On Influencers

Do you ever scroll through the sea of sponsored content in search of your friends, only to stumble upon a twenty-something with perfect five o’clock shadow and a full head of hair trying to sell you protein powder? You know the guys — the ones who have to adjust their own camera phones, stark white ring light reflections erasing their true eye color — you must have seen them. They are inexplicably shirtless and have pecs popping in the afterglow of a morning workout. Hunching over their kitchen countertop toward an iPhone with eight camera lenses, they flex their abdominals in preparation to spew their talking points as soon as hesitation is sensed. “Influencers,” so they are called. Do you ever stare at them on your smooth silicon brick as their freeze-frame eyes stare into their own reflection in their smooth silicon brick? Do you feel the vertigo as you are flung across the yawning chasm of isolation to hover in the air, separated from the quiet desperation of another human being by the thin membrane of a transaction?

“Does it have a soul?” you wonder. “Like I do?”

Searching through the background of these thumbnails that make up the bulk of your meta-x-insta-tok trough, it is hard to find anything out of place, any sign of life in the desert planet living spaces of these social media laborers. A stray sock, perhaps. An unwashed dinner plate. When your thumb has cramped up and you decide to linger on such a video to learn why you should be quaffing the newest pre-workout of cricket butter and goat placenta, you find yourself hoping that a frumpy roommate…