Everything Is Content - Influencer Special: No Influencers Allowed, Creator MLMs & The Age Of Rage(bait)

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

Hi EICelebrities…Today’s we’re #gifting you an influencer special. Once the guardians of the internet, are we now experiencing a rising tide of anti-influencer angst? Is it sexist to find them annoying? And just how relevant are they any more? First up we share the creators and influencers who we love to follow. Ruchira loves following Navy Ahluwalia (@naviahluwalia) & Savannah Sachdev (@savannahsachdev), Oenone loves following Veronika Slowikowska (@veronika_iscool) and Beth loves following Melissa Holdbrook-Akposoe (@melissaswardrobe) and Jack & Ash (@jackremmington & @ashholme).Then: is hating influencers a socially acceptable way to hate women? After a shop sign in America reading "no influencers" went viral, popular influencer Levi Coralynn argued that anti-influencer sentiment is often a vehicle for misogyny. We ask why female creators do seem to get pigeonholed and flattened by the term ‘influencer’ when men are allowed to label themselves in far more varied ways online? And is some of the criticism aimed at influencers fair?Next: are we in a style influencer recession? Hermes unboxing videos and videos of them grabbing a matcha pre-pilates aren’t garnering the same 7 figure viewership anymore, "forcing" increasing numbers of influencers to pivot to making low level ragebait to engage new audiences. In response to this, are we seeing more desire for intellectual and paywalled content on platforms such as Substack? Is it time for us to become ragebaiters or should we all go and touch grass? Finally: the latest influencer pivot seems to be teaching others how to influence. Is this an MLM or a natural career progression for a creator? Thanks so much for supporting out independent podcast! We hope you've loved listening. If so, please do follow us on Instagram and TikTok @everythingiscontentpod. We're also now on Substack- expect essays, deep dives & even more pop culture recs!O, R, B x Links:New York Times - Are influencers barred from this Nantucket shop?Vulture - Are influencers being demonised – or held accountable?Vogue - Let’s Face It: Influencers Aren’t Really the Problem Vulture - You Can’t Just Be Showing Matcha-Pilates-Alo Apple Podcasts - Reasonably Optimistic "Why is anger so addictive"Substack - Late stage content creation is depressing as hell BBC - Meta to pay up to $18bn to settle claims its platforms harm children Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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We're your weekly gifted PR box filled to the brim with everything you need to know. This week on the podcast, we're doing an influencer special. Once the Guardians of the Internet, are we experiencing a rising tide of anti-influencer angst? Is it sexist to find them annoying? And just how relevant are they anymore? You can and should follow our lovely and totally independent podcast on Instagram and TikTok and Substat, get everything is content pod, for behind the scenes content and a chance to get your opinions

included in future Wednesday episodes. And please do also make sure you've hit follow on your podcast player so you never miss an episode. So rather than what you've both been loving this week, I would love to know who have you been loving, as in is there anyone that you're following online that you're really enjoying that is making your time worthwhile on the old apps? So I have been loving a few people.

and the first one I'm going to bring to the table, her name is Navi Aluwalia, and she is the acting managing editor of Hype Bay, and she has just under 10K followers, but I love her style so much. She dresses amazingly. She has the exact style I wish I had, so it's really nice to look at somebody who's living the dream that I'm still trying to chase in terms of aesthetics, clothing, just cool demeanour, basically, and I think that she should have more followers. So I'm going to bring her up. The second person is, and I don't know if you know her because I think you both follow each other, but Savannah Sanchezv. I love her content. I know. I love her so much. She really actually has managed to help me bridge the gap between running, feeling like this big pressured

thing that you fit into your week, into making it feel like a gift to have some time to yourself to just get out, get out of your head. I've really been enjoying her framing of it, just her worldview on running and what's done for her life. She's just really funny as well and just like really silly and goofy and she's, yeah, just like a gorgeous person to follow. So she is my second one. What about you, Beth? So I, maybe this will surprise people because this is a luxury influencer, but it's Melissa's wardrobe who is a, I mean, she's a stylist, a founder. She is, I think, personal stylist to Stormsy, Anthony Joshua, really well known on the internet. I mean, she's done a huge collaboration. She's kind of as like a breakout star of influencing,

which so much of the products that she recommends are designer clothes and holidays that are never, not in my price range now or likely ever. But I just find something about the way that she influences very interesting and very honest. And I find her, even as we probably don't align on, you know, consumption and certain things. I do think that she is what influencing was made for and hasn't adjusted how she does her job in a digital sense in line with how many other people have and change to be a little bit less authentic, not the word, but a little bit less rigorous in their testing of things. She will be brutally honest and I really, I just like her and I do, I find her content very entertaining. I find her as a personality very entertaining. And yeah, I will

probably not stop following her, even as I don't really need luxury recommendations. She is also an M&S lover like myself. So that is who I am going to stick with. What about you and only? The person that I love, and I'm sure you must both follow her, but she's not really an influencer, is Veronica is cool, who is this like American comedian, satirist. I can never work out or she's actually going out with the guy that she lives with, that she tells with the videos with.

I think they might be in a relationship. She does these, like, kind of slapstick comedy videos. Yeah, Kyle, that's it. But today or yesterday, I saw, and now I don't know if this is a bit or if it's real, because she seems to be singing very sincerely, that she is like dropping songs. Do you think it's real, Beth, it's really confused me because she's being sincere and I can't. I think it's kind of like Britney Broseckel also has a pop career and it's confusing because you go, are you having me on?

But then they actually sound nice. I think she is a singer. I think she's kind of in the whole performing arts shebang. I've definitely seen old videos for doing it. And I'm not even with that old one of her funniest ones when she's like in an actual comedy, so doing it live. she like kind of breaks into cabaret. She's got an amazing voice.

