The Influencer Economy Is a Preview

Watch an influencer promote a product and you're watching something ancient and something radically new at the same time. The ancient part is obvious: someone with social status endorsing a product. Celebrities have done this forever. The new part is harder to see, which is why it matters more.

What's new is that the influencer isn't selling you the product. They're selling you the desire for the product. And increasingly, they're manufacturing that desire in real time, calibrated to your specific psychology, your specific vulnerabilities, your specific gaps between who you are and who you wish you were.

This is a preview. Of what the entire economy is becoming.

The Old Model

Traditional advertising worked like this: a company made something, then paid to tell you about it. The product existed first. The marketing came second. You saw an ad for a car, you wanted the car, you bought the car. Simple.

The influencer model inverts this. The desire comes first. The product is almost incidental.

A fitness influencer doesn't sell you protein powder. They sell you the fantasy of becoming someone different, someone better, someone who looks like them. The powder is just the totem, the physical object you can purchase to participate in the fantasy. If the powder didn't exist, they'd sell you something else. A program. A lifestyle. A feeling.

Tell me more about programmable desire

This isn't manipulation in the crude sense. The influencer isn't lying about the product. They're doing something more sophisticated: they're shaping what you want before you know you want it. They're upstream of your desires.

Distributed Desire

I think about this as distributed desire. Your wants are no longer fully yours. They're co-created by algorithms that determine what you see, by influencers who model aspirational lifestyles, by the endless scroll of curated lives that sets your baseline for what counts as normal or good or successful.

You don't form desires in isolation and then go looking for products to satisfy them. Your desires are formed by the same systems that then offer to satisfy them. The circularity is the point.

This is why the influencer economy feels both empty and addictive. It's empty because the products rarely deliver the transformation they promise. It's addictive because the desire itself is manufactured to be insatiable. You're not supposed to arrive anywhere. You're supposed to keep wanting.

The Scaling Problem

Here's what makes this a preview rather than a contained phenomenon: it scales.

Right now, influencer marketing requires actual influencers. Real people with real followings who have cultivated real parasocial relationships. This limits how many can exist. It limits how targeted they can be. A human influencer can only make so much content, can only speak to so many niches.

But what happens when AI can generate infinite influencers? Not just text, but video, voice, presence. Influencers designed specifically for you, calibrated to your specific insecurities, speaking directly to your specific aspirations. Influencers that learn what resonates with you and adjust in real time.

Tell me more about synthetic influencers

We're maybe two years from this being trivially easy. The technology already exists. It's just not deployed at scale yet.

When it is, the influencer economy stops being a sector of the economy and starts being the economy. Desire manufacturing becomes the primary economic activity. Everything else is just the supply chain for satisfying manufactured desires.

The Envy Engine

There's a darker layer here. Influencer marketing runs on envy. Not the productive kind of envy that motivates self-improvement, but the hollow kind that makes you feel perpetually inadequate. You're shown lives you can't have, then sold products that supposedly bridge the gap. They don't. The gap is the business model.

Social media companies have optimized for this. They've discovered that envy drives engagement better than almost any other emotion. So they've built systems that maximize envy production. Influencers are just the most efficient envy delivery mechanism they've found so far. The economics are stark.

This isn't conspiracy. It's convergent evolution. Any platform that doesn't optimize for engagement loses to platforms that do. Any engagement metric will eventually select for emotional manipulation. Envy works. So envy wins.

What's Coming

I don't think the influencer economy is good or bad. I think it's inevitable, given the incentives. And I think it's instructive about where we're headed.

In the emerging economy, the most valuable thing isn't what you make. It's your ability to shape what people want. Data lets you understand desires. AI lets you generate content that shapes them. Scale lets you do this to billions of people simultaneously, each one individually.

The influencer economy is just the beta test. The artisanal version. Human influencers are like hand-crafted goods before mass production. Quaint. Soon to be automated.

What replaces them will be more effective, more personalized, and much harder to recognize as influence at all. When the influence is generated specifically for you, shaped by everything the system knows about you, delivered through interfaces indistinguishable from entertainment or friendship or self-help, it won't feel like marketing. It will feel like life.

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I bought something last month because an influencer I follow recommended it. I knew, intellectually, that this was marketing. I bought it anyway. The desire felt real. It was real. That's the point.

We're not going to resist this by being smarter or more skeptical. The system adapts faster than skepticism. We're going to have to decide, collectively, what kind of desires we want to live with. What kind of wanting we're willing to have manufactured for us.

The influencer economy is a preview of that decision. A small-scale trial run. We're failing the trial run. Which tells us something about what comes next.