I was a
14-year-old schoolboy when the rapper 50 Cent released Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
The most precocious kids in class declared the debut hip-hop album an instant
classic and hailed the rapper’s legend: “He’s been shot nine times, you know?”
The failed attempt on 50 Cent’s life was at the centre of his sales pitch as
the bulletproof king of gangsta rap. My friends and I were easily sold. His
debut was the bestselling album of 2003, selling 12m copies worldwide. Curtis
Jackson may have been born black and poor in New York, but as 50 Cent, he was
now worth $30m.
There
are few things we find more compelling than a fable of overcoming the odds and
achieving self-made success. Everyone loves an outsider, because deep down most
of us believe we are one, and each generation has its own version for
inspiration. For me, it was the constant reinvention of the hustler made good
in hip-hop that stuck.
I grew
up in Tottenham, north London, a multiracial area between the city and the
Hertfordshire suburbs with a character defined by its then underperforming
football club and its Caribbean, Ghanaian and Turkish Cypriot communities. My
whole life, this corner of the city has been notorious for the anti-police
riots that broke out in the 1980s. A Jamaican-born mother had died after her
home was raided by police officers, a policeman was killed in the ensuing
revolt, and the tension between the residents and the authorities has festered
ever since.
By 2003,
much of the area could have slipped with ease into the background of a rap
video in Queens. My friends and I wore American hip-hop streetwear: baggy
Akademiks jeans, Fubu tops and Timberland boots. New-Era baseball caps felt
like part of our school uniform. My school had a high intake of students poor
enough to qualify for free school meals, but even the poor kids wore luxury
streetwear. In the year I completed my GCSEs, 75% of my fellow students failed
to get the five A*-C grades necessary to go on to further education. It is
unsurprising that the hustler was an inspiration to a student body of
underdogs.
At the
time we started school, the prime minister, Tony Blair, was announcing his plan
to create a knowledge-based economy, and his ambition to get 50% of young
people through university. “Aspiration” had become the political buzzword. When
there were outbreaks of violence in urban communities like mine, the government
blamed a lack of drive, and in 2007, it launched the Reach mentoring scheme,
with the focus on “raising the aspirations and achievement among black boys and
young black men, enabling them to achieve their potential”.
The
problem, certainly in my neighbourhood, was that it was aspiration itself,
rather than the absence of it, that drove young men to desperate measures. In
recent decades, aspiration has been heavily wrapped up not in what we aim to
do, achieve or create, but in what we can afford to buy. Young adults and
teenagers have been under more and more pressure to be successful, with fewer
means to do so.
Over the
past century, political parties and brands have spent vast sums of money on
trying to get our attention and influence our decisions. Today, that attention
is increasingly in the hands of a new type of hustler. Influencers with
thousands or even millions of social media followers can convert their
following into an income by making their feeds a living billboard or a peep
show you pay to subscribe to. Ten years ago, this pseudo-profession hardly
existed, and now the highest-earning influencer, Kylie Jenner, can earn up to
$1.2m from a single post on Instagram. Social media introduced a profit motive
into our social lives, with a profound impact on the way we behave.
Since I
left university, the economic promise made to middle-class millennials has
turned to dust. In 2008, I was an economics undergraduate learning about how
boom and bust had been banished. We all know what happened next: the global
economy crashed. Graduate schemes disappeared before my eyes and the next
decade did not live up to the promises made in the one before. As wages dropped
and employment opportunities fell, our consumer spending got higher and
personal debt rocketed. And this was before Covid-19 struck and making money
from home became the only game in town.
It is in
this climate that “influencing” seems a viable career, providing a potentially
luxury lifestyle with a low entry threshold. Once you have figured out how to
get people’s attention, you can monetise yourself as both product and salesman.
Often we do not even think of the most successful influencers as digital
workers, since they market themselves as relationship gurus, financial experts
and activists. Some influencers even offer teaching on how you can emulate
their success. One YouTuber named Patricia Bright, who has more than 2.8
million subscribers, has written a book titled Heart & Hustle, which
promises “to show you how to hustle like I do”.
The
problem is that success in this world is not as attainable as some make it
seem, and addiction to accruing followers by any means necessary is warping
human behaviour on and offline. For many influencers, deception is lucrative,
and becoming increasingly extreme. There are some feigning their wealth, their
followers and even their ethnicity while hawking dubious products to their
followers. In recent years, influencers have sold laxatives as health drinks,
promoted music festivals that never happened and been caught up in serious
fraud and multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes. Companies that sell regulated
products such as cosmetic surgery procedures and financial services have
increasingly turned to influencers to market their goods, away from scrutiny by
the authorities.