But it's because these pop songs are like somewhere in the middle of, oh God, I need new references. I was going to say in the middle of Taylor Swift and Charlie X, X, X, X. It's like, what is, what are we even doing here? Something like that. Anyway, I love her. And now I'm interested to see if she's going to be a pop star, but she's not really influencing me to do anything apart from laugh.

Yeah. But even her sponsored content, I think is very interesting. And that's what I enjoy because it's funny. And it is, I mean, the other one that I will mention then, content creators Jack and Ash. Oh, you love them, yeah. I want to go online and be cheered and I want to laugh. I do.

I think that's the era I'm in. And those don't tend to follow anyone outside. I think Melissa's probably an outlier in that she is in the kind of fashion space and the beauty space and I don't really tend to follow anyone in that space. Everyone else is making things, having interesting ideas and making me laugh. So for about half a decade, lots of Writers and critics and thinkers have said that lots of the ire and punchlines around influences is simply born from sexism. And their reasoning was that it is one of the

few industries that is predominantly female. And so it's such an easy target for lots of societies discussed in women. But this debate has kicked off again this year, thanks to a shop sign in America, a man named John Sylvia hung up a sign that read no influences in his shop in Nantucket, which went viral after his wife shared a photo online. Sylvia told the New York Times, I feel sometimes my store is used as someone's background, a stage. The shop owner, whose family, has also owned Sylvia's antiques for almost a century, said that visitors take photos and videos in the store, but don't make purchases or even try to engage with him in. in polite conversation.

He claimed the sign was a tongue-in-cheek joke and a comment about society rather than an explicit barring of influencers. One influence in particular did not appreciate the post, however. Page Paul, a content created with over a million followers whose lifestyle brand Dairy Boy recently opened a store on Nantucket, claimed it was sexist. Mocking women when they become powerful in a new industry isn't new. Paul wrote in a comment under the Instagram post, It's just a strange message coming from a store that celebrates a craft with such a rich

history of women shaping the island and its economy. Since then, there's been take after take after take over the story and also the conversation around sexism and influencers. Content creator Levi Corallin posted a video on Instagram stating, quote, hating influences has become a socially acceptable way to hate women. She said that while there are valid things to critique about the industry, including overconsumption and ads, she thinks the conversation has moved way past that and seems to instead focus and lambast the women who part. participate in it. The word influencer has become an insult, she went on. While a man creating food online is a chef, any woman creating content online, regardless of what that is, is an influencer.

She finished by saying, isn't it amazing women get to monetise their interests after men have been doing it for so long. Quote, women went from being chosen by an audience to owning an audience. Now that women have an audience, women have leverage. Women have power. So as the actual expert in the room, like I have to just digress to you. What do you think about all of this? Anoni, obviously you must have seen the cycles of discourse around influencers and it must be so bizarre being on the other side of it. What are your thoughts on it? The first line of my book is I fucking hate being called an influencer. I don't even really think I am an influence anymore. I very rarely do ads. I kind of just share my writing and my work. But I think that influences is not a term that's become hated. I think it was kind of

loaded from its creation. And I do think that part of that was. was loaded with like an inherent sexistness, like even kind of the term influencer for what, when we really look at about it, it's like women creating brands and doing marketing. And obviously now that there are men who are influencers as well, but we so infrequently call them that, like the natural default, even myself, you kind of want to say like content creator or you defer to the specific niche that they have within what they're talking about, whereas a woman who writes about violence against women who's never done an ad, but she has 300,000 followers and people will just call her an influencer.

So I think that is like a very true point. But I also felt that Levi Coralyn's video was kind of like the concept of a take rather than a take. And actually, ironically, Levi is one of the creators that I loved following. I found her kind of like gorgeously stylized videos with her partner where she's in slow-mo wearing kind of 50s, sexies outfits. I love them. So it's not a critique on her. But I do think that at this point in time, as much as I hate, I do kind of hate the way that women are pigeonholme. and the way that women can be kind of degraded or some ways flattened by the term

influence. I do think that also there are negative aspects to the industry, including encouraging overconsumption in a burning world. I do think as per the surveillance substack that went out recently that I wrote, that, you know, I do think that influences can encourage hyper-servalance. So I think that it's a bit confusing because I think it sounds like it's such a good take, but I actually think we should be ready to talk about at what point has social media and the kind of content that proliferates and our attention economy and the algorithms and the people that participate in making this content. At what point are we able to say, wait a minute, I do think maybe it is unfair to go into an independent shop, take loads of pictures, post it online. Maybe it's fair if someone feels that way about it. I don't know. It's at least not misogynistic to say that, I think.

I'm someone who has been called, since influencers really entered the public lexicon, people have said, oh, you're an influencer. And I just have a lot of followers on Twitter because I made jokes there. I wasn't selling anything. I wasn't influencing anyone to buy anything. So it's a very different career. It's very difficult. And I said, I'm not an influencer.

