick. So they don't seem to have much in common, at least on first glance, beyond a generic notion of shaping people's behavior.

David: 32:43

Yes, that's that's right. They all are ways of shaping people's behaviors, which is why he uses this mechanical image of pressure. But Parsons says that even though they are very different, you know, yes, money is a stick, political power. No money is a pres- wait, what is it? No, money is a carrot and political power is a stick. So, yes, there are these differences, but these are all expressions of influence that have one thing in common. And that is that they are ultimately committed to the justification of the influence that they exert. In other words, people who exert influence in these ways, ultimately believe that they can give good reasons for the pressure that they apply. So for instance, why should you be influenced by money? Because of its value and because it helps you become self-sufficient, which is a good thing. Why should you be influenced by a law maker or a cop that represents political authority? Because of social order, peace, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you can imagine the reasons that can be given to justify. Why should I trust the doctor on account of their medical reputation? Well, because reputation is a stand-in for expertise or something like that. And so they all are committed to the justificatoriness, can you say that? Is that a word?

Ellie: 34:03

No.

David: 34:03

To the justifiability?

Ellie: 34:04

Yeah.

David: 34:05

Yes, of their own influence.

Ellie: 34:08

Yeah. That idea of justification is bringing me back to our questioning of what the Brud corporation is using as criteria for judging what Lil Miquela is supporting and advertising, right. And so I wonder how you see this notion of justification that we get in Parsons in relation to influencer culture, because it seems like Parsons is talking about a pretty diffuse phenomenon, which is great. We love that at Overthink, right? Like we want, we want to, we want to expand from the micro to the macro and go back from the macro to the micro. And so, how do you think his general notion of influence applies to influencers? Right? Which are, like you said, a new category that didn't exist when he was writing this in 1960.

David: 34:52

Yeah. So that's a good question. And I do think it's very much in the spirit of Overthink to talk about something like contemporary influencer culture, by going back to the 1960s, American sociology and the concept.

Ellie: 35:05

I know. Well for what it's worth I wanted to find some connections to Plato, but I do not have my collected works so Plato right now so we're going just back to 1963, not back 2000 years, but in any case.

David: 35:17

We're keeping it, we're keeping it semi-contemporary by philosophical standards.

Ellie: 35:21

Totally.

David: 35:22

So the reason that I decided to go to Parsons when thinking about contemporary influencer culture, rather than just this diffuse sense of social influence, which is what Parsons is talking about, is precisely because of this notion of justification and to get to the core of my thinking here, I think there's been a shift in the nature of social influence from the time that Parsons created his typology to the present day. And maybe, just maybe, that shift was brought about by the rise of influencer culture.

Ellie: 35:59

And what is the shift exactly?

David: 36:01

So I think it has to do with the justification of influence itself. So again, Parsons says that all of these forms of social influence that we're already used to, reputation, money, power, they are in principle justifiable, you can give and take reasons for them. It's not that they are beyond reproach in particular cases, but generally you can appeal to reasons to justify the pressure that they apply. And I think that this giving and taking of reasons in relation to influence, completely falls out with the emergence of the influencer. As we know at this new figure that is tied to social media and to the constant search for more and more followers. Because when I think about somebody like Lil Miquela, now there is no longer a rationale for that imperative mood of the influencer. There's no reason for their influence. They're just influencers. And so there's a kind of a vicious circularity at the heart of the contemporary influencer. And for instance, if you just ask the question, does this person have influencer status because they have the capacity or the skill to influence, or do they have the power to influence only because they have influencer status? I think it's the second one.

Ellie: 37:30

Yeah, I think what holds influencers together of various stripes is that they are objects of emulation. People want to emulate the influencer, right? And so you don't want to buy the shoes because the influencer is advertising them. You want to buy the shoes because you see the influencer wearing them and you want to be like them, right? And so there's this weird mediated nature of advertisement there that goes by way of emulation. And I think this speaks to one of the things and in particular, the kind of question that you're pointing out, David, this vicious cycle, that worries me a lot about influencer culture, which is that most of it hinges on quantitative metrics of success, right? It's all about this quantification of the self as commodity and specifically about numbers, right? About how many followers you have and not about anything more substantive. I remember a friend of mine who's an actress for instance, got passed over for a role one time on a TV show because she had fewer followers than another actress who was up for the same role. So literally once they had gotten to the point of deciding between two people, the final decision that the casting directors were making was exclusively based on how big of a social media following that they had, because since one actress had more followers than the other, she could do more promotion for the show.

