A Crash Course on the “Corpocene”: The Influencer Factory, with Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness

You are listening to Policy Prompt. I'm Vass Bednar, and I'm joined by my co-host, Paul Samson. He's the president of The Centre for International Governance Innovation. Policy Prompt features long-form interviews where we go in-depth to find nuances in the conversation with leading global scholars, writers, policymakers, business leaders, and technologists who are all working at the intersection of technology, society, and public policy. Listen now, wherever you find your podcasts.

Is public policy keeping up with the Kardashians? Recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal illustrated that social media influencers, well, they aren't getting rich. In fact, they're barely getting by, and this is because platforms are just paying less for popular posts, and brands are pickier about partnerships, and there's a possible TikTok ban that looms in the US. You can still get tic tacs.

So even as the business shrinks over all, it's still pretty big.

Hey, Vass. I'm going to jump in here with a Tic-Tac-Toe, sorry. TikTok is on fire right now in the US. ByteDance, the parent company, may be forced to sell or shut down TikTok in the US due to national security concerns. There's a ton going on, including a McCourt Global Consortium to buy TikTok and redesign it to give power back to the content creators and totally shift the model. So there's big stakes at play right now, and it's in the courts. We'll see what happens.

Well, I mean, I think that kind of power shift could actually be pretty interesting. It does feel that there is a generational shift brewing as well, right? Gen Zs in the US, Gen Zed here in Canada, a little bit of a joke there, are more skeptical about influencers related to... Were trying to kind of politically influence them on the cusp of the next presidential election. That's different than back in 2020, but still, at the same time, influencers as these figures, the very compelling people, remain powerful brokers of products and ideas online, and they do court and capture our attention.

Our guests today, Katherine Guinness and Grant Bollmer, are the authors of The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube. They've studied the characters and personalities that compel us on the internet, and they have a thesis about what it all means.

Paul, they're going to help us understand why Mr. Beast, somebody called KSI, and Logan Paul are releasing a Lunchables competitor. But this isn't a how-to, this is a maybe-don't-do.

Yeah, I had to dig back a little bit to understand who my deep influencers are in preparing for this podcast, but it was pretty cool.

Katherine and Grant, it's great to have you here. Welcome to Policy Prompt.

Hello. Thank you.

Yes, thank you very much.

I really liked that introduction and the Keeping Up With the Kardashians reference because I once made a bet with Grant that there's no theory I could not teach through the Kardashians, that I still stand by that.

You're till cashing in on that, good.

They're excellent theoretical tools, yeah.

I feel like I get a cut for this one. I wondered if we could start by going around our huddle here, and just maybe sharing or confessing an influencer or an online personality that either now or a one point in our life was part of our lives. Someone we were low-key following. I wondered: Who are they, and why were they or are they important to you? Anyone can start, or I can start. Paul, do you have? Or Katherine, you're ready. Katherine.

Sorry, I'm so excited about this, because I could probably spend two hours, but honestly, a lot of the influencers within our book are the influencers that I have followed, and I think a lot of them are influencers I've followed for almost 20 years now, some of them. We talk about this journey of some of them starting in the early, early days of blogging and watching them try the different platforms and how that goes. And so I would have to say that while Mia Maples, who is a Canadian ...

Mia Maples:

Everyone, so today we are doing a very exciting video. I am very afraid for what is going to happen in this video because one of these pieces potentially could make me go bald. I'm not even ...

Kind of very middle-tier, she's not super famous. I think it's surprising that she's in the book, to some people, but that is because I think she's very representative. But it's just because I love her so much, and she's just excellent. But also, it is a sister team called A Beautiful Mess. Their names are Elsie and Emma Larson.

Elsie and Emma Larson:

... to our home. I am so excited today because four years later, I am here to show you before-and-afters of our fully renovated home. I'm going to break-

They have been, from early, early blog days, and even before WordPress days, and are still thriving, which to me is just wildly impressive, and very interesting about this difference. When you say that 50 million people earn some money, the way that they have been able to earn all the money from these different platforms to where they are, very, very wealthy, and they disclose that, and they're very honest now about how they make that money, is fascinating.

I'm with you there, and you're referencing women, too. I think what's interesting about some of the history of influencing is how women were at the cutting edge. For me, my reveal here is there was a fashion blogger, she no longer posts, but she was posting on the daily, and I think I was living very vicariously through her as a younger professional.

She lived in New York, she met her boyfriend, they got married, she had her baby. I read about what her birth was like. I looked at her outfits every day. It was outfit of the day. It was a part of my day, and then all of a sudden, it just stopped, and I was like, "Well, I hope she's okay." But it was certainly something parasocial going on there.

Paul or Grant, do you have a follower... Or someone? Who have you been following, in or out of the book?

I would say one of the people that I find to be most interesting is Mr. Beast. That is the online name of Jimmy Donaldson.

Jimmy Donaldson/Mr. Beast:

I just bought this train, and it is currently barrelling full-speed towards that giant pit over there.

I find him to be like... His videos are so extreme, and he embodies this kind of excessiveness, this over-the-topness that I think Katherine and I talk a lot about in the book. One of the things that I find to be really interesting about Mr. Beast, so at one point when we were writing the book, I was in North Carolina. I was teaching at NC State there, and NC State is about an hour west of where Mr. Beast is based. And I always found it fascinating when I'd have students. They would say it was like, "Oh, yeah, it's like either I know somebody or they personally worked for Mr. Beast on one of his productions, like a camera operator or something."

And so it was fascinating to hear about that. Apparently, he'd get ultra stressed-out and be very yelly at everybody. He was not like the chilled-out guy that you see in his videos. He, in fact, is totally stressed-out, and yes, there is something. Like they said, it was like you could tell there actually was a lot of money on the line, that is not necessarily what he seems to be when he presents himself in his videos.

And just that he has those students as employees that you never see, all of those laborers, at many different levels, that are never visible.

But Grant, I have to ask you, do you actually enjoy watching Mr. Beast videos, or do you just love theorizing Mr. Beast?

To some degree, I do like it, just because-

To some degree.

To some degree. Well, it's because the level of hyperactive, just overstimulation in so many of his videos, it's absolutely insane to watch.

Jimmy Donaldson/Mr. Beast:

Also crashing countless cars, blowing up thousands of sticks of real dynamite, and even putting 10 jet engines on a car. Just as-

Even though I would also say with the two of us, Katherine is far more invested in the actual loving of influencers, probably, than I am, even though many of the people that she has turned me on to, I do enjoy it to some degree.

I hear you on his surrealness, though, and the absurdity that draws you in, where it's like, "Well, just one more minute. Just two more minutes. What else will happen?" And maybe we'll pick up on that later.

Paul, we've left you hanging, and we're dying to know who you've been creeping online. Now's the time.

Well, I'm going to be the outlier here, but I will say first on Mr. Beast, I had to watch it, because I've heard so much about it. And there's obviously a formula there. "We're going to solve blindness today, and there are going to be prizes." There's a methodology to it all, regardless of what it's about, and the energy there is what draws you in.

I was going to say, if I'd been asked this question a week ago, I would say there are no influencers. I'm spread out. I'm not easily influenced. But now, after preparing for this podcast, I realized that I am influenced by many, that you two are right, as we'll hear.

So I listen to tons of different podcasts. I would say the ones that I like the best are the science ones that are about deep science. One of the best ones is StarTalk Radio. It's well known: Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Space by itself, and time by itself, only have meaning when they're brought together as one concept: spacetime. The universe-

And they get into topics where I learn something and disconnect from what I'm doing on a daily basis. So that's my influencers, so I absorb it a small amount at a time.