I couldn't do it. It is a lot. You have to be business-minded. You have to, the negotiations. I was just talking shit on the internet. Let's not do anyone down by saying it was. anything other. And then I've become a writer and a journalist and an author, as many influences do. You kind of, you expand your digital career and your, I guess, IRA

career, even though they're both the same thing, outwards. And it's just too simplistic to say, this person's just an influencer. I think some of the most astute criticism of influencers and this conversation have been female influencers. So I don't think it is, it's too flattening to say it is just the right, it's sexist, it's whatever. It's not necessarily. There's a lot of misogyny in that and we need to shut that down and we need to critique that and then ignore it. But a lot of the valid critique is how human beings, our peers in the world, are using public spaces, how they're using digital spaces and how those ways can be quite antisocial. And, you know, the entitlement in public spaces, sometimes invading the general privacy of the general public,

undisclosed ads, which is kind of lying to consumers, working with unethical companies, wielding their parasocial relationships unfairly to cause a dog pile to ruin a business, just because they were perhaps having a bad day, that's behaviour of certain content creators that does need to be called out. And I do think that is unpleasant, whether it's a man or a woman or an aspiring content creator or someone with a million followers, these digital trends do adapt and they do spread to how other people behave in public, people filming themselves on the sidewalk people, going into a space, making a lot of noise, kind of forgetting that a public space has another purpose beyond a backdrop for getting the content. I don't think this is,

even most content creators do this. I think it's a very small amount in the total, but it's just such a growing group that it does, as it infiltrates young people's behavior and people that watch this, we've got to call it out. There's a lot of trends that are very dangerous at the moment. There are also things that are just unpleasant that content creators and influencers do have a hand in proliferating. I am a woman who makes content to some degree, knows a lot of content creators, does not feel at all that that's a degrading thing to call someone. I think it's a wonderfully interesting job and can be valid and difficult. I just think that's what people are calling out. That's what people are saying when they say no influences. They're saying, don't do these

influence behaviours. Everyone can come in. It's not actually banning anyone. They're just saying, by the way, when you're in here, don't take a bunch of photos. Don't do this. Have a nice time. my share. It's so funny because I just said the exact same thing as you Beth. And then as I was thinking, I was thinking, oh, maybe it is just misogyny. Because that is the way you've just spoken on what I said. Like, that's logical. I'm like, that's right. And then as they're saying, I'm like, oh, I bet there are just some people are thinking, 100% dumb blonde influences just just don't let them in the shot. I think it's both. I think it can be that the way influences are spoken about contains misogyny. And I think that is true and that's a fact. But I also think

that page is undervaluing the amount of power that she has in this situation. She has the leverage to bring in a huge amount of fans and followers and all that kind of thing to Nantucket. And Nantucket, this New York Times piece spoke about how lots of the locals are really struggling with over tourism and the kinds of tourists who are coming are coming for that very take a picture, take content, leave style of tourism that we've spoken about, which is becoming increasingly more of a thing. I think she is underselling the amount of influence, ironically, that she has in this situation.

And I don't think it's an equal he is being misogynist. And he said that the sign is tongue and cheek. And I do believe him, to be honest. And I also believe there probably is a bit of frustration at the situation about being a local and having the area you live and transformed by this digital age. It's kind of just, it's just a bit shit. And I do get that if you're on the other side of it and seeing those progressions and you're not involved in content creation, you're not involved in that world, you're just seeing

the place that you've lived in, you've had a shop for a century in your family, rapidly transform, helped and pushed on by, and accelerated by figures like Page or others. I do think it probably is fine for you to be a bit pissed off and a bit annoyed and just be like, oh, please don't use my shop as part of this. I don't want to be involved. I don't begrudge him for feeling that, but I do agree with you. I do agree with you both, that influencer is a female coded word, it is predominantly used for women. I also do think there are so many punchlines about, you know, influencers being, you know, superficial, vacuous, stupid.

When that's so clearly not the truth, they're running small businesses. And I think the problem is this conversation can either be kneecapped where it's like it's completely sexist to have a discussion about influencers because it's predominantly female, you know, very heavily weighted female industry. Or it can go the other way where it's like, like nobody acknowledges the fact that you have to really watch yourself when you're talking about it because of those facts. Beth, you sent a really good piece on the group, so I'm going to credit you because I am going to steal it and talk about it. It's a Vogue magazine piece by Laura Young,

and she said, let's get something out of the way. Influencers are not an oppressed or marginalized group. Influencers come in all races, ages, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds, genders, and occupations. Still, the archetypal influencer in our cultural imagination is not a man reviewing watches on YouTube or hosting a podcast from his studio in Austin. It's a woman, probably young, attractive, interested in selling fashion beauty or taking selfies or talking to the camera, and the characteristics we find so intolerable about her also remarkably familiar. She is vain, she's materialistic, but above all, she is embarrassingly convinced that she deserves to be looked at. So what is decidedly anti-feminist is not necessarily to participate in

these systems. The reality is that we all do it to varying degrees, but opting not to acknowledge the inequalities that sustained them until you personally become the target of criticism. So that's my problem with the situation. I feel like a lot of times, and this is the case with Nara Smith too that I wrote about in my essay for Substack for us, a lot of these figures defer to feminism, misogyny, all of those things when they are on the receiving end, but otherwise opt out of talking about these issues ever. And that's the thing that actually makes me, gets my backup. That's the thing that actually pisses me off because it's like, yeah, I'm happy to fight the fight with you sister, but also this can't be the only time that you mentioned this.

And also on the scale of issues, I don't think this is number one for me right now. The other thing that I think this conversation is quite interesting and almost like the time influences become redundant is we also forget that non-influences are doing the same things. It used to be a time where only content creators would be getting their tripods out and taking pictures. If anything, there's probably like, to every one vlogger influence a TikToker that goes and shoot something in one location that will create 50 followers who then go and recreate it. It kind of almost isn't just the people who are actually the influencers. It's like everyone wants to have an image in the place where someone did it. I remember there's a specific tree.