David: 38:51

Yeah. And in that case, you can kind of see the reason, right from the standpoint of the people making that hiring decision. But, what?

Ellie: 38:59

You can see the reason, but it's a terrifying reason.

David: 39:02

Oh yes, of course. It's a terrifying reason. But the more terrifying dimension here is that when you think about it from the perspective of the followers, that's where you see the bottoming out of all reasons, because you know, you say that the influencer is somebody that we want to emulate. And so we buy the shoes because this influencer is wearing them, then the question that follows is, but why do we want to emulate them in the first place? And that's where you see the emperor without clothes moment. The only answer is because they're influencers, right? Like that's why we want to emulate them. And I think this is why the nature of the influencer figure in today's society is fundamentally paradoxical because they influence people literally for no reason. Their reason for influencing is their very influence itself. And there have already been some funky little legal cases, especially in the world of like health and nutrition and diet where some people, some influencees, suffer some pretty serious harm from following the advice of influencers, just because they're influencers and in court, of course, things get a little bit complicated because it is clear that influencers wielded a kind of pressure that by far transcends any justification, any objective justification that we could give for it. But then again, most influencers never claim to have authority or expertise that they don't really have. So it's not really that they lie, necessarily. It's just that they exercise a pressure that is unexplainable and disproportionate to any reason they could give to justify it.

Ellie: 40:43

Yeah. Because they don't have expertise in these particular areas. And so it's interesting though, that if you follow some creepy diet advice, and develop gastrointestinal issues, you won't succeed at suing the influencer who made you do it. And I know that there was a case about a particular influencer named Belle Gibson that is really interesting in this light because she was actually lying, like she was a scammer. So this is unlike the people you're talking about, David, who just lack the expertise. Belle Gibson said that she had cancer and she was able to keep it under control with diet and alternative medicines. And it turned out she was actually lying and she never even had cancer.

David: 41:25

Yes. I've heard about that case. And in that particular instance, the trial, I believe hinged mostly on her fraud, but it still raises broader questions about whether people who follow these Instagram influencers, bear some kind of responsibility for placing their trust on somebody purely on account of their fame on social media, right? And here, I also want to make another point that comes from my reading of Parsons because Parsons says that when we are influenced by somebody, we implicitly trust the person who is influencing us. And over time, we come to identify with them and to internalize their values because that's the only way in which we can justify to ourselves our letting ourselves be influenced by this other person. And so in the case of social media influencers in the 21st century, what are their values? They are a mixture of what aesthetic perfection, quantitative metrics of success, and a constant self-branding, uh, turning the self into a commodity. So the more that we interact with these influencers, again, the more we come to identify with them and we internalize the values that they represent. And that worries me a lot. If you're enjoying Overthink, please consider supporting the podcast. By joining our Patreon, we are an independent self-supporting podcast and as a subscriber, you can help us cover our key production costs, gain access to our exclusive digital library of bonus content, and more.

Ellie: 43:09

Because social media is conveyed through screens, it really caters to the visual. And I'm really interested in how this connects to conceptions of selfhood, because I think the rise of the influencer economy leads us to further and further reliance on a visual concept of self, especially the self as an object. And so I wonder, for instance, what is it like to have a profession that is so deeply bound up with your image where you're capitalizing on your own identity constantly, right? How does influencing shape one's sense of self? And of course my go-to here in asking these questions is an existential approach to the self, since that's what I work on a lot, and I want to focus on one in particular because, I think that it highlights the gender dimensions of the economy of influencing. And that is Simone de Beauvoir, especially her 1949 book, The Second Sex.