The
instore music complements the skimpy clothes that have made Fashion Nova in Los
Angeles a market leader in ghetto chic and timeless hoochie wear. You can buy
similar styles in the store next door, an unbranded clothes shop called Mode
Plus, or in the budget womenswear shop opposite, called Queens (the menswear
shop next door is Kings). The same tight party dresses produced for cents and
sold for dollars are for sale in all of them, and can be found in any other
makeshift store in low-income Latina communities from Los Angeles to London.
However, Fashion Nova has come a long way from its humble first store in LA’s
Panorama City Mall.
The
company’s impact could not have been predicted when that store was opened in
2006 by an industrious Iranian American named Richard Saghian. But Saghian knew
the world was changing. He wanted his company to target the kind of girls who
went to clubs to dance to hip-hop and desired to be on a VIP table – girls who
wanted to be famous. Most importantly, they had to be able to turn heads on
Instagram.
From
about 2013, Fashion Nova began recruiting micro-famous brand ambassadors who
fitted the vision. Young women with big followings were given free clothes, and
those with huge ones were paid a fee to post online. They were told to always
tag Fashion Nova to help its followers grow and boost awareness. Some
ambassadors were also allowed to earn money from sales of clothes via a
discount code that paid them a commission. Where the company achieved major
success was in its aggressive penetration of the hip-hop scene. It paid rappers
for shoutouts in songs and signed up artists such as the reality TV star turned
rapper Cardi B as highly paid brand ambassadors. It even gave the African
American and Latinx entertainers who now dominate US pop culture their own
Fashion Nova lines. The company had bought a seat at the table. But it also
stole scraps from it, too.
In
February 2019, only a day after Kim Kardashian was photographed in a gown by
the exalted French designer Thierry Mugler, Fashion Nova began selling a
replica. When Kim’s younger half-sister, the even more influential Kylie
Jenner, threw a star-studded 21st birthday party, dresses worn by guests were
cloned within hours. Fashion Nova was not just fast fashion, it was the
fastest. The process of recycling runway designs is well known and widely
practised, says Bimi Fafowora, who worked for Nova for nine months overhauling
their marketing and branding. “Celebrities wear these gorgeous gowns, they
release it on social media, fast-fashion brands pick up on it, release it to
the mass audience,” says Fafowora. “These people wear them for about a day …
because on Instagram you can’t wear anything twice.” (Fashion Nova did not
respond to a request for comment.)
As
Fafowora and I sat on the roof of the Nomad, a luxury London hotel frequented
by holidaying footballers, she remarked, “I think we’re in an age where people
aspire to something greater, something higher, more famous, more popular, more
loved, and fast fashion has allowed for that. It’s allowed for people to
shorten the gap between [them and] unattainable celebrities.”
In 2021,
Fashion Nova surpassed 20 million Instagram followers. Three years earlier, it
had become the internet’s most-Googled fashion brand, and the company posted
revenues of $294m. Fashion Nova invites aspiring influencers to buy and model
its clothes, then tag their photos @fashionnova and #NovaBabe. More than 10m
posts have been made by ordinary young women auditioning to get the brand’s
attention. Each is hoping to become a paid “NovaBabe”, an ambassador who
receives free clothes, the Instagram equivalent of being on the VIP table.
Fashion
Nova’s website has a callout for aspiring influencers: “Wannabe a #NovaBabe? Do
you have what it takes to be a #NovaBabe? Are you the OOTD [outfit of the day]
queen who can literally rock anything?! Do you have your own style that is
admired by others?? If that’s you, we want you to join our #NovaSquad!”
Many
aspiring influencers pay for hauls of Fashion Nova clothes to review and model,
viewing it as an investment in what they hope will become a job. In reality,
they’re providing the company with free labour as promo girls, giving the brand
adverts they did not have to pay for. The small number of women the company
actually hand-picks for free clothes tend to have a similar aesthetic. They are
young, most of them with narrow waists, wide hips and thick lips. Many have
hourglass figures and wear clothing that clings to their skin: an aesthetic
known as “Insta baddie”. If these women are black, they looked mixed-race or
light-skinned, and if they’re white, they mostly have dark hair and bronzed
skin.