Somewhere Nottinghalla, I can't remember. It's like a blossom tree where all these influences to get a picture in front of it. And I remember thinking, oh, I wonder whether that was. Everyone always had pictures. One day I was out walking about, I think I'd just been to like Portobella Road, like walking back to get the tube. And I turned around and there was this beautiful, full blossom tree and a queue of women to get a picture in front of it. And I was like, that is so funny because it's like in front of someone's house. And how frustrating and annoying must that be if that was you? But it's just, it's almost, one, yes, it is kind of like an influence problem. But the more I think about it,

it is just sort of like the content generation is kind of the issue. Yeah, it does. It leaks out. Like I think we all do make content some degree. And now in the age of video, it just is a lot more time consuming, space consuming to make it. Like people will be doing a fit check and holding up foot traffic. They'll be sticking their little octobody on public glass services and then not cleaning them off. Flash on in restaurants, the cinema concerts. These things that for the first like 25 years of my life didn't see at all then saw very intermittently at a certain events. content creators became this group of workers in the real world. Now it is, it's not unusual at all to see these, these types of behaviours, which I think, okay, fine, that's maybe just where we're at, that's how we create, how we communicate, we've got a digital landscape that, that requires that, but I do think it's right to be like, this takes up a lot of physical time, this is distracting, does cause a buildup in certain areas, a disruption of the peace. And so for someone to say, I think the tone of that of someone to kind of say, use this space for what it was meant

for. This is not a playground. It's not a backdrop. This has got a function as a business. Please use it for that. Enjoy it. But then leave. It's not aggressive. It's not misogynistic. I think it's about time we had more clear boundaries on what is appropriate to do and where. And it's very possible to do all these things and not get in the way, or if you slightly get in the way, you apologize, it's absolutely fine. Like, if people are taking a picture in front of the Eiffel Tower and they're in my way, I don't go, fucking tourists. Actually, no, probably Parisians do, but I do understand that's a thing that we do. We take photos of ourselves and others, but there is a degree of it that is just like, this is too much now. There is really little, little,

there is nowhere that it's content free. Maybe it is, he could have put, I guess, no filming and no photos. Yes, it's a, it's too, it was a choice worth. Are we in a lifestyle influencer recession? Last month, a vulture piece by Rebecca Jennings dropped called You Can't Just Be Showing Matra Pilates Allo. Lifestyle influencers used to post cute photos and make millions. Now they have to pivot. Just a few years ago, we'd all be watching influencers

and box their Hermes bags and potter around their huge flats. But do we actually want that anymore? Jennings shares how this may no longer be the case and interviews Audrey Peters, a 29-year-old influencer with one million followers on TikTok, who used to rack in huge views for videos of her purchasing Chanel items and luxury holidays. Now that no longer works, Peter says.

Instead, she's had to strategically pivot to low-level rage bait to get the same traction she once did. Her new niche is pissing people off by needlessly ordering lots of things to her house. This often looks like multiple meals a day or a Starbucks when one is just down the road. Jennings writes, What she'd created was greater than a one-off viral hit.

It was an easily repeatable gimmick that she could serialise for guaranteed views, even if most of the views weren't necessarily her fans. It was completely strategic, Peters says. Your goal is always to hit a new for you page. The problem is no one cares about lifestyle influences in the same way, the piece claims, but they do find the energy to fill Peters' comment section, calling her out for being wasteful and frivolous. It's valuable engagement that's attractive to brands.

Jennings continues. Now, halfway through the TikTok decade, another evolution is taking place, one on an ever-nitifying, hyper-competitive internet devoid of any real monoculture and obscured by fake or bought metrics. The only reliable way to reach mainstream or even moderate recognition against all the noise is to either carpet-bomb social media with clips or to enrage wide swathes of the public. But maybe there could be something good in there too, amid the rise of influences pivoting. to rage bait, there is also a clear desire for education and value from the people that we follow. And perhaps that's why we've seen such big growth in substack. And they quote Lena Dunham in the piece as having said that one substack follower is worth more than several on Instagram as they're way more likely to be much more engaged with your work and buy your book, etc. And so are we

seeing more desire for intellectual and paywalled spaces? I think, it's interesting. I am someone who was in the lifestyle influence category. I did not have an Emma's bag or anything. I never unboxed. I never unboxed anything. And in fact, my lifestyle, there was some matcher there. As much as I saw, I found this piece really interesting. I'm very true. And the industry really has changed. And a lot of it has died of death. But I also think it was somewhat flattening. So I think a lot of the people that sat in that lifestyle box all came up around the time when I did. And what happened was you were in essentially like a really longstanding conversation. with your followers. And so even if your content might have looked pretty on the surface,

there was this sort of like back and forth in your DMs, on your stories that went on for years and people had really built a relationship with you. Even now, sometimes I'll meet women and they'll put out, oh my God, I've followed you since 2015. And I almost feel like I know them because I've spoken to them so much. So there is, because of the algorithms changing and you not being able to access your audience in the same way, that is also the reason why that content isn't performing. I don't actually necessarily think it's because people don't want it. I think the way that the algorithms are seeding out content means that they're not getting that kind of content. And we've spoken about the attention economy so much. Rage bait is what you get. And even I am receiving

this kind of content. I find it so fascinating that Peters was able to say like, yeah, I just do this. That is my idea of hell. I could not rage bait people. I'd be so terrified of them believing that it was me, that it was my sense of self. I don't know how much money it made me. I don't know how much money it made me. Unfortunately, I'm not that business savvy as a woman. And I also think it's really interesting that she is able to hold that in her head, then talk about it in a piece and carry on doing it. I mean, that takes a level of compartmentalization that I wouldn't be able to do. What do you think?

Did you miss? I bet. I'm not going to lie. I miss the old chronological pretty feed. That was for me. I kind of preferred it. Are you into the new vibes? Me and Richard love rage bait.

