[Letter from Los Angeles] The Anxiety of Influencers, By Barrett Swanson | Harper's Magazine

It does not bode well for us that so many of today's young "influencers" (as featured in this essay) seem to lack even the rudiments of a capacity for critical reflection or an appreciation of the value of education.

"..,these kids were very young when their parents gave them iPhones and tablets—they've never known a self that wasn't subject to anonymous virtual observation. And so it may well be that whatever we mean by "authentic" here isn't the standard definition that Rousseau and the Romantics first fathomed—a true effusion of your unvarnished personality—but is "authentic" in the sense that their identities have been made in perfect, unconscious sympathy with whatever their mob of online followers has deemed agreeable and inoffensive. Several times throughout my trip, I think I can see the toll this takes on them, a kind of pallid desperation that flickers across their faces. At one point, Brandon comes over and says, "The scary thing is you never know how long this is going to last, and I think that's what eats a lot of us at night. It's like, What's next? How long can we entertain everyone for? How long before no one cares, and what if your life was worth nothing?" Wasn't it precisely this kind of sadness that my lectures on Keats and Toni Morrison were trying so desperately to foreclose? —Continues,
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-house-the-anxiety-of-influencers/