Under the Influence

Influencers and influence networks

Rashed AlAkroka

A month or so ago, a close friend of mine finally started down the iron path.

You might think this is because I’ve relentlessly bullied him, but you’d be wrong. I don’t recall ever having tried to force him into the gym. That’s not something I’ve found to be effective. Long experience, both with myself and with others, has shown time and again that people need to have their own internal motivation. Whenever someone has relied on me to coax and cajole them into getting fit, it’s failed – the moment I let up, they stop.

I can’t say for sure what prodded my friend into finally taking the step to becoming an initiate of the iron temple. Only he knows. It’s possible his girlfriend remarking that I was jacked the last time I visited made him jealous, although that was a few years back so I doubt it. Another possibility, which I suspect to have at least contributed, was that I introduced him to the Golden One¹.

https://twitter.com/TheGloriousLion

I don’t watch the Golden One’s motivational YouTube videos a lot myself – I don’t much need the motivation at this point – but I met Marcus a few times several years back, and found him to be a great guy, open, friendly, honest, and almost painfully noble in a way that makes him entirely anachronistic. He’s also incredibly based: just ask RationalWiki.

Marcus is a professional influencer, with hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers and a prominent presence on Twitter and Instagram. He plays up the narcissistic gym bro routine to the hilt, interlaced with references to Evolian esoterica and generous helpings of Tolkien, Skyrim, and Warhammer 40k. Of course, he’s got a book – every good influencer has a book – a clothing line, and (as befits his niche) nutritional supplements, all available at his Legio Gloria webstore. I couldn’t tell you what his main income stream is, but he seems to get by.

Influencers have an unsavoury reputation. In the popular imagination, they’re a class of vapid selfie stick-wielding exhibitionists curating their lives for public display, presenting idealized AI-filtered images of themselves in order to trick everyone into thinking that they’re more glamourous and interesting than they really are, all with the goal of grabbing enough attention to funnel customers towards their affiliates. It’s all a marketing con, the latest iteration in a long and sordid evolution from newspaper ads that merely lied about the product’s virtues (nine out of ten doctors recommend!), through lifestyle branding that sought to differentiate indistinguishable products from their competitors by associating them with completely unrelated but desirable attributes (buy our laundry detergent and you too will have a stunning home in a leafy suburb with smiling children playing under the trees on a beautiful summer day!), which has now degenerated yet further into people whose entire lives have become nothing more than one long, uninterrupted product placement ad.

The stereotype is there for a reason – it’s mostly true.

Which doesn’t stop influencers from wielding massive cultural influence.

Consider Andrew Tate.

I’ve had harsh things to say about the e-pimp and recent Muslim convert in the past, and I stand by those things. Enriching himself by exploiting the loneliness of hordes of frustrated simps consoling themselves with the parasocial relationships they buy by the month from his stable of camgirls isn’t helping the social decay he rails against, it’s feeding on it and making it just that little bit worse. This is in direct conflict with the message that he spreads to his millions of followers – that they should hit the gym, find ways to get rich, learn to talk to women, and so on. Nevertheless, the fact that Tate is² extremely influential with a huge audience of zoomer boys cannot be disputed, and by and large the message he preaches is, I think, a good one. At the very least it’s a much better message than the one being rammed down their throats in the schools and in the media: that masculinity is toxic, the future is female, cut your dick off, yadda yadda.

Tate inspires those young boys to take control of their own lives, to pursue strength, power, dominance, wealth, to make something of themselves.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the reason the Romanian authorities went after Tate so hard was pressure from globohomo, and the reason globohomo applied that pressure was that they wanted Tate shut down. Here they are, spending billions of dollars per annum in order to demoralize young males, and here’s this one guy with a webcam and a TikTok account who’s undoing all of their hard work, singlehandedly defeating the legions of feminist elementary school teachers, adderall-prescribing child psychiatrists, and pudgy lesbian screenwriters who have been working for years – years, damnit – to break the spirits of make those boys good little anti-racist male feminists who understand that pronouns are the real life accomplishment. After his arrest, there was a flurry of articles in the regime press bemoaning the seemingly universal name recognition of Tate amongst teenage boys, and the equally universal admiration the grifting misogynistic showoff inspired. You could sense the unease. Under their noses, something horrible had been growing...

Part of the disdain with which influencers are treated, their castigation as shallow and self-aggrandizing pretenders, is almost certainly due to professional jealousy. The credentialed class are strongly motivated by their desire to ‘make a difference’ in the world, to become noteworthy, people of standing whose word carries weight. They want to be important. That isn’t a bad thing in itself; such ambition is a potent motivator, and when properly directed it can result in great achievements. Do something impressive, and be granted formal recognition of the achievement.

