Influence.

Many years ago, I wanted to be a YouTuber. I don’t know if that word is still colloquial, but back in 2012-2014, it was in the air, and I’d venture to say that many of us who were “coming of age” at that time found ourselves amidst the rising popularity and ubiquity of the “internet personality.” All of us — and I use that lightly — wanted to be one of them; we wanted to be famous.

Nearly a decade later, the internet personality has transformed into nothing short of the “influencer.” In fact, it is probably hard to name one of these individuals who isn’t an influencer in some sense, marketing or selling a product. I want to return to this point later.

To rewind, though: back in 2013 when I was getting ready to start my college career, I wanted to get into media studies. I was always an artsy kid: music, acting… trying to be a YouTube star. But for many reasons, I was also very interested in how all of it worked. There was something about the rise of the internet persona that was different in ways that other celebrities weren’t; namely that there was a direct second person relationship that existed between them and me, but it existed in a mediated space that made our entire relationship virtual and not real in any commonly understood way while also satisfying many of the social needs that one experienced from communicating with a friend long distance. While this probably applies to all social media, internet video media was different. It wasn’t the same as reading about what your friends were doing. It wasn’t like getting a postcard in the mail with some pictures. Unlike facebook, myspace, or even instagram back then, YouTube started something that I knew was going to change the world and they way we interacted with it. Video content allowed me to experience what the creator was experiencing in a personal time loop: content might have been recorded prior to posting, but having access to it at any time of day to watch, to rewind, to fast forward, to watch again… it allowed for a sense of intimacy that wasn’t available in other mediated spaces. These faces were speaking to me. I was being taken along for the adventure or sat down and told a story or having a conversation, and my ability to interact with the content itself gave me the feeling that I was right there with them, engaging in this interaction in a way that felt very real.

I didn’t know exactly what it was about this type of media that made it so enticing, but I wanted to understand it. I wanted to understand how via video, the internet both fixed my loneliness and, as I would later find out, exasperated it.

Today, it’s the year 2022 and I’m lucky enough to be in the position to really play around with these questions in ways that I wasn’t able to do in college, having the language and resources to think about these things in ways that I wasn’t quite capable of doing nearly a decade ago. Today, however, I am cognizant of one fact that was only a feeling back when I was an internet kid trying to get famous like everyone else: the rise of the “vlogger” and other internet personalities was catalyzed by capitalizing on a growing loneliness in the culture. With cellphones and other communication devices readily accessible at any time of day and ubiquitous across nearly all age groups, we found ourselves capable of finding comfort in new forms of relationship that could be mediated and fostered with this new technology.

I want to make myself clear: I do not think that the ubiquity of such technology made us lonely, but I do think that the ubiquity of such technology is suspect in how loneliness and a feeling of disenfranchisement and alienation became a form of capital that led to the ubiquity of such technology.

I remember that somewhere around 2013, talk of a “numbers game” on YouTube began to become a point of discussion among creators as Google found new ways to boost certain forms of content. A form of genius in its own right, the sort of data-mining that was happening at Google was beginning to find ways to connect people to other people who shared similar sorts of ideas, values, hobbies, and interests. There is much literature on the topic of how this phenomenon has led to polarization in all sectors of the social world, but what is more interesting to me is how the “algorithm” began to form a sort of subjectivity that was quite different from the idea of the “subject” that we in the liberal West had come to understand ourselves to be part of.

This brings me back to the fact of the “influencer.” Unlike the type of internet personality that preceded it, the influencer was a product of the capitalization of the virtual space. I do not believe that the Google engineers who were building the algorithm had insidious motives. In fact, one of the things I love about Google is that there does seem to be an underlying motivation to make the world a better place. (Of course, this is riddled with all sorts of problems like what it might mean to “make the world,” or to be a “better” place, which is why I believe it is more important now than ever to have philosophers in developer roles in large scale companies.) But the drive to connect individuals to content that matched their needs and interests also needed to be sustained by some sort of monetary capital, and so the need for ads on the platform began to rise and compete with professional networks that were beginning to sponsor individual creators so that they can continue their careers as internet creators.

Soon, Google developed standards for creators to adhere to so that these content sponsors would become partners rather than mere competitors, and the algorithm became a way to boost marketable content so that the platform could continue while investors made money off of “ad friendly” content that was free to partner with other brands for their own personal business venture.

The “numbers game” became quite a real thing. While intuitively the older generation of YouTube creators found ways to market themselves into niches, the need to sustain these careers coupled with the need to sustain the platform’s development while also allowing creators to generate income outside of partnering with Google advertisers generated the “influencer,” or internet personalities whose primary function was to generate revenue for sponsors by creating “ad friendly” content, or… bust.

The “influencer” can stand in as a normative example for this new subjectivity that was produced by algorithmic concern. The question of identity now became one of standardization… a phenomenon that was already sweeping the culture as the rise of data sciences became more accessible and ubiquitous to companies and institutions. Society became compartmentalized into manageable, observable data, and in order to manage such large scales of observations, the individual was crammed into a standard. This discourse on standardization exists in nearly all social sciences and now has brought about the exigence for critical discourse on evaluating what the “human” is. I believe, at least anecdotally, that the “influencer” is the definitive type of this standardized subjectivity, where fame and dignity are coextensive with predictability, manageability, and marketability.

What is at stake here is not merely the loss of some older concept of the person or the accusation of Luddism. Rather, of crucial concern is our very concept of dignity and our moral values. While I caution the conservative tendency to then damn these things on the grounds of protecting something essential to our identities, I do think that it is important to understand how our technological impulses to “make the world” and make ourselves square against our ideas of who we are and who we want to be, which is in my view inextricably linked with what we do. And so, the question of who we are is not simply an ontological question or a metaphysical one in any sense, but rather a moral one.

While certain norms necessarily will arise around the structuring and managing of this new sort of subjectivity, it will also be the case that the way we police these subjects will change, meaning certain forms of discipline will arise or come to popularity in line with our new conception of the self. As the subject becomes an object of manipulation, one which adheres to certain standards of predictability in order to thrive in an age of spectacle and commerce and profit, aberration, it might follow, would be met with standard and absolute forms of discipline and punishment.

I cannot help but wonder if “cancel culture,” or this fear of “being cancelled” arises from this technocratic impulse to survive by reminding one of just how lonely and isolated they can be made to be? That in order to find fame, or stability, or income, or housing, or money, we must fit a certain standard and fall within certain limits of error? But that particular concern aside, does this conception of the standard subject conform with our long-held belief in the free agency of the human person and moral dignity that is derived from it? Or have we come to find that we are nothing more than manipulable objects in the world and that freedom is no more than an imaginary concept brought about by the longings of some old dead men attempting to absolve themselves from their own crimes and guilt? Even if the latter is the case, are we truly willing to give up on our liberal belief in the inherent and immutable dignity of the person?

I caution to affirm the possibility of the latter. But though that is my own opinion and perhaps a manifestation of my own desire for the possibility of redemption, I do want to believe in the equal and immutable dignity of every person. Yet still, I can’t help but wonder just how far the spectacle of morality will take us.