Today,
Fafowora runs a boutique branding firm that recruits models and provides
marketing content for new fashion labels trying to replicate Fashion Nova’s
success. I ask her how the brands choose their models. “They base it on the
look that’s trending right now: the Kardashian look,” she replies. “It’s very
curvaceous, mostly racially ambiguous.”
A new
wave of pop-up talent agencies such as the London-based Above and Beyond Group
swipe through social media to scout for models and influencers who match this
brief. Their rosters looks diverse, but although most are not white, there is a
homogeneity of ambiguous beige and light brown.
Fashion
Nova may not have created this trend, but it has reinforced it. Fast-fashion
companies throw vast amounts of money and products at the young women they pick
to wear their clothes, and they have created a new economy that appears to
offer easy jobs to the prettiest girls on the internet. Beauty has always been
a commodity, but now it is far easier for women to monetise it themselves – if
they have the right look. The belief among many young women that being
desirable pays has led them to not only surgically change their shape, but in
some cases to even fake their ethnicity.
At the
age of 19, Aga began noticing that the pictures she took of herself and posted
online were getting more and more attention. “I didn’t really have an approach.
If I went out and I liked how I looked, I would take a picture.” The grid on
her Instagram page has an all-too-familiar grammar.
Aga’s
outfit of the day – whether fitted jeans with a crop top, a jumpsuit or a
patterned polyester dress – hugs her full hourglass figure. Underneath each
image she writes a playful caption such as “A daily dose of your thickums”. Her
skin is a light caramel brown and her hair is dark. Most of the selfies are
taken in front of her bedroom mirror.
Aga,
from east London, told me she had no desire to be internet-famous, but popular
theme pages celebrating curvaceous women found her pictures and reposted them.
One post was viewed over 147,000 times, and soon thousands of men began
following her. Aga became a local pinup. “I think nowadays people just love
thick [curvy] girls,” she says.
In 2018,
Aga’s pictures also caught the attention of fast-fashion companies and brands
investing heavily in influencer marketing. It was then she started to think,
“Let me try to make more out of this.” She was studying accounting, but saw
providing promo as a potential side hustle. She turned her Instagram page into
a business account that gives users metrics about who is looking at their page,
and then began tagging fashion brands including Fashion Nova. Not long after,
they started giving her clothes, as did its arch-rival Pretty Little Thing. Aga
had the desired aesthetic and the right audience. She also began working as an
affiliate for Protein World, a supplements company, which gave her a discount
code to promote to her followers. She got paid a commission for everybody who
used her code on purchases.
When I
interviewed Aga in 2019, she had 50,000 followers. Months later she surpassed
250,000. At the time of writing, most of the money she makes online is from ads
and affiliate work for local companies. She became one of a dozen ambassadors
for a London-based chauffeur company targeting those in the inner city
desperate to present themselves as successful. (Cars could be rented by the
hour. They didn’t need to go anywhere.) The company regularly recruits
attractive young women with significant numbers of followers to act as digital
promo girls for their largely male audience. Each ambassador generates an
income from the people who use their discount code. The ambassadors have an
almost uniform aesthetic – light brown or of mixed heritage and ethnically
ambiguous. Aga fitted in.
In
September 2018, the teenager photographed herself in an outfit composed of
items she had been given to promote: clothes, phone case, eyelashes, and even
hair, which came courtesy of a small afro hair store based in the east
Midlands. In the picture, she is standing in her trademark pose. Her hips are
wide and her waist is so narrow it looks like an optical illusion. Her skin is
brown, her lips are full and her wavy black hair is in cornrow braids, a
popular afro hairstyle. She is the picture of a confident and beautiful young
black woman. The only problem is, Aga is not a black woman. She was born in
Poland and would become one of the many white influencers accused of
“blackfishing”.
In
November 2018, a young writer named Wanna Thompson fired the first shot with
the tweet: “Can we start a thread of all the white girls cosplaying as black
women on Instagram?”
A post
was shared thousands of times with the before-and-after pictures of young white
women between the ages of 17 and 21 who had transformed themselves from having
pale skin, straight hair and narrow features into having brown skin, full lips
and wavy hair with the help of dark makeup, contouring and wigs. There are even
YouTube videos showing you how to do it. Emma Hallberg, a Fashion Nova
ambassador with the appearance of dark brown skin, had built up a loyal base of
over 300,000 followers, many of whom believed she was of mixed heritage and who
followed her for beauty tips.