Would you watch Neil make dinner, or talk about how he organizes his pantry, or something like that, too? Are there any other ways you'd connect with him?

I don't know if that show is available, but if it is available, I don't know about it, but I am not quite that into it. Let me put it that way. I'm not following... It's not a personality thing, it's a topic thing for me.

You don't feel the need to buy whatever?

The lunchbox.

Glasses Neil deGrasse Tyson owns? The lunchbox and the chocolate bars?

Sleeping bag.

Inevitably coming.

I've tried to separate them out, but I think I'm probably more influenced than I realized, as you two are saying, but not quite there, buying the recipe books and stuff yet.

Policy Prompt is produced by The Centre for International Governance Innovation. CIGI is a nonpartisan think tank based in Waterloo Canada. With an international network of fellows, experts, and contributors, CIGI tackles the governance, challenges, and opportunities, of data and digital technologies, including AI and their impact on the economy, security, democracy, and ultimately, our societies. Learn more at cigionline.org.

Very quickly, Katherine and Grant, maybe we could ask you to tell us a little bit more about the genesis of the book. I am assuming you guys don't have secret histories being online influencers, but if you do, feel free to share because we're all in sharing mode.

I mean, there is a slight secret history that we might get into, I don't know, that we have not told you about yet. But that influences, no pun intended, a lot of our knowledge, when we get into sections about Wyoming and Jeffery Starr and how that infrastructure is working. But the genesis of the book, like Grant's already said, I genuinely love YouTube, especially YouTube. It's the platform we focus on, mainly because of its ability to be monetized more easily than others, especially TikTok, trackable to monetize. And as Marxist theorists, that's what we wanted to do.

But the genesis of it was genuinely from that love of influencers and YouTubers, when during the height of COVID and lockdown in the States, I, like most, I think, everyone, was not at my happiest. I was having an existential crisis. There's lots of lying in the bathtub watching YouTube because I do think primarily, any influencer that's my favorite, calms me, is just calming. Just turn your brain off. I think Mr. Beast is interesting because he overstimulates you so much, you just shut back down. But whatever level, it's calming. And so I was watching at that point, just a lot of deeply Christian mom unboxing videos.

Wow, okay.

And that was what it took to just calm me down.

Carol Anne:

So every time I drink out of this little mug, I'll be reminded that it is well. And I hope you're reminded of this on today. Whatever's going on in your life, it is well. Okay, so that was the first thing in the box.

I knew all about Carol Anne and how because of house renovations, they couldn't have six Christmas trees up only five.

Of course.

And so I would watch that and we've all been there, right?

Relatable.

I got really, really fascinated. It started with those unboxing videos and the consumption and how... Because of lockdown, I couldn't go out and consume things the way I wanted to, I think. And so I genuinely do believe in that kind of watching other people consume things, less out a release for consumption in some way. It triggers you wanting to consume more, but it also helps feed that kind of circle of ouroboros.

But I would not shut up. I thought these videos were so interesting and I would not stop telling Grant about them. Because we are... We're married, and we had written some articles together, but we had not ever thought we would a book together. But by probably hour 20 of me telling him about Carol Anne's problems, he said, "You know, there might be something here. I think there's a book here." And so my job was to keep watching YouTube videos.

Amazing.

And we talked and talked and talked about it. And it really, that was kind of the start, but I would like to hear your thoughts, Grant, on the end of that.

Yeah, no, I think that it was, right, Katherine is an art historian, that's sort of like academically, that's what she's trained as. And I do media and cultural studies and have written about social media in the past. And some of the things that we had written together were specifically like an article about selfies. But it was stuff that combined her interest in visual culture and visual representation, and my interest in social media and the history of media and technology.

So basically, yeah, it's like when Katherine started telling me about, you have to watch these influencers, the things that they're doing. There has to be something there. My response was, "This fits totally into debates that were happening in media studies." What are influencers? What are they doing? And I'd also say, if you look at it, you brought this up in your introduction, there's a lot of really excellent work that focuses on kind of ethnographic studies of everyday influencers. By which I mean you'll have a researcher, maybe an anthropologist, maybe someone who studies the internet, follows around and talks with and interviews a lot of struggling, precarious, everyday people trying to make it on the internet.

And there's a lot of really excellent work that's focusing on that. I think that that's mostly the work on influencers has kind of tended to examine those kinds of things. One of the things that was interesting to me with what Katherine was looking at, were more about these ultra, ultra, rich excessive, you say as like, "Oh, we have, how many Christmas trees do we need?" But it's also people like Jeffree Star, who, if you're unfamiliar with Jeffree Star, massively controversial makeup mogul/kind of started out as a MySpace musician, and makeup artists and another person that's kind of been around forever, really.

Yeah. I don't think... It's not coincidence that some of the most successful influencers have been around a long time and have this capital and infrastructure built up that allows them to now exist in this world where it's really on steroids of influencer culture and it's so successful.

But Jeffree Star started on MySpace. He's even before A Beautiful Mess, who I mentioned earlier. He was a MySpace musician, first and foremost. And Mr. Beast was a streamer, right? A Twitch streamer first.

Like a game streamer, yeah.

Yeah.

And yeah, with Jeffree Star specifically, I think we watch, there's a series of YouTube videos that basically are like, "Oh, we're going to show you the hidden," I think this title, the Hidden World of Jeffree Star.

Right?

Carol Anne:

Because I'm going to be switching lives with Jeffree Star, who I am terrified of.

Yeah, and there's one in which they're like, "All right, we're going to show you inside Jeffree Star's warehouse."

Jeffree Star:

Do you want to go in here? There's a code. No one's been in here before. I've never shown this before.

Shane Dawson:

There's literally a number pad. I've never seen that on a,

Jeffree Star:

I'm nervous. I'm just kidding. I'm not.

Shane Dawson:

Whoa. Oh my God. This is your own little store.

Jeffree Star:

Yeah. This is GUCCI.

Shane Dawson:

Literally though. Oh, wow. Okay.

Jeffree Star:

And now we're in here.

Shane Dawson:

Yeah. What is this?

Jeffree Star:

This is a Dior bag. They only made three of these. Me, Beyonce, and Rihanna have it.

The person that made the videos mind was clearly just absolutely blown. It is like, "I do not understand how rich you are". Because the whole thing was, this was kind of in a point where, are the people who are reveling in extreme wealth online, are they faking it?

Right.

And of course, a large number of people who are faking it, they're going into debt.

I am, online. I would say. No, I'm just kidding.

You can tell from your background alone, Vass, that you're...

It's a Zoom wallpaper.

Your Christmas tree, [inaudible 00:19:30].

I only could fit five in the screen. Sorry to interrupt you.

And so it was like, no, Jeffree Star is not faking it. And that's because he actually is, he's just a capitalist. He owns Merchandise Warehouse, he owns partial ownership, like a limited liability corporation. He's one of the main owners of a bunch of different corporations that are kind of semi-privately owned by a small group of people.

And that I think was a big point that we realized, as you said, these merchandising deals, it's not just about for some of these influencers, it's not just about "I'm going to enter into this branded product relationship." It is instead, "I'm going to have part ownership of a range of different business deals", which is why you have Mr. Beast has part ownership of Feastables, right, the chocolate bar company that he owns with the person that started the Rx Bar Energy bar company.

It's what Paul eats when he's listening to that space show, actually.

Yeah. Totally, totally.

So that was, I would say that's a big part of...

It was a big moment. We kind of both screamed out. He owns the means of production. It was at the same time the kind of, oh, what was it called? Cancel-Amageddon. What was the Apology, Grant?

