Who should be famous? There are people who are so brilliant at – and dedicated to – what they do that their work makes the world seem bigger and more exciting. Watching them act, hearing them sing, reading their writing or seeing their art can make you feel like something inside you is waking up – like there is more to life than work, bills and shopping. It really hits you. There are people who live wild, fascinating lives, full of stories that remind you rules can be broken.
There are people who are so beautiful they seem to come from a different planet. You see a face like this and it stays with you. You find yourself, months later, in a supermarket queue, smiling and wondering about them, still. There are people who are very brave. Who will do the right thing, whatever the personal cost, because someone has to.
Then there are influencers. The typical mainstream influencer is conventionally attractive but unexceptional. They are accessible. They painstakingly document the minutiae of their lives: a parade of nights in; Tupperware lunches; cups of tea (herbal after 5); cocktails in chain bars; Ikea trips; gym outings; worthy non-fiction books; bland clothes from high street brands (they know fast fashion is bad, don’t worry); and their political views – corporate-brochure style progressivism. They are safe and unchallenging, a symptom of a risk-averse culture.
As Natasha Stagg writes in Sleeveless: “A typical influencer today is basic – the opposite of avant garde.” They are famous because they want to be. And often thanks to a deeply random origin story – appearing on a homepage, buying followers, being tagged by a bigger influencer, accidentally going viral – or via their participation in reality TV.
Mainstream influencers revel in their ordinariness. The larger their following, the more ordinary they tend to be. The biggest TikTok-er is Charli D’Amelio (135.8 million followers), a perfectly average suburban teenager whose skill is tap dancing. For a while her bio was a self-deprecating joke: “Don’t worry, I don’t get the hype either.” Social media has democratised fame and elevated banality.
My sense is that this banality has driven the demand that influencers conform to a narrow definition of a “good person”. A squeaky-clean type with brand-friendly progressive views, who lists their privileges and performs plainly superficial gestures, such as the trend for white people “confessing” to whiteness (a characteristic that is usually obvious). If a famous person is unexceptional, the subject of their morality becomes more salient because it poses an uncomfortable question: why do they deserve their fame?
Earlier this year, Molly-Mae Hague, an influencer who gained prominence as a contestant on Love Island, attracted ire for an interview where she said: “We all have the same 24 hours in a day … If you want something enough, you can achieve it.” This was interpreted as a shocking revelation of her Thatcherite worldview. Particularly stark since she serves as creative director of Pretty Little Thing, a brand that got bad publicity after its suppliers were revealed to be paying garment workers in Leicester just £3.50 an hour.
The vehemence of the response was striking. It seemed overstated, or mistimed. Hague’s position at PLT predated this – and the wages were national news in 2020. You don’t need great powers of deduction to discern that Hague’s politics would not align with a union rep’s. Was the issue her views? Or that she didn’t conform to what was expected of her as an influencer? If she had woodenly listed her privileges and self-castigated, while remaining at PLT, what difference would that have made?
While Hague’s media storm raged, I was subjected to a concerted advertising campaign by Uber, using a YouTube influencer named Lucy Moon. “Safety Matters with Lucy Moon,” went the tagline: “I love exploring the city. But as a woman, I also want to feel safe.” Footage showed Moon sipping cocktails and zipping around in a taxi. Uber has been beleaguered by issues linked to low driver pay, as Polly Smythe documented, and by safety concerns.
This advert seemed like Uber’s attempt to mitigate these issues. I imagine I saw so much of it because it was targeted at young women. This is not the most sinister (or canny) marketing strategy. But the influencer partnership struck me. Moon’s social media brand is familiar: a beige array of cardigans, teas and stock privilege disclaimers.
In posts from summer 2020, when the outcry over George Floyd’s murder made disavowing racism a brand imperative, Moon (who is white) exhorted followers to be better allies and advertised her own credentials by announcing that she was now reading Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. When I watched her Instagram story, it was a video explaining colonialism.
This self-conscious progressivism, performed while in partnership with a company that had to be forced by the UK supreme court to recognise workers’ rights, seems like galling hypocrisy. But I’m not sure it’s that; I think it’s mindlessness. The natural outcome of a politics that is proudly proclaimed when it is of personal benefit but totally unconsidered. Is this posturing better than what Hague said? Or worse?
Moon looks like just one example of the cynical and deeply unserious way that social justice operates among influencers: as a branding device. Melodramatic language (phrases like “taking a stand”) disguises the fact that what counts as activism on social media is inherently low-effort and low-cost. Even under these conditions, influencers are spineless. They frantically espouse support for causes that have mainstream buy-in and ignore controversial ones. The anti-racism black square in 2020, for example, was ubiquitous. Expressing views on Palestine is rare.
Inconsistencies abound. Rejecting colonialism is common, but there was silence last month on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot dead 13 people at a march for civil rights in Derry. The regular instances when a smear campaign (posing as a social justice crusade) is used to attract followers and advertise righteousness never involve personal risk. The recent West Elm Caleb saga was so corporate-brochure friendly that a mayonnaise conglomerate was involved within hours. It’s all just fake and silly.
None of this would matter if this progressivism was not being used to sell us something. Not just Uber or mayonnaise. But these people. These bland, ordinary figures. These symptoms of a culture that is forgetting the value of beauty, weirdness and coolness. Of people who are brave. Of people who are very good at something that matters. Of feeling like something inside you is waking up. A culture that is so risk-averse it has stupefied itself.
Rachel Connolly is a London-based journalist from Belfast