David: 44:01

How did you know, Ellie that the figure of the influencer was in desperate need of a Beauviorian reading?

Ellie: 44:08

Well, I have Beauvior on the brain a lot of the time as those who've read my publications probably know she's the philosopher I published the most on. But I think in particular, her account of self-objectification is super helpful here. And self-objectification is something that you and I have talked about in our Fat Feminism episode and our Zoom episode, but I think is important to not only raise again here, but also add to some of the previous analyses that we've given. So for Beauvior, to be human means to be both passive and active. The very nature of our bodies for instance, is one way that you can think about this, and our bodies for her are not separate from consciousness, but the sight of consciousness. Bodies are active in the world, right? So I can move within the world by walking outside, I'm currently exercising my voice and speaking to you, David, and to our listeners. And I can also shape my surroundings. For instance, maybe I decide to plant and cultivate a garden. And yet this active side of the human condition, isn't the whole truth of my body because my body is also exposed to others. Others can watch me planting my garden, they can judge how well or how poorly I'm doing it. Maybe they even want to help me in my project of planting a garden or worst case, they might even force me to plant a garden for them. And so to be a human means to treat oneself as a subject or consciousness, to identify with the active aspect of one's humanity. But also to know at the same time that we are always already exposed as an object to others, and therefore we have a passive side to our humanity as well. And this combination of activity, passivity, subjectivity, objectivity is what Beauvior calls ambiguity. And she thinks, stay with me here, I know I'm doing a little mini lecture status, she thinks that there are some people who are encouraged to identify more with their object aspect or their passive aspect than with their subject aspect. That is, these people are encouraged to relinquish their own freedom and enjoy being a passive object for others. And she thinks in particular, one group of people who is encouraged to do this, under patriarchy, is women.

David: 46:16

But doesn't enjoying being an object mean that one is still active? Because paradoxically one is actively enjoying one's passive status as an object.

Ellie: 46:28

In a sense, yes. So this is where Beauvior uses the term in French "se faire objet," which means to become an object or to make oneself an object. "Se faire" is in French, a reflexive verb, and it can have a passive or in active valence. So in French, you can have kind of both at the same time through this reflexive verb form, but in English, frustrating many translators, from French into English, you have to choose whether to render it actively or passively. And the way that you can do that in English is either by saying, to make oneself into an object or to be made into an object. And so I'm going to stick with the French term for a moment here, which is "se faire objet" because it gets at both of those dimensions. For Beauvior this passive object side of ourselves that we always have, we can also kind of lean into too heavily, right. And that's what happens when we're making ourselves into an object we're affirming and embracing that. And you're totally right, David, that there is a paradox here, right? Because you are actively embracing your own passivity. And I don't think that that paradox is for her, something that leads to a contradiction in her thought, that's actually precisely the heart of it, right? Is that there's this weird feature of actively taking up your own passivity. And the problem for her is that when you do that, you are not really living up to your full potential as an active agent, because to actively take up being an object, is not helping to shape yourself or the world around you in an authentic way. Instead, it's just kind of pretending, like you're only an object it's relinquishing your subject side of things. And so even though it has this paradoxical element of activity, it's ultimately not authentic in the way that actually acting in the world is. And I think I'm really inclined to see influencers this way as a category of people who are constantly encouraged to make themselves into objects because they are commodified through the visual economy of Instagram and through the demands of their job, which is to be, you know, basically vehicles for advertising. I'm wondering what you think about this.

David: 48:36

So before I answer that, question. I kind of like the idea of translating this really tricky French verb, "se faire objet" as to objectify oneself, because it captures the active and passive without having to choose, which is what you have to do with, to be made into, or to make oneself into.

Ellie: 48:55

Okay.

David: 48:55

To objectify oneself kind of has both of them already built in, and it's kind of faithful to the existentialist notion that we actively turn ourselves into objects for others under certain circumstances, even though we're always already potentially objects for others.

Ellie: 49:10

You've got an article in you about that. Anyway, go ahead.

David: 49:14

Yeah, a whole article about how to translate one reflexive verb in French.

Ellie: 49:18

Dude, I published on this anyway, go ahead.