Oh, Dramageddon, and Dramageddon 2.0.

Dramageddon, and Dramageddon 2.0. Paul, I'm sure you could give us a rundown of those things.

I'm thinking of Shark, Sharp, Mageddon or whatever that movie's called that has about 10 episodes.

Paul's going to summarize Sharknado.

Sharknado. Yeah, I'll try to summarize that later.

If Jeffree Starr was the shark, and nobody knows. No. So Dramageddon was where all of these makeup influencers and beauty influencers like Jeffree Starr were being canceled.

A lot of them had said very racist things. Some of them... For various reasons, a lot of it was racism. A lot of it was people just not being over them. But Jeffree Starr, who has a very racist history, he has done many problematic things over the years since his MySpace time. Hence, he was part of this. Everyone around him was being doing apology videos, was shutting down, their channel was being demonetized, and he was not. And people were kind of like, "Wow, I guess he's just untouchable for some reason, because everyone loves him."

But nobody really loves him. People love to hate him. And so when we saw that during the month Dramageddon was happening, it just clicked that you can't be canceled if you own the means of production. He makes his own products, so he can't have deals taken away in the same way. And just seeing that visibility of that, that I think a lot of influencers and a lot of people don't realize that's what's needed to last and that's what's needed to truly be successful and have the money in the way we think of that ultra money, was kind of what made the whole book click for us.

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That makes me think a little bit the picture of Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde. And people talk a lot about that, about there's no such thing as bad publicity and it seems to factor in here. People keep referring to those kind of antecedents. So I want to take us in that other direction, like historical, that whenever I think about these things, I always think about what's the historical context here? We may not know everything, but there's always a starting point of is there a historical context? Obviously, influencers have been around forever, big and small, and you think about whenever you look at a period in history, you hear about the fashion literary, artistic influencers, stars. And it's quite revealing when you dissect some of that. And then of course, there's the really big ones like Gandhi, and Galileo, and Mandela, Karl Marx. Apparently, the Pope-

Like and subscribe to them as well.

Apparently the Pope called the Virgin Mary the first influencer.

Oh, wow. I want to see a Karl Marx candy bar very soon.

So according to a lot of people, this goes way, way back and there is evidence of that. So if we think about it right now, what is the new part today that makes influencers so impactful and disruptive? Is it this ever presence of the technology or is there something... You always feel like it's new now. Is it profoundly new somehow in some way?

That's such a great question because the kind of work that Grant and I love to do and teach to our students, especially when learning media literacy and narratives about just the stories we're told in popular culture in the world writ large is that these aren't new, the narratives and things aren't new. So just to say, I totally agree with you that none of it's new. And just as a little tidbit that I love, when we started working on Mr. Beast, and it is my goal in life to be the preeminent academic scholar on Mr. Beast.

I feel like you are. I feel like you are, but I can change your intro later on. Don't worry.

.....We'll see......

We may get a like from him on this. If we talk about him much more, we'll get on this podcast.

I listened to one podcast. No, but we would present at conferences on him as we were working on this and there was one that we did fairly recently about... We called it Mr. Beast Giant Hole because it was a video in which he crashed a whole train along with many, many buses into a giant hole.

What?

Yeah. What?

He's got a budget. He's got a budget, right?

He has a budget. He owns the railway system now. He's buying train cars from the railway system in the state of North Carolina. It's wild. So I heard a lot of concern, especially from parents that I work with and know who say, "My kid watches this and it just makes me so concerned and I don't understand why they like it." And really everything's gone downhill, right? This is new. The kids aren't all right all of a sudden. But my favorite little thing that I'd like to tell them that we discovered while we were working on that particular video is about this historical late 1800s across the US that it started with something called the Crash a Crush in 1896 in Texas, in which for publicity for the railroad line, William Crush said, "I'm going to crash some trains."

Wait. And his last name was Crush?

Crush. Isn't it great?

It's too good.

It sounds like a wrestling event.

It sounds like a Mr. Beast video.

It does.

Damn.

And so he crashed the trains. They didn't have the right safety precautions. A lot of people got injured and some people died. He was immediately fired, but it goes to this corporate over human life moment, but also Mr. Beast and those things go together in which he was hired back the next day because the publicity, even though it was bad, was so big. Like you were saying, Paul, there's no such thing as bad publicity. And he was rehired the next day because it got so much publicity for the train line to then organize more and more of these. And there became several professional train crash organizers across the US. And for about a decade, this was a hugely popular thing where people would just go watch trains crash into each other. They would put presidential candidate names on them so you could cheer for which presidential candidate you wanted for the train.

And so I tell the parents that, don't be worried. People have always loved watching stupid things. At least the train cannot blind your son by exploding on him through the Mr. Beast video. But sorry, all that's to say that we totally agree everything old is new again. But the question of what is new now about influencers, even if these forms of entertainment are very old, even if the idea of being influential is very old. Wow. I'm going to maybe pass this to Grant, but I think there is something about the internet. My answer is just because internet, basically.

I know you're passing it to Grant, but I want to jump in and offer that maybe... I'm literally cribbing from your book, but I think you also highlight this fascinating tension where you're studying the most affluent, sophisticated, enduring influencers. And yet at the same time, many also have this affectation or appeal to a pseudo-authenticity, these extreme efforts to appear down to Earth and relatable. And maybe you could pick up a little bit on that too, Grant, since we are tossing it to you. Again, from the book in which the logic of the self is indistinguishable from the logic of the corporation. Why was it so important for both of you to challenge that, again, I won't say reality that's put forward, but that imagery that is so often put forward? Where's the-

Yeah, and sorry to interrupt you, Grant, but I do want to note too that we said Jeffree Star is uncancellable because he owns the means of production. But once that video, the Secret World of Jeffree Star came out and people realized how rich he was, that was then when actual backlash happened. He ran off to Wyoming and he doesn't really put out YouTube videos anymore. He's on TikTok a little, but he really has kind of gone away. I think there's a lot of reasons for that, but I think one, the moment the world did see just how rich he was in that he wasn't just aspirational, but it was just a different level, I think... They are authentic, but also this wealth is fairly... Are they faking it? We love to think they might be, but it's always aspirational. If it's not authentic and relatable, it's definitely aspirational. And when people realized just how out of their league maybe his money was, he did hit a wall and wasn't as popular. But sorry. Now, Grant, now I'm handing it over to you.

Okay. So I think I'm going to take a step back a little bit because I think that you did get to, yes, there is an argument that is very much about what does it mean to say these aren't just people but are corporatized entities that appear as people? One of the things that I think Katherine was hinting at and getting to is there is a really long history of social influence. And this is something that if we go to academic discussions about this, this is foundational for sociology. One of the people that we mentioned briefly in the book but has been popular with a range of people recently is a French sociologist named Gabriel Tarde. And he was one of the alternative to Durkheim in the foundations of French sociology. One of the things that Tarde, the main argument is that he thought pretty much all social relations are mirrorings. They're all sort of reflections. And there's few times that he even uses the term geniuses to refer to the origins of trends, the beginnings.

And so for him, basically everything in society, he even included economic exchanges, money. Money for him was basically a reflection, was a mirroring. And so for him, that idea of social influence was foundational for all. That is what society is for Gabriel Tarde. And a number of the people who have drawn on Tarde since then have really identified he was forgotten in favor of Durkheim. Now, one of the ways that this got picked back up was in the foundations of American communication research. And here I'm referring to there's a very famous thing in American communication studies that is called the two-step flow model of communication. And this was inspired, or this was defined by some scholars, Katz and Lazarsfeld. Elihu Katz, and I'm forgetting... Paul Lazarsfeld, I think is the first name. I'm forgetting Lazarsfeld's first name.