It's our thing. No, I miss it as well. I do. I miss everything online. I miss I miss reaching the end of the feed and it going, you've seen everything. You've seen all of your friends, dinners and you're all caught up. You're all cut up and then you can go off. I mean, I'm watching this ongoing meta lawsuit about they basically made it too addictive and we're all addicted. I absolutely am. But it is reading this. I was like, oh my God, it's the rage bait I find most interesting. It explains perhaps why she's so successful because she can see the cold, hard reality. She can adapt or die. I think when the internet stopped being just like a place where I could go and make silly jokes, I was like I can no longer pursue the kind of level of following I had. It was just like, nope, I'm out. A lot of people are like, why don't you pivot to this? And I was like, I have no, the savvy it takes and the sort of the being quite cold, calculating, I don't mean this as an insult because a successful business person is someone that can calculate and risk it.

I don't mean sort of a killer or anything. But like, I can't do that. She can. she can continue to thrive in this shifting ecosystem. But the idea of making my money by pissing people off, I just think it's a bleak way to earn your living, basically, like intentionally poking at people's worst, kind of least generous instincts and taking up the time of their day so they can tell you off

because we are all just sort of cross lizards at the end of the day is it's tough. I think I'm depressed by that, even as I'm not necessarily blaming these digital workers for having to do it. I just think I'm annoyed at myself. I continue to fall for it. And I'm annoyed that the companies above all have made this so profitable. And I think they should be sued into oblivion. But anyway, I just, I think the whole thing is just a lesser internet. Yeah, I agree with you. I think it is just really bleak and really depressing. It feels like the value in a lot of the content being made has depreciated if rage bait and provocation is the goal. you kind of think, oh, well, what kind of future is there for, I don't know, just a widespread learning, a widespread curiosity.

It kind of feels like playing the slots machine going online. It's just like everyone's just pressing the button, pressing the button, pressing the button until something like really pisses you off. And then you're like, yeah, I got what I wanted. I got the rise. And I was talking to somebody about Snap recently. And they were saying that Snap or Snapchat, if you're like me and still refer to it as Snapchat, has been like this for ages. It's really provocative content. It's really just kind of the lowest denominator content. It's like, as we've spoken about the Bop House previously, just all of these people kind of teasing really explicit content, never really giving into it, but just constant short form, oh, the next thing's going to be this. Ther-da-da-da, promising whole and never getting it. Not that that's a bad thing. We don't always need to get whole. But it's just constant feeling like there's loads of people just poking you with the stick, jabbing you. with a stick trying to get you to like break and be annoyed and then just respond. And I feel like

having that culture online, having people realize that and intentionally go after it is really bleak. You're right. It is so bleak. I think the one positive was reading Jennings bit about the intellectual payward spaces. She talks about how literacy might be going down and reading levels might be going down. But the people who do read are really holding firm on those walls for spaces where they can be curious and discuss literature and just have these conversations and debates away from what is kind of becoming the larger trend of the internet. That is my optimism, but it's also just quite a bleak picture overall, I think. So it's so tricky because yes, I find the very debate stuff so maddening, but also sometimes I look at people's post and I'm like, you definitely are doing

this to piss people off. Like, there's no way you're saying that. And then I kind of think, fair play. In a way, I wish, I kind of wish that I had that savvy. I think that about so many things. But on this substack thing, I feel slightly cynical about this now because I feel like as much as I, I'm so terrible at doing my substack all the time because I'm writing other things and it takes. I really want to be doing it. I've always wanted to be a writer and I love it. And I think it's so great that it's a space where when you send out a substack, what's incredible about it is you'll have an audience. Your content gets sent to everyone in that audience and you can see who opens it. Unlike on social platforms like Instagram, I don't really know how TikTok works now, but I think it's quite similar where you actually don't own your own your audience.

audience, even though those people have chosen to follow you, the platforms decide as when your followers will see your content. If you're playing the game properly, if you're using the platform properly, you might get boosted, say you pay for like the tick, you might have more access to your followers. So that is one of the reasons why a lot of people are migrating over onto substack. And I think already substack is getting slightly diluted with people posting Instagram adjacent content on substack because they know that they can reach their audience. And maybe that's a bit, Snobbies are wrong word, but I am worried that also Substack is then going to kind of see the same journey of going from a specific thing into people.

I guess it's, I know, and it is a way for people to make money, but there's something specific about the commercialization of content in a very specific way that erodes any goodness in a space. I don't even know if those words added up to make a sentence. And that's not to say that the whole of social media is like that, because it's not is I'm constantly finding really impressive, interesting voices on social media who are incredible. It's just you have to dig through a lot of slot to find it. Yeah, I really am and hour about substack.

I think the Instagramification of substack and the Twitterification and the blue skyification of substack is so well underway. It's such a useful platform and it is a wonderful host for so much, great writing. But it is also another place where I think a lot of journalists are struggling to get enough followers and build enough popularity and play the game well enough that their writing may continue, that they may continue to be paid. And, you know, it is, in a lot of cases, a popularity contest of who can put the right sounding words together

often, I hate to say it, with the help of AI, and gain a lot of following very, very quickly with ideas that either stole and regurgitated. This is not the whole picture, but it happens enough that I just think, oof. I mean, I saw, since being on substack, I've seen one, someone had plagiarised a piece of mind that ripped for dazed, put it through AI and presented it as their own.

I messaged them. And I said, hey, this is quite literally my work. And they said, oh, I'll take it down. They had very few followers. I don't know how I found it. How did you find it? It just came up on my view page. I'm certain I'll have, because they replied to my comment.

