When your friend starts posting like an influencer
When your friend starts posting like an influencer
A uniquely millennial embarrassment
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
I’m back from my jaunt around the U.K.! If you missed us, then consider becoming a paid subscriber below to get the Sunday Scrolls and never go more than a week without Embedded again <3 —Kate
Before the concept of social media verification, internet users had a different method of asserting their identity online: putting “real” at the end of their username (eg, @KateLindsayReal). It was celebrities, mostly, who used this “trick” to distinguish their accounts from fake ones. Celebrities, and Heather from my high school.
On platforms like MySpace, YouTube, and Tumblr, Heather (not her real name) had stuck “real” at the end of her username, as if there was a huge risk of someone out there choosing to impersonate this specific 15-year-old from Pennsylvania. That, plus the fact that she posted as if she was someone with a huge following when she was not, meant my friends and I found her accounts deeply, deeply embarrassing.
There have been many Heathers in my life since. The former coworker making watermarked infographics. The college acquaintance delivering wellness advice directly to the camera. Whenever someone I know in real life begins posting like an influencer, I get intense second-hand embarrassment, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.
Influencing is work, and it requires work to become a successful creator. The same way I had to write articles like “10 Women on the 1 Thing They Wish They Knew Before They Had Anal Sex” when I was 23, many influencers we know today likely had to, at one point, post in a way that gave their own friends secondhand embarrassment. I want to make clear that don’t think anyone putting in the work to become an influencer has anything to be ashamed of. This secondhand embarrassment is a personal problem, and also, I think, a generational one.
In the late 2000s, when the first of the Heathers were putting “real” in their usernames, influencers were only just entering the zeitgeist. Because they didn’t exist before, there was only one way to become an influencer, and that was by accident. Every single prominent person I followed at the time had the same story: They started posting for fun, and suddenly all these people were watching them! Because of this, my perception of the influencing career was as something other people choose for you, not something you could deign to choose for yourself. Now, as social media moves away from connection and towards discovery and Gen Z takes over the internet, I’m realizing just how millennial this secondhand influencer embarrassment is, because it’s a hang-up that Gen Z doesn’t seem to have.
“I was just back in my hometown to talk to some of the kids there, and honestly, as far as I could see, this is just how they post now,” Lucy Blakiston of
tells me over email. “They probably grew up watching influencers on YouTube or TikTok far more than they watched TV shows or movies, so this is a very normal way to act online.”
The same way millennials uniquely straddle the “before times” and “after times” of social media consuming our lives, they’re also straddling this shift within social media itself. We were taught to use social media to talk to each other, not strangers, but now that platforms have started rewarding the latter over the former, we’re clumsily adapting to something that Gen Z has just always known, and frankly doesn’t feel the need to think too much about.
“Maybe it's because we have a 'who cares' and 'what do we have to lose' mentality because we came into a world that feels pretty fucked up and we don't dream of having jobs where we climb the corporate ladder (because we watched it make all our parents depressed) so we may as well start posting into the void and see what happens!” Blakiston says. “I also think it's less that we're trying to be influencers, and more that right now there is a very real chance that something you post could go viral, and if it does, that feels like claiming some power as a young person. And that's all we want! To feel like we have a little bit of control in this shit show of a world!”
Once again, this is something I objectively understand and champion, but as I wrote about in a recent Sunday Scroll, it’s something I am fundamentally unable to achieve for myself. It’s only now that I’ve put together that this isn’t about the way I was raised outside of the internet, but explicitly because of how I was raised on it—and how, even when all of us will have been raised on the internet, we’ll still one day find ourselves out of the loop.