You're going to have to unbox it for us.

Yeah, I know because all the boxes behind me. And they ended up saying it's like social influence because that was their interest was how do we understand what social influence is? And their argument was people don't get directly influenced by the media. People are influenced through a two-step flow, meaning advertisements, media messages, whatever should target what they referred to as opinion leaders. And those opinion leaders were who influenced people in their local community. Usually opinion leaders, they identified were people who knew a lot about fashion, people who knew a lot about politics and how community members would say, "I trust your opinion because I know you are an expert within this community about this thing."

So basically, their message was to governments, to advertisers, to marketers is don't try to target literally everybody. Target the opinion leaders because most people aren't influenced by media messages, they're influenced by the opinion leaders. And so that has been a heavily debated theory within communication since its origins, which is 1950s, 1960s. One of the things that has emerged since then is with the internet and with influencers online, influencers aren't people you personally know, which is what opinion leaders were. They're people you just see online and you imagine them as friends. And I think, Vass, you mentioned earlier the parasocial. Parasocial relations, this idea that I think, I feel like I have this personal relationship with someone even though they don't necessarily know I exist.

I did Tweeted her once.

That's pretty clearly-

I did Tweeted her once, actually. She was coming to Toronto and she wanted some tips, but honestly, yeah, I'm full of shame as you even bring that up because it's like I was checking in with this girl online more often than checking in on my actual friends. Seriously. Even sending a text, I was being like, "Oh, how's she doing? Oh, that looks really cute. Okay, good outfit." And then continuing on. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I'm just like, you made me reflect on that.

So, right? That on one hand at a technical level, that is a very different thing than the opinion leaders within a community. It's the opinion leaders today when it comes to influence aren't necessarily people within. They're not someone you personally know. You have a parasocial relationship with them. You have this visual relationship. You imagine them as your friends. You see their private lives online, but you don't actually know them. And so on one hand, that seems to be a major difference.

The other thing though that Katherine and I pick up is when it comes to these people online and we start thinking about Jeffree Star is, again, we imagine them as people we know, we imagine them as friends, we imagine them as somebody that I just have this close intimate relationship with. But it is also the case that they are a brand and they are using their personal identity to advertise a range of products. Again, this isn't necessarily the case for every single influencer, but you mentioned the Sabrina Carpenter espresso ice cream. Is that something that she has a personal investment in, or is it just some other company using her image? That right there, that ends up being a pretty big distinction because you can think this whole thing with Jeffree Star being canceled or uncancellable.

If you think about tons of other people who have done something, say, offensive and they disappear and they lose all their branding deals, it's because they don't actually own part of the product that they are hawking. They don't have that kind of financial ownership. When it comes to people like Jeffree Star, Mr. Beast, we mention Emma Chamberlain with Chamberlain Coffee in the book a number of times. There's countless other examples.

The Kardashians are actually really good examples of this. It's not just their image that is being used to sell something. It is they have some level of ownership in the things that they're selling. And when it comes to, say, how these people appear online, when they appear as, oh, I'm just your friend. I appear as if I'm this community opinion leader telling you this is the best thing. That, for us, is pretty different when it comes to we have a particular financial investment in this thing I'm selling. I am the CEO, which is like you can even see this when it comes to billionaires who are appearing as the face of their brands. The fact that Elon Musk doesn't shut up about Twitter, using it and so on. There's some level of this conflation between the person and the thing that they own, the corporation that they are sort of both owner and image of.

Historically, billionaires have been very private and hard to find any information on. There's a now defunct podcast called Zero Some Empire that would just choose a billionaire per episode and get as much information on them as they could just to demonstrate how hard it was to get information on billionaires. But more and more today, and I think it is this conflation, billionaires have to... Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and that you know who they are and they have a branding and they are very public in some ways now, like influencers.

Especially since you can track planes and other things like that quite easily as some of the billionaires have found out. But I want to get back on one element to the question I was asking, which is what's new here? There is some evidence that there's a physical stimulation thing going on, that there's an actual brain function stimulation. When Vass is lit up on something and trying to find out what's going on, if people responded to her Tweet or whatever, there's an actual stimulation going on because of the interaction with the machine that we probably didn't have before. And that evidence is still patchy perhaps, but there is something that's more direct influencing us perhaps that's going on here technologically and physically.

Even when you stand in front of that train crashing into the other train, who's to say that's not lighting up the same parts of your brain? But to get there, you don't have it in your hand. You don't hold that train crash in your hand. In that crowd, you can talk to other people and they can say, "Oh, what a great comment on that train crash." And that's great, but then you disperse and you go home and there's boundaries. There's limits, but we are always holding our phones and I am holding my phone up. This is not a visual medium, just to demonstrate that it's always in your hand. It's always right there. Even if, I don't know as Grant was saying, the relationships are different or how we might respond to it are different, the ability for it to never be shut off and always be there is so different.

Exactly.

And maybe also monetization modes and some of the contorting, right? I think influencers often present it to us as highly independent. They epitomize the independent contractor fracturing of the economy. Maybe we can frame them as gig workers. Maybe that's inappropriate, but they're so interdependent on the algorithmic systems that moderate and showcase their work that actually, Paul, they're independent insofar as it matters that they use a certain amount of hashtags or have a video that's 12 minutes in length or have red arrows in their thumbnail, things like this. So maybe the incentives that govern and perpetuate their work is very historically distinct to that bridge from what Grant was saying around opinion and thought leaders to more economic influencers. I feel like at the end of the episode, Paul, you're going to realize there are more influencers in your life than you actually think.

Let's see.

We're speaking with scholars Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness about their new book, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube. They argue persuasively that we've reached a moment in capitalism in which individuals, like influencers, achieve the status of living, breathing, talking corporations. And behind the veneer of leisure and indulgence, most influencers are laboring daily, usually for pretty low wages if they're earning anything at all to manufacture a commodity called the self, a raw material for brands to use with the dream of becoming corporations in human form by owning and investing in the products that they sell. You can find The Influencer Factory at your local bookstore.

So one of your main points is that influencers do engage in work, that it's labor, but this work is more than just getting the right lighting or the best hashtag kind of thing. Some, I think, would say that the unpaid elements of their work is just the cost of being in that kind of unique business. What do you say to people that just accept those influencers' trade-offs as part of the risk they've taken on? Or do you hate that question? Did I freeze you? [inaudible 00:43:48] like oh, okay.

No, no, no.

Oh, no.

No, not at all. I think it's like-

I liked it so much I had to go in and think.

I'm going to say to some degree, and I think that it is what you were just saying about how reliant these people are on platforms. And I think that there's an argument, and I think that it's a very correct one, that is these people are doing very clear work for companies. This is not even thinking about the ultra elite ones that are themselves owning part of the stuff that they're advertising.

One of the reasons Mr. Beast is such a good example is he is going to burn himself out. He won't leave YouTube, but at this point, he could. He has so many other companies. Jeffree Star did leave YouTube and is fine because he owns a whole swaths of road and buildings and infrastructure across Wyoming now. But Grant's now talking about, yeah, who are the ones that can't leave YouTube, that if YouTube or TikTok went away tomorrow would have no business and no money?

