The book was a bit hard to get through. I don’t fuck with influencers much, because it isn’t my jam, but I thought it would be interesting to read about them for some reason.
The book brought up some interesting talking points about influencers— the effect on mental health of both the person and the people that consume their content, the rise and fall of a career that subsists on monetizing every aspect of one’s life, the lack of representation in the influencer “community”, the necessity of pursuing opportunities as an influencer…
The argument of the book was to try to say “influencers are important”. The takeaway was that I dislike the culture around it even more. It was revealing that the subjects of the book were two-thirds God-Fearing White Women, plus a Black woman to even it out. She basically followed their careers for two (three?) years and wrote about it, tossing in several anecdotes about the harm of influencers and then saying how much she enjoys consuming such content.
It made me feel bad to read. Truly, it did. “Influencers make jobs”, then make thousands and thousands of dollars and end up in a psuedo-luxury lifestyle that hinges on disrupting their lives to continue to feed the machine, while exposing themselves to people who make hobbies of being assholes.
I don’t know. I just can’t vibe with it. I get angry at people who make so much money off the people who get them there but don’t seem to give back to the community in any meaningful way. The only one who earned my stamp of approval was Mirna Valerio, who used her platform and reach to try to bring brands around to embracing real body-positivity for athletes of the bigger variety. She wants to put her money to building a home and creating a space for people to exercise out of doors safely, for free, in a non-judgemental space. Like, how could I be mad?
The other two are Caitlin Covington and Shannon Bird. One runs a site that is basically an online fashion magazine. The other was a mommy blogger until a late night 911 phone call for baby formula tanked her career. I’m sure they’re perfectly fine people. They sounded somewhat fine in the book. I just don’t vibe.
Anyway. It was extremely difficult for me to finish and by the time I wanted to put it down, I was suffering from sunk cost, so…