It’s all become parodic now, of course. The credentials are substituted for the achievements: the credentialed pretend that the finger pointing at the Moon is the Moon, and moreover, in order to be allowed to point at the Moon in the first place one must first point deer, say horse. To gain entry to the credentialed classes one must be willing to participate in elaborate lies, with the isomorphism of credentials with ability being one of the prominent threads of let’s-pretend weaving through that tapestry of deception.

Childish games of make-believe can only be sustained for so long before the audience tires of them, and the captive audiences of the credentialed are bored to tears. The white boys are tired of being told they’re racist for being white and sexist for being boys. Citizens are tired of being told they’re science deniers for wondering why they need to be impoverished in the name of the climate when the climate models are always wrong, or for asking reasonable product safety questions about novel medical treatments. Taxpayers are bored of being told they’re xenophobes for wanting borders and selfish for not wanting to be bankrupted to pay for the migrants flagrantly violating them. I could go on but you all know the litany at this point. The list of glaring failures from the intellectual elites is long and familiar.

Enter the influencers, as a rival intellectual elite.

Armed with nothing more than charisma, wit, and a social media presence, influencers build audiences that can reach into the millions. Their podcasts and livestreams get views that make anchors at major broadcast media weep bitter tears of envy. Their blog posts can reach more readers than any journalist at a major newspaper or magazine. They have reach. They can move the needle in ways the legacy media no longer can, and unlike corporate journalists they say whatever the hell they want.

The influencers don’t need credentials. Many of them possess credentials, of course. There’s a strong undercurrent of Turchinian resentment running through influencer political discourse. We’ve been overproducing doctorates for decades relative to the number of available sinecures, and not everyone finds a seat at the table in the great game of musical endowed research chairs at the universities. As competition for high-status positions has grown more fierce, the elite have increasingly relied on (im)moral signalling to regulate entry, which has only made the situation worse: it’s one thing to lose the game because others were better at it, but it’s another thing entirely when the game has shifted from professional competence to political acquiescence, and you see the positions filling up with unimpressive mediocrities. But then, isn’t that exactly what the losers would say? There’s a fascinating symmetry to the intellectual war raging between the credentialed and the influencers: the former accuse the latter of being merchants of misinformation, while the latter deride the former as a bunch of lying shits. Don’t listen to those guys, they’re full of it – the one message everyone can agree on.

In any case, many of the influencers do have some form of credential. But unlike the credentialed class, for whom that pat on the head from teacher is necessary (albeit not sufficient) for career advancement, credentials are entirely beside the point for influencers. The audiences don’t care. A substantial fraction of influencers are anons, writing from behind the protection of pseudonyms. Some of them openly discuss their academic backgrounds – eugyppius or el gato malo, for example. In other cases, they never mention it, although it can be inferred from their grasp of subject matter: if Bronze Age Pervert’s doxx is to believed, for instance, he has a doctorate in political philosophy from Yale ... but so far as I know he’s never once mentioned this background. He’s never used a piece of academic paper as an argument for why he’s correct about something, anymore than eugyppius or el gato malo have. He lets his arguments stand on their own.

BAP is a particularly interesting example: BAPbook went to the top of the Amazon rankings immediately upon release, and dominated its category for years thereafter. It’s probably the single most influential work of political philosophy (if you can call it that) of the last decade, inspiring fanatical loyalty among his base on Frog Twitter, and endless attack articles from the limp conservative press pointing and sputtering and demanding that no one take this dangerous clown seriously. An anon wrote Shitpoast: Teh Book and outcompeted the entire class of torpid academics whose long-winded, soporific sludge not even they bother to read.

The credentialed are optimized to slither up the greasy pole of the institutions by appealing to authority, and therefore acculturated into a system in which things are true because authorities say they are true, since it is at each stage in their career those very authorities who decide whether or not they advance based entirely on whether or not they agree with sufficient enthusiasm with authority. Credentialed discourse has thus evolved into empty sycophancy intended to flatter egos while avoiding controversy and therefore, of necessity, avoiding any genuine intellectual insight, with the illusion of depth achieved via endlessly more elaborate euphemisms, confusing circumlocutions, and dense thickets of technical jargon. The aim is not to enlighten but to bore to death, not to be read but precisely to avoid being read ... even by one’s dissertation committee. It is the intellectual equivalent of a virtual Zoom background showing walls packed with books that they’ve never read.

