Anyone with eyes and feeds has probably noticed that Coachella, known to its friends and snarks as The Influencer Olympics, is firmly in its flop era.
The outfits are meh, ticket sales slow and low, the brands activations are beyond formulaic and mostly smaller-scale than usual (apart from Kourtney K’s Camp Poosh…man she’s spending), and the creators are moaning (James Charles has 40 videos to film and he is o-ver it). Headliner Lana Del Rey was lifeless and mumbling, according to The Guardian: “she lay on the stage and sang, straight up bed-rotting her way through Coachella.”
In internet-speak, it’s giving can’t-be-arsed.
(Sidebar: ever so grateful for such reliably shit phone coverage at Glastonbury)
As always, everything is connected and I think what’s going on in the desert is helping reveal a collective disillusionment with - and within - influencer culture. Or at least, this influencer culture.
Sinead Bovell tweeted this recently and I’ve been…staring at it.
I think she’s right. It does feel like we’re no longer where we were, but not yet where we’re going.
How we behave on our social platforms has always revealed a lot about who we are + what we want.
Right now I think we’re sick of bonding with others through what we consume. What we buy. What we wear. How we eat. What (and whether) we drink. What we watch. What we put on our faces. Where we go on holiday. How we decorate our homes.
I think there’s a deep yearning to bond with others through what we think. How we feel. What we’re interested in. What we believe. How we perceive the world. How we define ourselves.
Who we are.
Not what we buy.
All this recent discourse about personal style, and taste, feels like trying to do point 1 by way of point 2.
We’re using our consumption (what we have, what we’ve bought, what we want to buy) as a code to express things about our inner selves or explore our inner worlds (who we are).
…and that’s a problem.
I think we’re yearning to explore and reveal our inner self and inner worlds.
But the current social media paradigm wasn’t really built for that.
It was built to monetise human conversation and community.
To help us develop as consumers. Not to develop as people.
To become better, more efficient consumers. Not better, more self-aware people.
Trying to explore and share our inner feelings and thoughts via our outer surfaces is making us sick, broke and unsatisfied.
…I think the platforms are fully aware.
Instagram is consistently trying to move beyond the performative, heavily filtered, snap-shotty, highlights reel it’s criticised as.
What has its algo been favouring of late? Photo dumps, rawness, transparency. Recent features shipped? More quick, casual video (Reels) + more thought-provoking written hot takes (Threads). But then, it’s also consistently dialling up shoppability.
I think Instagram changed the day someone turned the camera around. Right back at the start, it used to be a kind of window into others’ worlds - a feed full of what people could see right now. Sunset, latte art, their lunch. Then it became a feed full of faces staring back at you.
Similar scenes at TikTok. The dance vids and shopping hauls have evolved and we’re seeing more deep storytimes and POVs, longer videos and educational content series (edutainment lol).
In my feed there are board-certified doctors and cosmetic chemists, sociologists, serious fashion critics, philosophers, psychologists, lecturers, graphic designers, product designers, political analysts and breaking news from major news orgs, in amongst the GRWMs, skits, lip syncs and shop-bought-pesto stitches.
There’s been a lot of talk about TikTok as a search engine.
A lot of data on demographic shifts (broadening out, up-ageing) in the user-base.
TikTok remains a v mixed bag, but as the platform develops it feels like the direction of travel is - in general - moving away from the ephemeral and towards the sincere. Or at least, towards a balance. That said, TikTok Shop is a juggernaut.
(But Substack runs on different rails)
It’s become a haven for thinkers. A place to connect through ideas and views, with (if you’re me) ex-masthead journalists and editors, behavioural scientists, authors, professors, think tanks. People (of letters?) open up here with a depth and honesty I have rarely seen in 20 years of working in + watching digital culture.
On Substack you can hold a thought in your mind for a bit longer than other platforms are designed for. And there’s no obvious role/space yet for brands, beyond perhaps a founder newsletter (it’s my job to advise fashion/beauty c-suites and let me tell you, they want in).
However Substack co-founder
posted this last week:“Writers and creators need a system that has them, and not advertisers, at the center. That system is Substack”.
Then there’s Reddit (that just IPO’d at market value of $6.4bn) where users are anonymous and ruthlessly honest.