When she
was included in the list, her stunned followers messaged her to ask if it was
true. Could she really be white? Hallberg replied that she had never claimed to
be anything else. Some of her followers tweeted that they felt deceived.
For Aga,
the controversy led to a huge increase in activity on her Instagram page. She
was accused of pretending to be black, of racism, and even minstrelsy,
referring to the old performance where white entertainers darkened their skin
to mimic and mock black people.
“I did
understand where people were coming from,” said Aga. “I’m a millennial. I am on
social media. I see the trends and stuff like that, it’s not like I looked at
my picture and thought they’re making up things from thin air, but what can I
do about that?”
Aga is
part of a generation that has only known a world in which the internet is
supreme and the dominant aesthetic in youth culture is hip-hop. The genre’s
music and fashion dictate not only what and who is desirable, but also the part
you can play in its billion-dollar industries and the clothing companies
attaching themselves to it for clout. To be shapeless and pale with narrow
European features has little currency in the part of the internet where a
Fashion Nova ambassador gig makes you a VIP. Today, many young white women in
their teens and early 20s are conforming to this standard by contouring, and
their racial transformation has an economic incentive, too: this cosplay
actually pays. The ethics and politics of beauty trends are rarely discussed in
a world where influencers happily sell their following to the highest bidder.
Fashion
Nova has a simple model: it buys cheaply manufactured clothes and manages to
glamourise them enough to sell them for a substantial profit. It would almost
certainly not be the juggernaut success it is without the stardust of
influencers. The brand captures all the contradictions of California, where its
clothes are presented on the bodies of Los Angeles’s finest, but many of them
are manufactured in the city’s hidden sweatshops.
Scattered
across downtown LA, according to advocacy group the Garment Worker Center, an
estimated 3,000 small factories employ Latina migrants to fill orders for
brands like Fashion Nova. Demand is high, and yet, in the UK alone, more than
300,000 tonnes of the clothes produced end up in household bins each year, with
less than 1% recycled. Aside from the environmental concerns, the industry also
has a record of labour exploitation. From Leicester to LA, poorly paid workers
are turning around the must-have celebrity dress of the day before tomorrow’s
new flavour arrives. Influencers dress up to market these clothes under the
banner of self-expression, but for the most part, the workers manufacturing
them have little voice.
According
to Marisa Nuncio, the director of the Garment Worker Center, 85% of factories
in the industry are paying under the minimum wage. “Through our casework we’ve
seen an average of $5.50 an hour,” said Nuncio. The minimum wage in California
is $13.25 an hour. Undocumented workers are easy to exploit, not just because
they are willing to work for less, but because they are too scared to mount
wage disputes for fear of reprisals that could get them deported.
The
Garment Worker Center soon noticed one company popping up again and again in
complaints by factory workers: Fashion Nova. Overnight, it had become the
company that sweatshops were fighting to win contracts with, and as they
competed for work, their fees went down. Although numerous companies who supply
garments for Fashion Nova have been found (in an investigation by the US
Department of Labor) to have withheld and underpaid wages, Fashion Nova says it
is not responsible for the practices of their suppliers. After they had been
contacted by the labour department, in a statement to the New York Times,
Fashion Nova said it had an “ongoing commitment to ensuring that all workers
involved with the Fashion Nova brand are appropriately compensated for the work
they do”.
Fashion
Nova did not invent the fast-fashion model, but it appears to be better than
any of its competitors at driving the demand for clothes manufactured to be
worn just once, by turning a generation of young women into mass marketers
without a care for what it is they are selling.
“Their
model is built on creating the demand,” said Nuncio. “I feel like it is not
even that someone like Fashion Nova is lying about who they are. They are
actually creating [an] environment [where] people don’t care.”
In
Fashion Nova’s flagship store in Panorama City Mall, the clothes on sale profit
from messages of female empowerment. The brand promises that women can be as
successful as NovaBabes like Cardi B. The rapper’s own fashion line sold out
within hours. In the store, colourful tops proudly sport slogans such as
“Equality” and “Independent Woman”, and yet Fashion Nova is a company owned and
run by a man accused by garment workers’ representatives of profiting from
clothes kept cheap by the exploitation of vulnerable women in his supply chain.
