pinkfloydpsw's Blog

I feel that there are people that exist in this world now that did not exist in the world I grew up in simply because technology has changed us into a different sort of communicating human. What was an ‘Influencer’ 30 years ago? Did society have a word to describe a person whose actual job was simply existing as a convoluted and externally created persona, and that existence changing the lives of those that were gullible enough to confuse the person as a product, with the person as a person? Yes we had people who influenced other people, there has always been inspiration and heroes, but it was once they became famous for something else they were then used to be a face of a product. What we didn’t have, I think, was a raft of people who set out to be an influence as their proposed primary skill and then looked for a product to realise that goal (though this may be arguable).

Sexy people, sexy women, have always made men more likely to buy cars and women more likely to buy clothes. There is the career ‘model’ who is beauty for the purpose of beauty, they are the exception, clothes look good on them so the clothes they are paid to wear sell without anything other than the physical performance of a beautiful moving manikin. The influencer is a new breed that suggests how they identify with the product as if it makes them who they are, or how it unlocks something they already had. We, the influenced, are supposed to buy into the notion that they, the influencer, are some sort of expert in the thing they appear to be bringing to our attention, likely a product that they have been supplied with by a paying vendor, and likely something they first became familiar with a moment before the video. Bringing things to people’s attention is not producing things, it’s marketing, but it’s marketing the method more than the message. Like those people who spend their time ‘raising awareness’.

Sidebar…. Raising awareness is not actually doing anything, and it’s not journalism, it’s saying ‘look over there, there is something happening, and because there is something happening, something that you might care about, I am valid’. Doing something is doing something, standing up for someone is doing something, paying taxes is doing something, helping out is doing something. Raising awareness, if for the sake of being the focus of that awareness, is a selfish act that might harm the actual cause. I’m not saying that there are no people who are pure of nature and trying to raise funds or awareness, I’m just highlighting this new breed as nefarious attention seekers. The person who jogs anyways, but is now jogging for “the cure”, is not giving anything, or enduring anything, they just want the attention.

Maybe I am being overly critical, maybe this is just a new form of advertising? I do feel though that the product gets lost in the focus on the person who is acting as the influence. People will now buy a product with little critical thought as to how it would suit their particular shape or size or style. More and more we see the repeated wearing of what is ‘on trend’, and by people who it very much does not belong on. Skinny jeans on overweight 40+ year old guys, skimpy shorts on fat young women with bumpy orange peel cellulite on their fat folded ass cheeks hanging down. The llama perm hairdo of the athletic footballer, sported by an entire generation of youths who all wear the same branded sportswear in the same colours. They’d look like they’re in uniform if there was a uniform for the willing personality vacuum.

I’m writing about these new mechanisms of influence, not to criticise them, because that would be pointless, but to understand how they give validity to people in a new way. This is how the world is, advertisement drives product uptake because people don’t need things until they gain the notion that their lives would be better off if they obtained them, that is not new or changed, Marx and Marcuse mention this, and Parkin wrote at least two books on the science of making it so, but now the influencer is the suggestion and not the suggested product itself. Product identifying the person, as if they know who they are because of their psychological matching, is the building of a flitting psychological self. In previous times the person knew themselves predominantly through introspection, community, and family, and then if they were unfortunate they maybe became their job (you should not become your job). They knew the self by their usefulness to someone or to some business.

For Marx this was a wrong, and I agree with him, I am not what I do for a living, I am what I care about. I am not what I wear, it is me. An extra layer of social ketchup has been veneered onto the self now that we have allowed the addition of the power position of the salesperson to be paramount in the thinking of the consumer. People buy the influence rather than the product, and when the influence changes, the consumer preference changes right along with it. Say top influencer Holly Melt (made her up) falls out with “Spondula Styling” (made that up too) over how much they are providing her for free, and starts lauding the virtues of her new influence line “Gattesbury Glam” (made that up also), her followers will likely shift product, away from one they thought they were happy with, and that’s ridiculous. We are being influenced by the paid time of the paid salesperson rather than the mooted benefits of the product. The product is almost irrelevant to a new generation. This is not information conveyed, it’s more like cultish person-worship.

Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays realised that psychology could be used on the masses, as opposed to the individual, in the early part of the 20th century. It had ever been so, long before Bernays harnessed the power of propaganda and made it into a method that could be taught and replicated. Freud described the unconscious as a garrison in an overrun city, overrun and holding out against besieging forces (society) . What he meant was that the you that you are is easily replaced by the you that social forces wants to tell you to be, that your autonomy is under threat ever and always, that you will have to hold out against constant external pressure if you wish to remain an authentic self. Bernays realised that he could strengthen the besieging force by appealing to a false idea of individual freedom that was actually a hegemonic push, so successful was he that the US government employed him.

If we switch away from the product and look at the change to society that happens when people of no distinguishable talent other than to be sexy can have on other people, we need to understand how the acceptance of such a phenomenon occurs. I feel, and this is just my theory, that people are, in these times, accepted as being valid as an A priori truth, i.e. they begin as valid, and I think this change is a mistake. Then they go on to build a career of being taken seriously on the strength of that primary falsehood (validity). So each person has been granted, through sheer existence alone, an equality of potentiality, and this is regardless of any demonstrated worth. This alone acts to remove the notion of necessary learning or expertise. All people are not equal, that’s the real truth.

Now it’s not exactly true that people can be equally influential, ugly women do not sell cars, nor beers, nor perfume. They are however included in the modern advert where they were not previously. This provides a just like me aspect to advertising and it likely works, it must or they wouldn’t do it, but it lacks the sexiness of the previous incarnation and that might prove to be a mistake. I have to say I have no idea why anyone would think it works to remove the appeal of idealism or optimality from a product advert, it seems counterintuitive, but that may just be my age and experience talking. Important to remember is that I do not transcend influences, I just am not swayed by these versions.

So if primary validity is a reality, and all persons are equally influential (which of course they are not), people are important for no reason (which they are not), and products only become good because of influence, not from the engineers or scientists that made them physically (which is nonsense really). I started out to understand this, and I am no more enlightened now…

Paul S Wilson