David: 49:21

Yeah, actually I know as soon as I said that, I was like maybe I do have an article here. No, so applying this now to influencers in particular, when influencers turn themselves into an object, they're not just doing that in the generic sense of being there for another person, they're turning themselves into an object that is a commodity that can be bought and sold, that can be traded, that can be exploited for value. And that's where we transition from just this kind of existential self-objectification captured by "se faire objet" to something like self-branding, you become a brand in short. And of course, I think this comes with a very high price tag, not just existentially, but psychologically. And there is a lot of overlap between existentialism and psychology. And one of the ways in which we can think about this price tag is in terms of the price that other people who are influenced by influencers end up paying. So think about body image problems. We now know that a lot of young women are seeking plastic surgery to turn themselves into all kinds of Instagram filters, just because those filters become popular and they are used by their favorite influencers. We know that people who spend a lot of time on social media, places like Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, you know, suffer from terrible depression, because these can be deeply depressive platforms that isolate you from others. You know, they can create echo chambers, so on and so forth, but they just turn you against yourself so that you end up objectifying yourself to such a degree that maybe you lose that active component that according to Beauvior is essential for ambiguity. So it just tips the balance in the objectivity or objectification end of the existential spectrum.

Ellie: 51:21

Totally. And I think that what you're describing David really forecloses, authentic modes of relating to oneself and also authentic modes of relating to others. Because when you are looking at an influencer's photos, you are encouraged to have a parasocial relationship with them, right? I think that's like a super fascinating phenomenon that people have been focusing on a lot lately is this idea that you can see them and you're interacting with their content, but they're not seeing you, they're not interacting with you. And who are you interacting with though? You're interacting with a packaged, visual form of that person. It's not even really a relationship, even if it's one sided. It's a one-sided relationship, not with another person, but with a packaged version of that person. And I could see how on the influencer's side, this would be very alienating as well because people think they know you, but they really don't, right. And they're responding to your constant objectifying of yourself, which really, it's not like you can choose if you're an influencer, whether to objectify yourself or not. I think it's fundamental to the very visual economy and capitalist economy of influencing that you are always already put in a position of self-objectification and I could see how that would lead to a real sense of being misrecognized by the people who are following you.

David: 52:37

Yeah. And I mean, to put this existentialist insight in connection to the sociological insight from Parsons that we were just talking about, something that's really interesting is to think about the extent to which that difference between the authentic self that maybe an influencer is outside of their life as an influencer, and then the brand that they become in their capacity as an influencer breaks down over time. Because again, with enough time, we come to psychically identify with the image of ourselves that we put forth to the public.

Ellie: 53:10

Yes.

David: 53:11

So, you know, at some point the difference breaks down.

Ellie: 53:14

And David, that makes me think about something I have been thinking about a lot recently with influencers, which is how much the idea of following somebody changes the old economy of the 15 minutes of fame that you saw with celebrities in the rise of celebrity culture, where a celebrity would be hot shit for a while and then they would fall out of the public eye and they would be known as a "has-been" because suddenly Us Weekly wasn't featuring them anymore and they weren't on the pages of Vanity Fair. But when we're following influencers directly, how long does this go on? Like, do we just follow Emma Chamberlain forever? Like at what point do you stop following somebody or do they just fall out of your algorithm?

David: 53:59

I don't know who that is, but, and so I don't follow her, but yeah, it's a real question about, to what extent do you then even become trapped in a social media prison that you made when you were like, whatever, when you first joined social media and started following, like, let's say that you joined when you were 14, 15, 16, then you just grow up with those fictional characters that are those influencers. I think that other comparison that I might draw here is the same way in which millennials come to identify with Harry Potter characters as they are growing all these fictional characters that represent something for us only because we have a long history with them. But yeah, you're right. It's almost as if the influencer, their 15 minutes of fame never end because they're not in the public eye. They are in the private eye, the private eye of each member of the public.

Ellie: 54:55

Private eyes, they're watching you.

David: 54:59

We hope you enjoy today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 55:14

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David: 55:21

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