So I'll send it to you both if it's still anywhere. And I've also seen tweets of mine from, I want to say, half a decade, a decade of getting repurposed. Being repurposed as someone's notice, just plagiarized. I just think, worth, like this is not, there is no sanctity anywhere. And I, you know, I appreciate people's efforts. And I do think in some regards they're working. I love long-form content. I love that people are just sitting down to read something, sharing it around,

sitting down to write something. It's as much as I feel what subsect lacks is what younger writers should have, which is a great editor, nothing will teach you more. And they are obviously writing and then it's not being edited. Above all, it's an amazing tool. But I don't know. Something about it, I think it has to be so properly managed. And I just don't trust the gatekeepers of the internet.

And I just think that they follow the money. On the copying thing, there's a girl, I don't know if you know who's a woman, I should say, called Bambi does beauty. And a lot of her content is about how she's single and she loves at home. I don't know if you know her. She did a post the other day that was like, I'm 36. And here's the things I've learned from being 306. So it was really personal and really specific. And someone commented like, I've just read this exact post on whatever this other page is. And Bambi replied like, yeah, she literally copies all of my content. So I go onto that page. It's got like a million followers and it's just lifted the whole word for and every bit of text from the thing, but put it over. sort of like drawn pictures and all of the comments are like oh my god I love this I have about it and I was like that is absolutely wild that they've literally just lifted and and this is the thing that kind of makes me sick about content is this is where I'm thick there are people that aren't doing anything and they're making so much more money whereas that freaking surveillance substack that I wrote for the podcast I just can't even tell you how many hours I spent like worrying about it writing about it posted it Instagram basically just showed it to three people and I was like

So there's another world in which we're just rage baiting. Like, if I'd gone on and be like, I actually want to wear my glasses because I think that they are really cool, that would have gone viral. We could have made like £3 of some sort of like ad revenue. We constantly exchange whatever you want to call it, you know, intelligence or what's the word that I'm looking for that's just like we've got a backbone about these things. We exchange that for integrity. Integrity, that's what I'm looking for.

For cold hard cash, it's sometimes you go, oh, there is a lot cold hard cash to be made. if you ditch the first thing. Well, the problem is now we're too late. We missed the boat. We should have lost our integrity like last year and then we would have been ahead of this trend. Oh my God, I've slagged off too many brands. I've honestly, I'm sorry, girls, I've alienated all the evil ones.

I know it's fine, don't worry. I'm just going through deleting our back catalogue and we'll just, nothing will be there, don't worry. Sheen, we love you. I don't even think it's too late. I think that is what, I mean, I don't know how I'm getting into this, but at any point in time, I reckon we could say we're pivoting and we're going to become like a right wing podcast.

And the right wing, they would be like, Come on, girls. Do you know what I mean? They want hot women. They want hot young women and they also want people of colour. So yeah, there's a good market for us to pivot. Unfortunately, we cannot. There was a really, in trying to claw this slightly back,

there was a really interesting episode of the reasonably optimistic podcast hosted by Washington post-columnist, Megyn McArdle. I don't know if you guys have listened to this. I'm sure you have. But she was from May this year, and she talks to a Stanford professor and psychologist called Keith Humphreys about how actually addictive anger and outrage are, how basically conflict is the currency and accelerator of so much of what we do now online.

Like, it's exactly why Allo Pilates Matcha doesn't work anymore. It doesn't light up the same parts of our brain. It encourages us to linger. What feels compelling is annoyance. That feels urgent. And so we stick with it. And he was sort of saying they frame it like the internet is addictive. But because we all have different algorithms and different internets,

it can be tailored to our deeper sense of actually annoys us. So like if you don't like seeing rich people be awful, e.g. Audrey Pieces content, then it won't show you that. It will show you drunk drivers being arrested, for example, things that actually activates your sense of annoyance and justice and whatever else. And we will linger on that. And it basically is it's, they describe it as a drug that can redesign itself for you. And what that ends up as is us all spending time in the internet getting crossed, but also creators, harnessing an audience and trying to reach out to an audience that hates them, that's so antithetical to how people began their lives on the internet of, I'm going to try

and find like-minded people, people that really like me and have this relationship. Now it makes way more sense to be like, I'm going to piss you all off forever. I think what's so annoying as someone that does sit on both sides, although increasingly, really, I do think that I really, I just accept people calling an impotence, but not really. But what's annoying is as a content creator now, what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to write over the text because our attention, over imagery, sorry, because our attention span is so short that people need to be told like what they're looking at. And ideally, in the first three seconds, which is quite quick, you've got to make people feel an emotion. And that emotion ideally is like intrigue or shock or anger or like disagreement. And then you're meant to post about the same thing every single day. People want you to be like, have the consistent messaging. So that's why it's even more annoying when people that do and I get this, because I, I I do sometimes receive content where I think you'll rage baiting me. And then every day it's just the same thing. And people are getting it's such a, it's so fucked on both sides because we're kind of,

we're harming each other. And everyone's sort of doing it as, you know, people think this is the last career that's actually viable. It's kind of like it is somewhat true that if you want to be creative, like the only way to get investment is to be sponsored by advertising. And so lots of people do it in their own individualistic way to support their work. But then as consumers, we're really destroying each other's. brains. And so the sad thing is, and I kind of use this, like, as an, as an analogy at the end of

that surveillance piece, but it is very much like the guys in Silicon Valley are like playing us like chess pieces and we're all just being dragged along the board kicking and streaming, but also like can't disengage. Yeah, we need to, I don't know. There's not an answer, but it's all enraging. It all just goes back to touching grass and like it's so obvious and it's such a cliche, but it genuinely is the only tool we have that is easily accessible. We all all should be doing it. We know we should be doing it. The only last thing I was going to say is, I know this seems like a really stupid point, but sometimes when I watch loads of high conflict reality TV, such as like the reunion episodes of Housewives, Real Housewives, it really sits with

me, that kind of high level of conflict, the anger, the frustration, the kind of like tension. And I just think it can't be healthy what's sitting with us watching so much of this rage-based content. I feel like our levels of empathy, sympathy, tolerance, patient, forgiveness, all of these positive traits that make a society very warm and forgiving in a community, really. It makes me wonder what tools are being sanded away by watching the complete opposite and the inverse over and over and over again. Okay, so I'm not saying you're four years old, but an example, real life example of this is my niece started watching. It was either Wizards of Waverly Place or what was Ariana Grandin, like when she was little? Like one of those really

early Disney shows. And one of the shows, the little girl has got like a massive attitude. And she's constantly like, don't talk to me. Anyway, after like two days of watching this, my sister was like, we couldn't work out. Matilda and my niece started being like quite like really sassy and being really rude. And she'd literally just like absorbed. And I do think it still works on us like that. Like once you see interactions, if you're watching it enough, obviously it happened way quicker than her because her brain is still just a baby, baby sponge. But she, Emily was like, no more. We are not having that on the TV. Because she suddenly was like, She was like snapping her fingers.

She was going, no, I don't want to. Like really, yeah. So I do think like, oh, we've got to be careful because the real housewives. The next thing you know, I might be sort of like, what do they do? I don't really watch that much. Throwing a drink in my face. Throw a drink. It's going to, accusing you of doing coke and sleeping with my husband that I don't have.

I did do that, but that's different. That's just girly things. As we said, Jennings identified that we're watching content creators evolving to survive. and part of that is becoming hyper niche and offering something new to audiences. Another influencer pivot is teaching other people how to influence. Is this an MLM or a natural progression in the career trajectory of an influencer? So a substacker named Millie Hughes wrote a piece titled, Late stage content creation is depressing as hell last month.

In it, she describes how TikTok helped usher in the so-called normal influencer, e.g. people with average lives who rose to fame compared to the luxe influence, influencers of Instagram, but then all of this came crashing down. It's so funny because I actually wrote last year in a substack that I wrote that was called Like, Don't Be Ridiculous, Andrea, everybody wants this. I wrote about this concept of content creators making content about making content. And it's so fascinating because once upon a time, brands were so desperate to understand internet culture and to figure out exactly what it was that content creators were doing.

Millie makes the point in the piece that recently her feed has become. flooded with these influencers who are teaching others to become influencers, essentially, which fonts to use, which cap-cut sounds will help with retention, which hooks increase watch time, etc. In a paragraph that feels very designed for us, she writes, but what is content? Are we content? How much more of ourselves and our lives can we monetise as content?

Can we figure out a way to keep creating content about content without actually creating? You guessed it, content. She wrote, I'm flawed, especially by the hundreds of comments. comments left by real people trying to access the same imagined future in pursuit of a synthetic rags to riches story prompted entirely by our new best friend, therapist and even romantic, sycophantic partner for some. We've reached a point in late stage content creation that reaps the rewards of being a content creator or a quote creative without actually being creative or making content designed for consumption without considering the wants, needs and

basic agency of the consumer that is relied upon for a good payday. She's compassionate towards the influences involved in this trend and cites the slow death of the reliable 95 job. But she also makes the point that historically, in times of crisis, great art has been made. But right now, all we see is people fighting for our last five minutes of attention online. Why in 2026 does this seem to equate outsourcing all of the above to a plagiarizing robot so that we can continue selling each other crap we don't need while labeling ourselves inclusive AI content creatives, she asks. I mean, woof, it's a very, very good piece.

And I do think it just points out that there is so much, there's so much bullshit, it's so much BS online. And I am starting to see the turtles all the way down, impossible, I'm going to sell you this, to sell you this, to sell you this. Oh, but you haven't done this. So I'm going to sell you this. It does feel like a scramble for people that didn't quite make enough money or losing their footing in one industry, attempting. to adapt and maybe it does to some degree feel a little bit MLM, a little bit pyramid schemie of like, come on in, the water's great, but all the while, that's the only way to make money. I find it so confusing because I get these all the time. So it'll come off my feed and it'll be

like how I grew 12,000 followers and the last thing. So I'll go on their Instagram because I'm like, interested, but this is their only content. And I'm like, where is it? You're monetizing it. Obviously the way they're monetizing it is they are selling a guide on how they made the followers on the selling of the followers. It very much is. it feels like a pyramid scheme for sure. And it's so fascinating because again, it has mechanized, automated, turned the reason that we came to the original iteration of like social media influences where people were fascinated with how individuals live their lives. They're like seeing them in the car and they like watching what they were up to. Then people became more

adept at creating this interesting content and people were kind of competing. And now again, like I said, the power is completely inverted to the algorithm. So it is very much you will have these people that are taking note of what the trends are, taking note of what's working, that trend will last have along and it moves on. That is what makes it feel like the end times. Even though there is so much great content still online, I just think that that was really what started to depress me. And one of the reasons that made me want to write that really long piece I wrote last year

when I was essentially like, I think I need to step away from this. It just feels so dystopian and so strange. And also when you watch one of those videos, you do think I really should lock my phone now because I can't believe I've just watched that. AI fruit videos. I haven't watched one in ages. I've actually been really offline. Yeah, it does feel like more so than ever

it's the crabs in the bucket situation for the vying for attention and the kind of clawing to get onto the algorithm. And I have seen this quite a lot, a lot of people who are guiding you on how to be a thing, but I'm not really sure how much of the thing they're actually doing because the stuff they're putting out is nearly exclusively just the guiding. So things like even a few weeks ago when we spoke about the literary agent who started the big

discussion around AI witch hunts, a lot of her content online is discussion about publishing. And it's not just that everyone has to be a content creator and the thing that they're doing for a full-time job. It kind of feels like slowly the full-time job is whittling away and the influencer about the once full-time job or full-time job is becoming the full-time job. I know that's a lot of waffle. What I'm trying to say is there's so many authors, there's so many journalists, there's so many people who now are no longer publishing actual pieces or doing the thing that they have said is their main role, their career, whatever.