And Wisdo where users form communities around what life challenges or wellbeing/mental health concerns they have.
Or Vero, which is all about privacy and control - users share with pre-set ‘circles’ of close friends/family only (wait, wasn’t that Google+?).
And Airchat, where people speak their thoughts into existence.
None are perfect, obviously. But all those platforms are built to nurture (niche) communities, with an emphasis on privacy and control, running on more progressive revenue models (like Substack’s two-tier free + sub model), with some form of ethical design built for user well-being.
But the question really is about WHY we share, more than WHAT or WHERE.
What do we truly hope to achieve/feel when we hit share, I wonder?
It seems that we’re no longer sharing in hopes of building a huge audience…100k+ creators are actively asking people to unfollow them.
It seems that we’re not doing it in hopes of becoming a professional influencer…see above, their status is waning and it doesn’t seem as fun as it perhaps once did.
I’d risk saying it seems that we’re not even doing it for validation anymore…because we know by now that online praise from strangers, even going viral, is a hollow victory.
I think we (generally, increasingly) share to express ourselves + better understand ourselves.
If so then the dominating social apps are not fit for purpose.
Because they’re not really built for discovering ourselves.
The future of social influence = a more true, real meeting of minds? And less artifice.
I think you can see it, for example, in the rise of messaging groups and gated mini-communities of interest, as an alternative to that massive imbalance of creator-on-pedestal + thousands/millions of followers. And I think you can hear it, for example, it in the tone of the debate around the ethics of gatekeeping. And I think you can feel it, for example, in the rebound of Tumblr.
These are, probably, rather early adopters. Does everyone really truly know who they are enough to confidently express it? Almost certainly not. Has life under the algorithm systematically robbed many of us of the chance to find out? Almost certainly.
So who knows? But maybe we’ll see more equitable relationships, where we maybe don’t follow like disciples, but rather subscribe or connect like opted-in supporters.
Maybe we’ll see the death of visible metrics - maybe viewcounts, likes, all content performance indicators will be removed from public view to lessen the urge to chase engagement, or to follow the most popular creators. Which would prob give us - quickly - a much greater diversity of voices, much greater inclusivity, and lessen that deathmarch drift to the middle…the average…the enshittification. And removing metrics could remove (or at least lessen) the performance anxiety…the fear of our content visibly, publicly failing - or catching fire…we know by now that this brings its own set of pressures and anxieties. Metric-hiding is already possible a bit here and there across different platforms. And it’s how podcasts have always operated. So there’s the blueprint.
I think things will change because when any consumer market experiences this kind of tension - misalignment - then change always comes. And here, now, to me at least, it seems pretty clear that…
We all probably want to see and be seen as individuals. Not echo-chamber clones.
We all probably want to be understood as who we really are (wait, who are we really?)
We all probably want to get to know ourselves better by finding (truly) like-minded others.
We all probably want stronger ties…real connection, actual community, meaningful interaction with people we respect and find interesting.
Life under the algorithm makes all of this hard, and so does the great irony of the age: we’ve never been more connected, yet felt more isolated.
But when you zoom out to try and get a 10,000ft view - by reading anthropology and sociology and human psychology; by looking for the red threads across literature and poetry and plays and movies and music lyrics (over the past couple of centuries!), I think it’s pretty clear this stuff is what most humans really want.
It’s perhaps all we’ve ever wanted.
Thanks for reading/see you next time.
bb
A bit more?
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Sherry Turkle - an oldie but a bloody goodie.
You Are Not A Gadget, Jaron Lanier - ditto.
New release (not yet published in UK) The Anxious Generation from Jon, who writes
.Plus this piece in The Atlantic on the terrible cost of a phone-based childhood.
What have I missed??
"Then it became a feed full of faces staring back at you." Awful! I'm in the gardens community, so they are usually accompanied by people lecturing me about how to do stuff I'm very well aware of how to do (better). Always reminds me to shut the sound off.
But there is much point in much garden gossip and pics.
What a great piece. This line in particular makes me hopeful! “…maybe we’ll see more equitable relationships, where we maybe don’t follow like disciples, but rather subscribe or connect like opted-in supporters.” Let’s manifest that! Substack certainly feels more that way than any other platform I’m on. ❤️