The influencers by contrast are born in the anarchic agon of the Internet, where no one cares where you studied or how many letters you have under your name, and an anime pfp can talk back to a professor emeritus, a New York Times journalist, or a public health director and, if the mind behind the absurdist pseudonym knows its stuff, absolutely own them. The coin of the realm is not approval from authority figures but approval of the audience, and that means one must be interesting enough to pay attention to, and the best influencers are able to garner vast amounts of attention.

There are obvious failure modes inherent in this model. Influencers are entertainers before they are scholars, scientists, or journalists, and the temptation to grab attention with pointless e-drama or blatant nonsense is always strong and, for many, too difficult to resist. For every bad cat running the numbers on the potential fertility impact of gene therapy injections, there’s a Stew Peters shouting into the camera about nano-hydras self-assembling out of graphene oxide particles which is surely going to KILL 90% OF THE HUMAN SPECIES right after it TURNS EVERYONE INTO BORG ZOMBIES REMOTELY CONTROLLED BY THE 5G TOWERS! Let us be honest that the credentialed have a point about the tendency of histrionic absurdities to go viral. It is not so much a question as to whether this happens (it does, and often), but of whether we trust them to decide for everyone else what constitutes nonsense (we do not).

To a certain degree the ecosystem is self-correcting. We very online natives have grown jaded over the years due to the hoaxes and fake news that we’ve shared and believed, even if only momentarily, and have learned to treat information we come across in Bayesian rather than binary terms, collating data from multiple streams of varying trustworthiness and basing our evaluations on evolving models of reality rather than on the unimpeachable veracity of Trusted Sources:

In the reputation economy, bad actors who fail the temptation test and sacrifice reliability for attention once too often will tend to lose audience as fast as they gain it. Those who are more often right than wrong (and honest about when they are wrong), while also being consistently interesting, novel, and entertaining, will see their audiences grow, and be rewarded. We don’t need official government agencies or corporate oversight boards to curate our datastreams for us.

We started this discussion looking at influencers as though they are mere individuals, in isolation, but of course this could not be further from the truth. An influencer is merely a node in a network, distinguished from other nodes only insofar as it has more connections than ordinary nodes. The network itself is massively redundant and fractal in structure. The basic functionality of each node is the same, meaning that any node has the potential to become an influencer in its own right. Indeed the boundary between ‘audience member’ and ‘influencer’ is a fuzzy one on the social networks.

We should thus think more in terms of influence networks than we should in terms of individual influencers. All of us participate in these networks. I’m participating by writing this; you’re participating by reading, and hopefully sharing, it.

That participation is a key element in the influence network’s power to shape our minds. We are not necessarily simple consumers of information, but are actively producing it. The influence networks are participatory: we respond with comments, tweets and retweets, replies. When you participate in this fashion, articulating a given set of ideas, there is a tendency for you to take ownership of them. Words that emerge from within you are your words, your thoughts, an expression of your soul. When others respond to, share, like, or otherwise appreciate what you say, this reinforces your convinction that you said and thought something good. This then shapes your conception of the good. As your conception of the good changes, inevitably, your behaviour changes. You see a gap between who you want to be, and who you are, and you move to close that gap in order to resolve that contradiction between identity and actuality and thereby avoid falsifying the fundamental premise that your identity exists.

Thus, for example, the memes I consumed on 4chan ultimately led me to start lifting weights. Thus, for a similar example, the Golden One’s videos planted seeds in my friend’s mind that led him down the same path.

This is a process that was used by communist psychotechnicians during the Cold War in order to brainwash captured GIs into hating America. They’d have essay competitions in the camps, asking the POWs to write critiques of America ... not necessarily from a Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, or dialectical materialist perspective, no not at all, but surely there was something to criticize about your homeland, right? America can’t be perfect, after all ... nothing is perfect. There’s always room for improvement, so write about that. Then they’d reward the best essay with a bit of extra food or something. Sure enough, the next round of essays would be just a bit more critical, and then a tiny bit more, and then just a few more steps and before long they’d turned the captured tank drivers into tankies.

Those communist brainwashers understood that when you say something yourself, something that you weren’t coerced into saying but rather an articulation of your own ideas, you want to believe it is true. It becomes a part of your identity. Shape this discourse, and you shape people’s minds. The ideas will become a part of them.