The
customer service could be so poor that some fashion bloggers have accused the
company of being scammers. Last April, Fashion Nova was fined $9.3m to settle
charges that the company failed to refund buyers whose orders failed to arrive
on time, or were never dispatched at all. In January this year, Fashion Nova
reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations it had
suppressed negative reviews, and was ordered to pay $4.2m. (The company
continues to deny it had manipulated reviews.) However, none of this has
stopped its boom in sales, or the queues of young women desperate for a Fashion
Nova brand deal, or even just some free clothes. When it comes down to it, the
company’s greatest success is as a dealer in hype.
This is
an edited extract from Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New
Influencer Economy by Symeon Brown, published by Atlantic books on 3 March
Hustle
and hype: the truth about the influencer economy. By Symeon Brown. The Guardian, February 24, 20212.
A clip
of Rihanna being interviewed has been doing the rounds recently. Asked, “What
do you do on those days you don’t feel confident?” she replies, “Uhh, pretend?
I mean why not, it’s either that or cry myself to sleep, who wants to do that?”
This idea of pretence – of faking it until you make it – is at the heart of a
new cutting exposé by Symeon Brown, Get Rich Or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit
in the New Influencer Economy.
Unlike
Rihanna, though, who has unquestionably made it, the book examines the fallout
of influencing and the murkier side of an industry built on an inconvenient
truth of scamming, vanity, and unattainable lifestyles. It’s a book “which is
led by stories about the people in this economic system who aren’t the
winners,” according to Brown, who zooms in on the world of pyramid schemes,
botched plastic surgery, Twitch swatting, dropshipping, and fast fashion. It’s
VidCon, OnlyFans, Forex, Deliveroo, and Khloe Kardashian, and explores how, in
an attempt to hustle our way up the economic chain and secure the bag, it can
bite us in the (surgically-enhanced) bum.
Social
media is the most exploitative frontier of late-stage capitalism, Brown says,
and he outlines a shift where the ruthless values of Wall Street have filtered
down into a young market desperate for financial success and freedom. Brown is
a news reporter for Channel 4, and the book finds him travelling to LA to meet
a Twitch streamer pandering to alt-right viewers for money, and migrants
working in Fashion Nova’s filthy downtown districts. The US, after all, is a
nation of salesmen, and the shadow of Trump, who Brown describes as
“effectively an influencer” looms large – when you have the ultimate scammer in
the White House, what does that tell the rest of the world?
With the
internet now the primary mode of wealth creation, the book also references the
slightly galling stat that more than one-fifth of children now name ‘influencing’
as their dream job. While it examines well-known pyramid schemes (‘multi-level
marketing’ companies) like LuLaRoe and Avon, the emerging markets of
cryptocurrencies and NFTs, which are bolstered by hype, can often be scams
packaged as get-rich-quick schemes. Below, we spoke to Brown about “cloutrage”,
the Californication of the world, and whether or not the influencing bubble
will finally burst.
Where
did the idea for the book stem from? How and why did you begin looking into
influencer culture?
Symeon
Brown:
I studied economics at university, and have
always been interested in how people live. Growing up in Tottenham, which at
the time was a multiracial but socially disadvantaged area, a few years ago I
started to notice all these young people from the ends – Tottenham, Hackney,
Brixton, from the estates – suddenly shifted their aesthetics and personas.
They went from wearing hoodies to three-piece suits, they were driving sports
cars and would carry themselves like hedge fund managers. I was like, ‘What’s
happening?’ I found out that they were part of a shadow economy that signed up
young people to bet on super dubious platforms – what in real terms were no-win
betting products. These people were building huge followers off the back of the
identity of traders, sometimes they even managed to dupe journalists. That led
to me looking at the world of Instagram, people mimicking the Wolf of Wall
Street and the meme culture surrounding it.
How did
that bring you to the wider – global – scope of the digital influencer economy?
Symeon
Brown:
It brought me to how working-class people had
consumed the idea of wanting to participate in capitalism. [I also noticed] a
renaissance in pyramid schemes online. The way they present is often very
gendered, or racialised. Many target women, sometimes young women who’ve just
had children, promising they can work from home, multi-level marketing
companies like LuLaRoe. Young people have never been able to see so much wealth
around them. It’s so accessible – they feel like they should be wealthy and if
they’re not, then that’s a character flaw. At the same time, there’s precarity
and a squeeze on real wages. I feel like a lot of stories about influencer
culture are told by people who have won; a blue-chip YouTuber, a Love Island
contestant. But if you really want to understand the system, you have to look
at the people who are losing.
Why do
you think ambition can turn so quickly into deceit, and why are so many people
willing to mislead their audience or followers?