And it is. These people are doing real labor for these corporations and in terms of basically advertising products, in terms of... And you could say it's like in the recent past, that was pretty built into marketing budgets and things like that. But now that's being offloaded on a range of people, and it does seem that that would be fairly ridiculous to say, "Oh, you are voluntarily doing this labor, so therefore, you should be glad you're getting anything," because that is sort of right. You can very easily imagine this as offloading of a particular kind of corporate budget onto a bunch of people who, for the point of fame, are doing it for free or low amount of money. But the thing is that also it ends up with a range of extremely exploitative, extremely exhausting material that there are-

... extremely exhausting material, that there are tons of people out there who ostensibly would want to do this work, so it is incredibly difficult for, say, influencers at that kind of level of precarity to organize themselves.

And to have lasting power, yeah. And I think it would be naive to say to not acknowledge that ... What am I trying to say here? It would be naive not to say that they don't understand, or if they don't understand, then they're being naive, the precarity of YouTube itself, they're creating content that they don't at the end of the day own. They're content creators, but that lives on a platform. Again, a beautiful mess who has gone the distance. They had their rules for how to be successful if you want to be an influencer. And their number one rule was own your platform. And they still have their own website. And they say you have to own your platform. And we were also really interested in, we see all these influencers have been canceled, blah, blah, blah.

But the worst thing that can happen to your pocketbook on YouTube isn't that you're kicked off YouTube. YouTube very rarely will kick off or will just not allow influencers, they won't take the content down, they won't kick them off. They demonetize, that's the penalty, is that you can't make money off of it. The content's still working for YouTube, but you don't get the money. And that's the penalty is demonetization, not being kicked off the platform.

They want you, they want the content. But again, the other issue, as Grant said, is, and as you ... that number of 50 million people earn some money, there's always, always more people. And it's also another really interesting reason why things that are very helpful in this late stage capitalist, what I would say corpo-sane world, that are effective like unionization. And I'm really interested right now as the teamsters have declared Amazon enemy number one and that they want Amazon to organize, and the teamsters are coming in to help do that. But I think something that I'm really interested in is the ability for influencers on these platforms to unionize because there have been small attacks.

And while I believe so much in labor strikes and unionization, I think that's the way forward, I don't know if that would work for influencers. And that is something that eats at me a lot. And there's always, always more. It's something that becomes at large in labor that human labor and human life is becoming less and less, is becoming more and more dispensable and treated as not valuable.

But within, we argue that influencers are a new class, and so we can't do the normal policies, we can't do the same warnings, we can't do the same things like unionization and just restrictions that we've done before. And I'm not sure what else to say about that, but it's something that I think we're struggling with.

I'd just say on unionization, I think you're right, it's super interesting in this space, but there have been historical examples where unions formed not in the relationship between the owners or the managers and the workers, but amongst the workers themselves as almost a social safety net among themselves. Recognizing that they were independent and that their livelihoods were precarious. And so when one of them fell down, the others were there. So it was like a bit of a different union model. But some of those have emerged. But usually when the times got tough and they learned ... and they said we had to do this. And then they carried on the tradition. But there are some interesting examples of that that have occurred. But not recently, not so much recently in history.

It's happening right now with reality television stars, that they are part of SAG-AFTRA. But there's been big moves, especially from Alanna of Real Housewives, shout out to Real Housewives of all states and nations.

Policy leader-

Do we have that in Canada by way?

Commonly recognized-

Do we have Real Housewives in Canada?

Is there Real Housewives in Canada?

Yeah, there was a Toronto one.

Is there?

There was a Toronto one for a bit.

Was there? Of course.

But I don't think it's still on. This I could try to Google in the background.

Didn't cut it?

We have it.

I feel like, much like YouTube, if there's a Real Housewives, I've seen it. But no, they are currently, they are driving the force for reality TV stars to have unions in much the same way as television and movie actors. And so I think the entertainment world is a good model for this because it's very similar. Same thing with child labor laws that we see that in entertainment for certain reasons. But yeah.

And sports teams do that actually.

Yeah.

Sports teams do have, they've got a lot of money to throw around, at least the big pro ones, but it's largely about taking care of each other when needed.

I wonder if one of the problems, and this is like Katherine was mentioning this, but the fact that there is a heavy reliance on internet platforms. And something like YouTube, it's not like the only people posting things on YouTube or any other social media platform are influencers, it's like to be an influencer does not just mean you're using social media. And so as a result, because the platform itself is open to anyone, it's like how do you make that distinction? How do you say whose labor does count as influencer labor and whose does not?

And then even on top of that, which is what Katherine was also mentioning, when it comes to something like YouTube, and there's been a lot of discussion about things like the YouTube partner program and people getting paid from YouTube, is that the rules and regulations continuously change and are oftentimes extremely opaque. And there's so many people, and this is one of the reasons why Mr. Beast is actually really interesting, is because you can look at him and say what Mr. Beast has done really well is he has relentlessly optimized his ability to appear in search results on YouTube. He has done a lot to really understand that at some level how things appear on YouTube and how YouTube recommends things to people, and he's been able to really rely on that. But those things, those rules change. And it's not always that obvious as to why they changed or what the changes have been. And Katherine and I have been discussing a lot recently about The Try Guys and this is not in-

Right. You got to tell us a bit more about The Try Guys and how they've evolved, but I definitely want to talk about them.

Yeah, this isn't in the book, but it's like, Katherine, do you want to start?

Yeah, I'll come in with the pop culture references and then you can theorize it out, which is a lot of it. So The Try Guys are, again, fairly long-lasting, fairly old influencers in that they started on BuzzFeed.

Speaker 1:

Hi.

Speaker 3:

Last year we made a video telling you that The Try Guys is changing.

Speaker 2:

It was sort of spooky, right?

Speaker 3:

Unintentionally ominous.

Speaker 4:

It really was spookier than we thought it was going to be. But we talked about how The Try Guys is changing and there were going to be changes to come and other announcements to come. And here it is. Here's the announcement time, it's happening. But before we get to the announcements, one really cool thing is that we are 10 years old this year. We have been making content on YouTube for 10 years. Very few people have the honor and privilege of doing [inaudible 00:54:01]

And there was the BuzzFeed to YouTube pipeline was pretty direct because BuzzFeed started massive layoffs. And then there was an entire genre of YouTube video called 'Why I Left BuzzFeed'. And that was very popular, that anyone who left BuzzFeed to make their own content, that was one of these waves of where influencer culture really came about was off the backs of leaving BuzzFeed so that they could own their content because BuzzFeed owned everything.

Quinta Brunson, who does Abbott Elementary, started off at BuzzFeed doing video work. And The Try Guys were unique in that they were one of the only groups that retained the rights and the ability to use the name they had at BuzzFeed. Most other people weren't allowed to carry over that brand identity of what they called their videos on BuzzFeed. But The Try Guys were able to. And there are just two, now there's only two of them. There were four Try Guys, and for various reasons I will not go into, there are now two Try Guys and a cast of extras.

They're cutting it close with that plural. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah.

Yeah, it's like a try duo. Exactly.

Yeah. It's like, what?

So maybe it'll just be a Try Guy someday, who's the last standing.

Well, I'm interrupting, but sorry, you're saying that early on they had a sense that the intellectual property elements of what they were doing were valuable enough to them that they were able to go to bat for it. So that's like an early clue or maybe setting the stage for them in terms of how they've endured. But please go on.

Yeah, yeah. And also I think one of the reasons for their lasting power. But they were on YouTube and they had much of the same content as they did on Buzzfeed for a long time. They started to try other videos, and very recently they announced that they were starting their own platform. Now it's not a platform that they own entirely or that they built out themselves, it is piggybacking off a different platform. So it's not entirely about owning their own platform, but it's about leaving YouTube. And it's about this inability and ability, as Grant said with Mr. Beast, to optimize views on YouTube and to beat the algorithm. Which we haven't really mentioned much, but it's always there about what is the algorithm and how do you get seen on it.

And their argument was that the new content they wanted to make was not making the algorithm happy and no one was seeing it, their numbers were plummeting, and so their money was plummeting. And they said we had a choice of either creating the same video again and again, like you said, like Mr. Beast does, there's always a model to it. But they didn't want to do that. And so they went off and made their own platform or using a different platform from YouTube. And so that they could make videos that were different.

Now, how authentic or inauthentic that is, if it's truly about the art of the YouTube video, I can't say yet. But what was most interesting about this was commentary on their leaving eked out this idea that they were middle class influencers. And that I think as overwhelmingly in the world the middle class is dying off, we hear about that a lot again and again, various ways over time, that on YouTube where we talk about either the very precarious or the very owning infrastructure, billionaire, Mr. Beast successes, the fact that there is starting to be, and I agree that there is and can be perhaps a middle class of influencer is really interesting, and speaks to the evolution of influencer as a class of its own and maybe a work group of its own. I don't know how you would want to categorize it, Grant.

Yeah, well, this is, I think it's important, the actual platform they're using is linked with Vimeo. And there's a number of other platforms that do this. But basically it is Vimeo allows people to create their own streaming platform, basically create your own limited version of Netflix. And again, this is one of a few things, different platforms that actually have that.

Why does it do that, do you understand, why does it do that? That's interesting, but why would it do that? Just as an aside.

Yeah. It's because you can create your own subscription service.

It's like Roblox on Vimeo, you can build your own.

Yeah, or your own Netflix.

Build your own Netflix, okay.

It's like I'm going to make my own Netflix using Vimeo. And so that would be-

And it does, if you use this platform, it does show up on things like smart TVs and Roku, and it'll be there with all your other Netflix and Macs and whatever television outlets you have.

Yeah, you basically can use it to create a smart TV streaming service.

But it does mean, much like the deaths of maybe cable television and how we consume media now with Netflix and everything is streaming, everything has a paywall and you piecemeal it together, it's very rare that you just have one go-to for all your media, it seems like that might be what's going to ... this will allow a lot of influencers to leave, those with their platforms, and they will all have their own little platform stream.

I'm going to jump in here. Because we got to talk about TikTok. We've touched on it a couple of times. But there's two things we absolutely have to talk about. And the first one is the introduction of AI influencers or AI avatars. And the second thing is about the potential ban of TikTok, at least in the US. And there's a bunch of threads on both of those.

On the first one, the introduction of an AI is popping up everywhere, and I think that could be huge in the context of a TikTok avatar. So thoughts on that.

But the other thing I wanted to get your thoughts on were the ban of TikTok, from what I'm hearing, is actually fairly probable on national security grounds, despite the fact that there are lawsuits underway as well. When national security decides something it trumps everything else. And so if a sale is forced, there are some initiatives out there, one of them is a consortium led by Frank McCourt, so-called people's bid to acquire TikTok and then reconstitute it in a way that would prioritize data protection, empower social media creators, and give much more control over data and essentially turn it back into the original concept of an individual controlled thing. Now, could that work? Do you have any thoughts on that?

But maybe starting with the AI avatars, where's that going?

Grant has lots of thoughts on AI right now I know. He's deep in it.

But Vass, do you want add anything before they jump in? Vass looked like she wanted to jump in.

Did I? I was like, I'll never make that facial reaction again. I was just thinking, is this also an opportunity, somewhat of a prompt for influencers across this middle class and upper class to have something to rally against together, a common enemy that's not the platform, but synthetic reproductions of what they do that could help them work together to push for a better floor, more algorithmic transparency, more inclusion? But this question is really for you guys, yeah, what does it mean?

I'll try to start, because what you brought up there opens up a unbelievable number of issues. And some of the things that we haven't even talked about are, say, things like VTubers, which are, if you're familiar with VTubers, VTubers are basically, for the most part, they're like anime characters who are themselves influencers. They oftentimes are game streamers.

But the way the VTubers work are, there's some level of oftentimes motion capture or at least some sort of voice synthesizer. There is a real person behind it, but it's heavily manipulated by a computer to turn a person into, again, usually some sort of anime adjacent character.

And there's been a lot of stuff where that is almost, even more than what we've been talking about, is incredibly exhausting and has led to ... there's fairly publicized examples of people who are VTubers just breaking down during live streams, which is surreal because of the fact that it's still this animated character. It's laughing and doing things that are meant to look cute or look interesting.

And so you already have things where there is some level of, I guess, we could say synthetic VTuber, virtual YouTubers, some sort of synthetic persona that is already, maybe not AI generated, but has some level of, well, what's the difference between what is real and not real, putting those things in scare quotes.

And then when it comes to AI it's like we look at the implementations that have already happened, most things that have attempted to use AI I personally think are terrible or at least are just nonsense. They don't generate the information that people want them to generate. But it does seem to be, "All right, we no longer have to pay a person to do this, this is great, blah, blah, blah." At least from the position of the people making AI.

But it uses an unbelievable amount of energy. There is a lot of economic and environmental implications of AI that I think are ... Again, that takes us into this completely different direction to think about, all right, you're not necessarily paying a human being to do the labor anymore, but you are going to be paying an unbelievable amount of money in terms of the use of energy merely to have computers ... Because in data centers, they're generating a massive amount of heat and you have to cool those computers and that takes a lot of air conditioning energy. So that takes us into a completely different location.

But it is fairly clear that at least the promise quote-unquote of AI for a lot of companies and industries is, we no longer have to worry about these human beings who can't fully be controlled. And instead we can offload this into something that is synthetic, that is computer generated, that people will treat as if it is a human being. Which again, you can have precedents, which are VTubers on one hand, an example like Lil Miquela. If you are familiar with Lil Miquela or Miquela, I guess, the Lil was dropped at one point in time, who was a computer generated influencer that was racially ambiguous and would basically do all the things that an influencer would do.

Carol Anne:

Whole nother level. If you're late to the party, hey, I'm Miquela, I'm a 19-year-old robot living LA making music and, well, I guess, just keep watching and catch up.

But was pretty overtly computer generated. Now this also gets into all of the other critiques with AI. It's like the training data and how AI ends up being biased based off just how it is designed and how that training data reproduces particular norms, which are oftentimes racist, sexist and so on. And so there's a lot. That opens up a ton of issues. My personal guess, and I could be totally wrong about this, and you can already see, AI, even though ... McDonald's is removing its AI.

Oh yeah, everyone's stepping back.

Yeah. It's already started to kind of like AI systems are being pulled out. But it is fairly still the case, it is that OpenAI and Microsoft are really pushing to implement AI on pretty much everything that can possibly exist, even though it doesn't seem to be particularly functional at this point in time.

So that is one of the things I'd say is I don't quite know how it's going to influence the actual influencer space. But it is going to be something that makes, in the short term at least, make the actual labor of precarious influencers more precarious. Because the idea is like, well, you can just be replaced with an AI. Your data, which isn't your own, it's on TikTok, it's on YouTube, can be used to train AIs that can then do your job. Because that's also part of it is if your videos are on YouTube, if they're on TikTok, they're not necessarily, they're not fully yours, they have to be licensed to those platforms. And so because they're licensed to the platforms, it can be used as training data.

Yeah, they are. Because there are groups, especially on TikTok, who are ... Grant, I'm going to have you come in and tell me what the name is. But there are groups on TikTok that are removing the music they own rights to because they know that it's going to be used to train-

Oh, the Universal Music Group.

Thank you. Universal Music Group has removed all of their music from TikTok because they know that's going to be used to train AI models on TikTok. And so it's interesting that it's not the influencers themselves, it's just the owners of the content and the owners of the content battling over who wants to be used for AI training or not.

If I can add a wild card to the mix. I wanted to ask, Katherine, you've also written about billionaires and how they're building bunkers and buying islands. I think we gestured at this when you said Jeffrey Star disappeared, and maybe from social media they did, but I think they own much of Wyoming, you've said that.

Yes.

So how billionaires are evolving their own ecosystems of businesses. Why do you call this a new feudalism? Isn't it just an expression of their extreme wealth? And why should we be paying attention to this? Because I think we're fascinated, we laugh at it, if it were to be a YouTube video, "Hey guys, come check out my bunker, day in the life of my bunker." I'm being a bit facetious.

Isn't it so glamorous?

But what should we take away? Yeah. Or "I'm in my car in the driveway of my bunker." Sorry.

Right. How to fit a Lambo on bunker when ... Yeah. So this is an article I wrote with Grant and ...

This is an article I wrote with Grant and with our colleague at the University of Queensland, Tom Doig, who is a journalist, who's in journalism, the school of Journalism at UQ. And he has worked. He has done a lot of work on bunkers and preppers. And he has this concept of rich prepper, poor prepper, that again, there's this divide between who is doing prepping and who is trying to get bunkers together. And that prepping for end times or whatever you're prepping for, climate disaster, can be done on a very small budget, where you have a lot of cans of things aren't a huge budget where we're making bunkers. But what we worked with him on was that the bunker is becoming out of style for the very, very uber elite. It's becoming the McMansion right now, that anyone can have a bunker because the disasters we're looking at...

And again, Grant said AI is taking up so much energy that there's going to be a whole new... we're talking about having much more nuclear power plants right now, so maybe nuclear fears will come back even stronger. But a lot of the bunker came from those nuclear fears. And I think a lot of the fears about the end of the world and living through it now or because of climate disaster issues. And so, the uber, uber, uber wealthy, like Mark Zuckerberg, are not building... he has bunkers. This idea of why not do everything if you have all the money. But what they're really investing in now is huge amounts of land and infrastructure.

So, Jeffree Star has Wyoming. He owns a farm, and a ranch, and roads. He's building roads. He has all of this agriculture and industry. He sells his steaks from his yaks to local restaurants, and on and on. So, we knew that about Jeffree Star, that he has yak meat that he sells. Very recently we saw on Mark Zuckerberg's Instagram, him eating a piece of meat announcing, "I'm starting a cattle farm on my Hawaiian island." And that woke us up. Everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg has been colonizing Hawaii all over again for a while, but he owns a massive amount of land. And the fact that he now is starting up agriculture, he has ranching. He is growing macadamia nuts in other plants in, he says to feed the cattle. He has a brewery that also seems to be a water desalination plant. Again about the labor we don't always know about. This also has a ton of workers.

He is displaced the tourist on labor market and the workhorse who worked for tourists on this land he has bought, and they now work for him. They're building buildings for him. It's a whole environment. And he can make his own food and he can have his own entertainment systems. He's on the ocean, he can have his water. So, it's not about going underground for end times as much, but about not only even and sustainability about where will not just I go. And so many billionaires are about this kind of having as many children as they can and thinking about future generations. It's a really big concept within a lot of billionaires. But where not just me, but after me, and after me, and after me. And so, they're setting up these little environments, these ecosystems along with workers.

And they all signed massive NDAs. We only know about a lot of Mark Zuckerberg's bunkers because one of his workers died and his family didn't even know he had died for several weeks because of the NDA. And then they tried to find out how he died. They really couldn't. And that Unmasked Wired did an excellent article on just how big this island that Mark Zuckerberg owns is, and how many people work for him. So, that's why we think it's this new feudalism, because it's not just about you in a bunker, it is about having a sustainable ecosystem that can go on for hundreds of years perhaps after the rest of the world is on fire, or flooded, or what have you. And there are many, many billionaires. It's not just Mark Zuckerberg to pick on.

We've covered a whole range of issues and we haven't really talked about policy interventions, let's say from government in particular. Are there things that government can do here? What are the hot pursuits or the promising tracks? There have been things that have been tried. And in the US, you've got the US Federal Trade Commission, which is pretty active in this space, including on the TikTok that we were talking about earlier and the use of AI. But they seem to be largely ineffective in their ability to influence the outcomes. And in Canada, we've got legislation on online streaming and things, and they're on the margin of a lot of the issues that we're talking about here. So, is there some kind of promising track that we could be recommending government look at or focus on?

Not to be negative, but I think when you mentioned TikTok, what might finally allow legislation to ban TikTok is this idea of national security. I don't think that's the real reason. I think that it's much more about how information is being spread on TikTok for this up and coming generation. And I think the same. So, I would say for policies for these things, we need to look at what is being warned against. And I'm really interested that in June now, this is happening, we're recording in June, that the Surgeon General is now saying that they're going to issue a warning. And that's maybe about mental health and social media. The US surgeon General is saying that they want to put warnings, not unlike how cigarettes have labeled to say this is bad for your mental health.

And so, I think that while I don't think it would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would say that social media is good for your mental health. I think it is bad for your mental health. I don't think that those kinds of warnings like you have on cigarettes, etc, are the way to go. And I don't know what the answer for social media is. Maybe, Grant, you do. But I'm interested in just much more action and plan-based policy. I'm obsessed. I understand New Zealand is a very small country. It's also where all the bunkers are currently being built. That's a massive billionaire bunker paradise. But their policy on cigarettes and banning cigarettes is just, I'm obsessed with it, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but they are going to.... every year they're going to lower the age or raise-

I was like lowering. I was like... anyway.

Yeah. No, no, no. Every year they're going to age-

Add.

Every year New Zealand is going to raise by one year the age that is legal to buy cigarettes. Which basically means that anyone addicted to cigarettes currently, can keep on smoking until they die. But it eventually will be that no one-

Oh, cool.

... alive can buy cigarettes. And I think that's a very interesting policy. That actually is action. And it's not just saying, this is bad for you. We know it's bad for you. We know it's a national security risk, but we do that with our phones every day. There's so many risks in other places. And so, I'd like to hear what you think. But for me, it's about looking at what the message is and saying is that really what the problem is?

Well, we know it's bad for us, but we still might watch it in the bathtub during a pandemic or not.

Exactly. What's bad for us feels so good in the moment.

Now and then.

Well, there's a reason though that there's an age. Your point is a good one on New Zealand because it's often about is there particularly vulnerability at a certain age? And there's a lot of evidence that that's been the case with social media and social influencers, that there's a vulnerable period there, particularly probably in adolescence, but certainly before too. And that has got to be a major focus. When I mentioned that, that consortium trying to buy TikTok and turn it into something good, one of the major motivations is the protection of children as I understand it because there's so much evidence of harm coming out.

Yeah, hyperbolically, I don't have much evidence to back this up, but it's a pretty well known hyperbolically that most people who have children in Silicon Valley that are tech billionaires don't allow their children to access to screen because it is terrible. And they know that. They're pushing drugs. They're drug pushers, and they know it. And they know what their children addicted to it.

Grant, did you want to chase on that? And then I have a final question to round us out.

Sure. The big thing that I'd say is, at least following some of the things that we've argued, is that there's been very... I mean the argument that some form of media is going to cause some psychological damaging effect has been the case with pretty much media as long as media has existed.

Right. Before the trains were crashing into the holes.

Yeah. I mean it goes back to literature. Reading too many books will cause women's heads to get too hot and they won't be able to think anymore. So, there's always been some kind of fear that media and access to media is bad. Now, that is not to say that it doesn't do something. I'm very much in the view that media always does something. It does something to thinking. But it isn't necessarily, you can't really evaluate it as purely good or bad.

Now, there's two things that I do want to say that don't necessarily come directly from that, is if you think about on one hand, and this... Paul, when you were mentioning children and how do we protect children's rights when it comes to the people who want to buy TikTok, and use it to attempt to protect the privacy and rights of children, it is pretty clear that almost all forms of social media rely on the accumulation of personal data.

And so, when it comes to something about policy related to social media platforms, thinking about individual's rights to privacy and what kinds of data are being taken, extracted from individuals using it, just in terms of how the platform works. I mean, it should be anyone using any platform should be able to know what data is actually being taken from them and should have some control over that. And I think it's like this is very much in line with a range of things, especially European discussions about say, the right to be forgotten and other rights to your own personal data, the ability to access that. And I think that that is always a good idea. People should know what data is being accumulated about them, have some level of control over that, have some level of the ability to delete it or manage it in some form or another.

And I think that's especially the case when it comes to people that are not legal adults, legal persons under the eye of the law. How do we actually protect that? The other thing is even within that, when it comes to how do we actually... the other thing, and this comes from what Katherine and I have been talking about to some degree the entire time, is how do we actually think of the work that say, influencers and other people that rely on platforms, that this is a form of labor? This is something that there deserves to be labor protections and there deserves to be some sort of ability to grasp this is work. And you shouldn't necessarily just be this corporatized individual who is in fact multimillionaire, who owns literal infrastructure, that that is, you have to get to that level to actually have some sort of security. That shouldn't be the case.

And so, how do we recognize this this is a form of labor? These people are reliant on platforms and therefore, they should have, again, some access to knowing how the platforms work, especially when, again, some of the examples that we've mentioned are The Try Guys are creating their own platform. Again, the [inaudible 01:22:16] on not totally, but creating their own platform basically because they do not know how YouTube actually is manipulating attention and leading people to their videos or not. There should be some more transparency about that. And that might be some way forward, is how do the people actually using these platforms understand how videos get seen or not seen? And maybe we can breathe this. This is perhaps one of the things that has to do with the purchase or sale of TikTok, is there is an acknowledgement that there's a massive amount of data there. And we can say that that data being of value means that hopefully, if it is forced to be sold, gets in the hands of somebody who will hopefully use it for some sort of socially positive reasons, as opposed to say selling it to Oracle.

I know earlier, there was discussions of Oracle buying TikTok, and that was from a while ago from one of the first times it was like, oh, we're going to force the sale of TikTok. But I mean Oracle, one of the reasons was because there's links between Oracle and the CIA. And so, if it comes to who actually manages and owns this data, what's the purpose that they're using this data for? How is that actually going to be deployed? Because anything that we use on the internet, it does know a lot about us. Now, there's debates of how well it knows anything about us because the more data that gets accumulated, the more difficult it is to actually say anything meaningful about a person, I feel. But that data is out there and it is going to be making decisions about us, what we see, how we interact with other people.

And I think when it comes to AI, that data is also going to be used to train AI inevitably. And so, I think those are probably the concerns for, in terms of saying policy recommendations, it is to know that influencers are part of that space and recognizing influencer labor as labor, is also making a statement about how data gets used, and how data is regulated, and how these corporations that have access to this data are allowed to analyze it or not.

Right. Critical part of the ecosystem. You have to build it in to the action.

I'm wondering, and this could be a question for everyone if this is a stupid question, but if that's the case, that how available we are and how available we make our data online might eventually be used to train AI or is being used. And then AI might eventually be used in so many ways that it becomes how we scale the world and how that we understand the world. Does that make any of you feel better about maybe having lots of your data out there? If AI is going to be trained off this data, do you want it to be more like you? Or do you want it to be some person... we all have that person who spends way too much time on Facebook and clicks all the scam ads, and it shouldn't be that. It should be me and my data is how we should train this model. And maybe that's a security blanket for everything being leaked. Or is that...

Katherine, you're getting [inaudible 01:25:52] credit on this episode now. I think I do not feel better. I feel like those elements are a pollutant and I wonder how it will dilute the dilution of generative and of false... I'll say, false and misleading actors. I like to use other words sometimes. I often like to use just computer systems for algorithm. I just try to make it sound less fancy than it actually is. But I wonder if it will maybe push us more towards that messy middle class of influencing where we do want this kind of authenticity, whether it's veiled or not.

You capture in the book that some brands demonstrate a preference for influencers online that don't have millions or hundreds of thousands of followers because based on that kind of, I guess, ratio, they're deemed to be more authentic or more relatable. So, I wonder if it pushes us back to humans and helps us pay attention more to what's actually happening on these platforms, the work that people do, the ways they're of exploited or extorted, and then calling into question that role for the state. That's the element that I'm hoping about. Otherwise, I hope that all the AIs are like Paul, because that would be good. I'm just teasing. What do other people think?

But they're all into Neil.

Yeah.

Really into Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yeah.

Well, I'd just say one thing there because we can have a whole big discussion on this, that there is an emergence of data as a new form of DNA. And there's actually a relationship between storage of information on DNA and where data may be evolving. But that would be a totally different discussion. But your point is that data is so important, and it can live forever, and influence in and of itself that do you want to embrace it or do you want to hide? There's some really, really important trade-offs on the horizon there for everyone.

Katherine and Paul, thank you so much. You've given us so much to think about in terms of how to re-conceive of not just who influencers are, but what they're doing and why. And I think the biggest question you're asking us to think about is why influence persists as something that appeals to us and that we aspire to. And you call to that in the conclusion of the book as something we really fundamentally need to tackle as well. So, thank you so much.

Thanks so much, Grant and Katherine. Great to meet you both.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I had really been looking forward to talking about influencers with you, Paul, just because I think they are so underappreciated and too often overlooked when we have these bigger policy conversations about regulating social media. The entrepreneurs, the characters that contort themselves to various algorithmic incentives, they do represent important shifts in trust and commerce. But I think because they're framed as entertainers, they're devalued. Anyway, I don't know the whole world deeply enough to appreciate all the history and hierarchies, but I was wondering if you felt like your understanding of them has evolved.

Totally vast. I do. I really got a lot out of this one. I think the idea that the opportunity for just that incredible depth of influence is remarkable right now. How much do you think how time people spend on social media? And that seems to be growing every year and with each generation. I definitely understand now a bit better myself about how I'm influenced. I was in a little bit of denial on the show about a lot of influencers and things, but I do spend a lot of time on social media. I'm being influenced and more than I realized before we had that show today.

You're a via rail influencer?

Yes, I am riding the rails a fair amount. And hopefully this podcast will be known on those rails. But I always go back often to the point, and you'll probably start teasing me about it on this podcast, that I always say, well, is it really new? Are we seeing this again? Is there something different now? It does seem to me that that intensity is at a higher level than we've seen. Influences are not new, but in a way that that's combining with an absence of norms and rules that have really established in this space. It's peak influence vulnerability in a certain way right now.

Policy Prompt is produced by me, Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Tim Lewis and Mel Wiersma are our technical producers. Background researchers contributed by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thompson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan. And creative direction from Som Tsoi. The original theme music is by Josh Snethlage. Sound mixing by François Goudreault. And special thanks to creative consultant, Ken Ogasawara. Please subscribe and write Policy Prompt wherever you listen to podcasts, and stay tuned for future episodes.