This was almost certainly the dynamic driving the Great Awokening. Social media companies changed their algorithms to boost left-wing content, and Facebook normies started noticing that when they said something leftish they got a few more likes, a few more shares, a few more replies. So they did more of that, and like caged rats hammering on the big red cocaine button the dopamine engineers had enslaved them to, they got led step by step into political radicalism that left them ideologically unrecognizable from who they’d been only a few short years before.

There’s an irony there: the Great Awokening has primarily grabbed hold of the neocortices of the credentialed professional-managerial class, who have found themselves in open competition with the rising influencer class ... yet it happened precisely because of the power of influence networks to shape human thought. Those who rail most loudly against the misinformation-spreading network are the those who have been rendered into unreflective NPCs by that network. Perhaps deep down their unease with the power of this technology emerges from an unspoken recognition of what it has done to their own minds.

You don’t get much of a choice about whether you participate in an influence network. In principle, you can unplug completely – delete all social media, cancel your internet, break your phone, smash your computer, and move out innawoods to take up the Uncle Ted lifestyle in a wood-heated tinyhome. In practice, almost no one is going to do this ... and even those who do, still have to live in a world in which influence networks are the single most important force shaping the minds of essentially everyone they run into.

What you do get a choice about is which influence networks to participate in. This is no small matter. Whichever network you join and begin feeding will inevitably shape your consciousness, and the effects over the long term can be dramatic or devastating, leading you to ascent or annihilation. It can set you on an upward path of self-improvement, or drag you down the devil’s staircase into self-destruction. One network will fill your mind with thoughts of marriage, children, productive work, creation, beauty, truth, physical fitness, intellectual growth, spiritual development. Another will feed your worst impulses, turn you against yourself, fill you with despair, poison your soul with envy, teach you to excuse your laziness and greed and gluttony, trick you into sterilizing yourself.

You must choose wisely. There is great hazard here, because it is not a choice that is easy to reverse. The longer you spend immersed in a given influence network, the greater your participation within it, the harder it becomes to disentangle your very sense of identity from the network’s memetic structure. Changing networks is not like changing one’s socks, but is more akin to religious conversion. It is not that it is impossible to switch paths if you choose the wrong one ... it simply becomes increasingly difficult to do so.

The influence network you participate in is also the influence network that you build. It informs your mind and gradually even shapes the very form of your body. At the same time the network draws strength from you, becoming that much larger and more influential to the degree that you participate in it. Some networks are parasitic, thriving to the degree that they weaken you over time. They suck the life out of you like vampires. Others are symbiotic, becoming stronger by filling you with vital energies. You should always be asking yourself, are the networks I’m participating in leaving me feeling energized or enervated? Are they tonic or toxic?

As for influencers themselves, this isn’t just a game any more. There are real world consequences for the memes that you spread. People’s lives are directly affected: the choices they make are a function of the ideas in their heads, and every influencer has some input on that both for their direct followers, and via second-order effects, followers of followers of followers in the extended network who may encounter the ideas you propagate without ever knowing you passed them on. Using influence merely to sell product on behalf of Globohomo Inc. is a perversion of a sacred responsibility. Using it just to grab attention because you want the validation of attention for attention’s sake is a similar abrogation of responsibility. I’m not saying you should not garner attention (that’s the nature of the game), nor that you should not make money (you should). But it should be about more than that. At every step you should ask yourself: is what I am sharing likely to improve the lives of the people who encounter it? Maybe in big ways, like convincing them to have that first kid, or the third; maybe in small ways, like it just makes them laugh, and takes out some of the sting of these terrible years we are living through. If the answer is no: don’t do it. Spread something else. Do your part to build the network that opens our future into something wonderful.

Shahab Alizadeh

Thanks for reading! As always, if you’re still looking for more to read, feel free to check out my archive – and I do mean free, because it’s all in front of the paywall. Some of my most popular essays are collected here. A special thank you to the perfecti of the Martian legions who have stepped up to become supporters of this blog. You’re what makes all of this possible, and that isn’t just me trying to shift the blame. If you’ve been enjoying my writing, and would like to liberate your heavy spirit from the dense gravitational pull of your guilty conscience and thereby join the elite in orbit around Barsoom on Deimos Station, our doors are always open:

In between writing on Substack you can find me on Twitter @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active on the Russian malinformation distributor at Telegrams From Barsoom.

1. Upon checking with my friend, he says that probably planted a seed, although he isn’t sure exactly what it was that finally pushed him into it. Whatever, I’m running with it anyhow.

2. Perhaps was, although I doubt he’s done just yet, the Romanian authorities notwithstanding.