Symeon
Brown:
A lot of the time these platforms reward and
incentivise lies. Adverts have always done that, but obviously it’s far easier
to regulate a TV or billboard advert than millions and millions of individuals.
The issue now is that if a platform, like Twitter, incentivises you to be
angry, and if you tweet something that’s going to get other people angry, that
could generate attention. If you can monetise that, or you’re rewarded for
anger or dishonesty, then people will just reproduce that.
On social
media it feels like the US’s culture is increasingly seeping into ours, and
that’s something you tap into in the book. Do you think American ideals are to
some extent powering this new economy?
Symeon
Brown:
One of
the ideas in my book is the Californisation of youth culture. In America,
there’s widespread inequality, but there’s no class, because they believe
anyone can make it. The American dream is ubiquitous, even though it’s flawed
and we know it to be mythology. But to some extent there’s more porosity to the
possibilities. With globalisation and the post-Thatcherite world, it’s really
about conceding political, economic, and social-cultural power to America:
whether we like it or not, those American ideas are here and they’re here in
great force. When I interviewed people for the book, some were major TikTok
influencers, and were like, ‘Your followers wanna see you in LA, this is where
all the big influencers are’. Hollywood’s there, celebrities are there, the
glamour is there. People want to consume an aspirational product. But then the
money behind the attention economy, people reaping the rewards as investors,
engineers, the creatives, are predominantly in Silicon Valley, San Francisco.
So you have this very small part of the world literally dictating our culture,
everywhere.
Your
book also touches on influencers wearing activists’ clothing, mentioning people
like Chidera Eggerue and Florence Given.
Symeon
Brown:
What
happens in that world is you have what’s called ‘cloutrage’, generating clout
from outrage. Important, valid social movements can become appropriated by
influencers who don’t always entirely get the issues. They become the loudest
people in the room and then, suddenly, you’re misrepresenting important
discourses. It enables alternative narratives to arise, which undermines the
validity of important movements. I spoke a little bit about what I saw taking
place in Black Lives Matter, where an important civil rights movement was
creating content that was removed from real action or understanding, leading to
misrepresentation and blowback, because that was what the algorithm demands.
This
went down after your book was finished, but the discourse around Molly-Mae’s
‘we all have the same 24 hours in a day’ comments feels important to bring up.
Symeon
Brown:
I imagine Molly-Mae would have been surprised
at the backlash because this is the dominant orthodoxy of our time: you have to
hustle. It’s up to you as an individual. It was that idea that was at the heart
of all the stories my book is telling: the age of individualism. I think the
critical reception she got was useful in terms of, let’s look at this idea: a
lot of people believe it, so let’s talk about that. Because we do know that
that is not the truth. Everyone knows how [Molly-Mae] made it, and there was a
lot of good fortune involved. Being self-made is a complete illusion, nobody is
self-made. But there’s a belief that you can be, and that was what I was keen
to really investigate.
Where do
we go from here? Do you see the influencer bubble bursting any time soon?
Symeon
Brown:
I don’t think we’re anywhere near the peak.
COVID was a huge engine of digital migration, but we still mostly consume
things offline, and increasingly spend more of our social life online. If you
have a social account – I mean, my final chapter’s called “We Are All
Influencers”, right? Affiliate links are going to be something that more people
do. Even the kind of language we use now, everything becomes a monetary
function. People misunderstand the idea of ‘emotional labour’, which is where
if you’re a service worker, you have to be nice to your guests. Emotional
labour is not your friend saying, ‘I feel down’, and you being like, ‘I’m gonna
have to bill you to listen to you’. It’s this idea that suddenly everything has
to be monetised and commodified. You can’t do hobbies if they don’t make you
money; people constantly pandering to brands: all these things are an extension
of that. It’s the result of a generation born in a media age. We’re all
inadvertently becoming media workers in some form.
How
influencers became the scam artists of the digital age. By Felicity Martin.
Dazed, February 9, 2022. 
How far
would you go to get famous and escape poverty? Ash Sarkar is joined by Symeon
Brown, Channel 4 News reporter and author of ‘Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition
and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy’, to discuss how the democratic
promise of the internet has reinvented the pyramid scheme. From
cryptocurrencies to botched Brazilian butt lifts, they look at how the new
clout economy has created a digital lumpenproletariat.
Influencers,
Exploitation and Capitalism | Ash Sarkar Meets Symeon Brown. Novara Media, January 26, 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment