InfluencersInTheWild has overstayed its welcome
We love watching content. Why do we still hate watching it get made?
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Luckily, videos of me doing my job are very boring. —Kate
Last week I interviewed the newest TikTok sensation, Tube Girl, for Vulture. Tube Girl, aka Sabrina Bahsoon, films herself dancing on the London Underground without any fear of judgment from her fellow passengers. This judgment, I wrote in the piece, has been stoked by accounts like InfluencersInTheWild—a long running Instagram that, in its early days, shared photos and videos taken of creators doing their job in public when it wasn’t yet taken seriously. But as the years have passed, especially the ones in a pandemic, the work of influencing has come to make up a multi-billion-dollar industry. While influencers are still often the butt of the joke, the act of influencing itself is no longer a novelty. And yet, InfluencersInTheWild is still going.
I clicked on the account for the first time in years to link it in the piece, and was shocked to see it was still going strong with 4.9 million followers and near-daily submissions from people who’ve witnessed “influencer” behavior that annoyed them. But the act of documenting ourselves in public is no longer limited to professional creators. We’re all doing it, which means the account is conflating videos of “influencers” with videos of random people just using social media—people who, for the most part, aren’t doing anything wrong. While shaming influencers for their work was already a questionable premise, the account has aged poorly. It’s corny, dated, and has a specific vendetta against women and gay men.
Most of the videos shared show women in minimal clothing getting their pictures taken, resulting in comment sections filled with STD and rape jokes. When a post features a seemingly gay man, that becomes a joke too, along with the overarching sentiment that all of these people are responsible for the supposed downfall of our society.
But when a seemingly straight, masculine-presenting person is featured, the tone of the comments is different: “That’s not an influencer, that’s a leader,” someone wrote on a video of a man posing on top of a tractor.
“This one wholesome AF,” wrote another.
The account is predicated on the notion that no one should be engaging in this behavior seriously, and is fueled by sexism that tells us women and gay men are, but that straight men are just being silly goofy guys. But perhaps the most ludicrous part of this account is that all of these commenters, who had to be using social media to see these posts, are happily consuming the fruits of the labor they’re so quick to mock.
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Over one billion TikTok users spend hours watching content on their phones, but many have a real aversion to seeing it actually get made. A recent viral tweet showed a woman attempting to film a video of herself on the Tube platform,and getting frustrated with people walking into frame. Now, I wouldn’t say public transport is the best place to film if you don’t want to run into other people, but from the replies, you’d think this girl had started pushing them onto the tracks. I’d bet if we had only seen the finished product, however, we would have simply liked it and moved on. We would not have thought the creator was suffering from “main character syndrome,” or any of the other insults being hurled her way in the replies. I’d wager almost every successful TikTok video these days is one of multiple takes and failed attempts on the creator’s part. We just don’t see it, unless we see it IRL.
I think the reason witnessing this behavior still feels dystopian is because, despite years of Zoom birthday parties and remote work, the general consensus is: talking to people IRL = real, talking to a phone = fake. But the relationships we build online, with peers or with our favorite creators, are no less legitimate. We’d feel their absence were they gone, which means we have to learn to stomach the work that goes into keeping them here.