It is just nearly exclusively, all I can see the work they're putting out is the talking about it. And this isn't a new thing. I remember when I first became a journalist, there was loads of people talking about how to become a journalist and they would get 10K followers on Instagram, Twitter, whatever. And you would kind of notice, oh, they're not really working for anywhere full time or they're not really publishing any pieces. And it kind of felt like a bit of an MLM to me because they would also be like pay 30 pounds for my Zoom call or like da-da-da-da-da. And a lot of this information I think should be available to everyone. I don't think it should have a price tag. it's really gatekeepery to know basic things about pitching.

And if anyone ever wanted to know that, I would be happy to share it, although I'm not really a journalist anymore because no one will hire me. But I think now it's become so much worse and it's kind of this feeling that everything is gate-kept unless you buy into somebody on the other side of the gate who can teach you the information. And I understand it. Everything is so shit right now. The 9-to-5 is just not a thing that is accessible in the way it used to be. People are being made redundant everywhere.

So I have compassion for it, but I also feel bad because I feel like there is a level of exploitation that has to be inherent for those people to survive. I just don't, I can't square it. I don't feel good about it. And it's people, it's the top comment I think on this was someone saying, it's so frustrating. I'm a hairdresser. And at the moment, there is no way to break into the industry and build a client list without being a photographer and social media manager on top of doing hair. I didn't go to school to churred out content. I just want to do hair.

And I do think, as much as people can and should charge. for expertise and to some degree coaching and consulting and there is a lot of value to teaching someone how to navigate the internet and understand in a very basic level this is what it is. You know, many of us spent years learning on our own. If we could then pass that to someone else who is running a business over the course of a week or a month to get them started, then I think, okay, maybe there is, you can attach a price tag to that. But I do think it takes advantage of the fact that people aren't able to just have a job

anymore. They have to be creators and they have to run this internet business alongside actually just doing anything. And it's so time laborious and it's just a lot. And I just think it's a lot of it also relies on exchanging like money for the keys to this castle and people's desperation as the list of things that you can do to make money and achieve financial stability and have a pension and a house narrows considerably. You just want that golden ticket and people know that they can attach people with a million followers or whatever know that they can attach, you know, quite a high price tag in some cases. And people say, okay, take my $159,99, $9, I want a chance to have a family. I want to buy a house. I want to do these things. When it's between that

and just the bleak circumstances that you might already be living in, I think that they know, like MLM and cult leaders, that desperation will shift a lot of product. It's so funny because which is exactly what you're saying about kind of people now are doing the content instead of the thing the content's about. At the time when I first started writing bad influence, there was still, and there still is, but it was different. There was a lot of stigma around influencers, and it was sort of like journalists, print media, true media was the real place to go and influence were kind of like a bit embarrassing. It wasn't the real thing, whatever. I remember writing bad influence and thinking when this is published, when this goes out, this will be my punctuation mark.

I'm going to log off and I'm going to be a writer and I'm not going to be, I'll just go online just to post my writing. And by the time it came out, most journalists, but already thinking, I need to build a profile, I'm not going to get any work unless I have an audience. It just completely turned on its head. So my imagination of like having done all of these years in online to build up a profile to be credible enough to finally be the thing I actually wanted to be, which is like a real world writer, real world writers who previously up until that point had been, to be honest, looking down and influences and content creators, everyone kind of thought it was a bit, you know, almost like a bit embarrassing. It's completely turned on its head now.

the thing that everyone's trying to do. And I think it is deeply, deeply depressing, to be honest. And it is also so time-consuming. And everyone who has any kind of business now, you are constantly competing with everyone on social media. Everyone's like advertising ability. And where I think social media at one point was quite democratizing because the idea was you didn't need amazing technology. You didn't need to live in a Beatle house. You could just have a webcam or your phone and you could share your ideas and your thoughts. Now, as with anything, because of the way that you're competing with so many people, like I said, right at the top, there is content now which is like full production value. People, Holly Willoughby, for example, who obviously famously is no longer doing her TV show,

now has her own like fully produced YouTube show. We've weirdly kind of like decentralized what was public media and turned it all into this individual self-created media, which I think at one point people felt might be a good thing, but I think we are just seeing that actually it's not. That's so smart. Everyone has their own media corporations. I did an interview for a job. What they were talking about is wanting somebody to build their socials, but that looks like sub-stack video, building the profile, maybe doing LinkedIn, all these different things. It is like regardless of what you are, everyone has a mini media company that used to be the kind of thing you would only have at a big publication, but all of these places are having to publish as if they

are a news site, for example. I think you're so right about that. And I think the people that are not trying to pivot to being their own news organization are pivoting to kind of trying to use these cult-like tactics to convince people to join the influencing world, the marketing world, or to to buy what they're selling. And there's a book called Hoodwinked by Mara Einstein that explores these parallels. And it's her idea. It's not something that I came up with. But she explores the link between cult manipulation and modern marketing strategies

and how in the age of the influencer and the single content created, the kind of face of each of our own brands, we're all again falling for this in a really invasive way like any of us from our home in front of our phones are falling for these tactics, e.g., you know, we're being asked to prove our faith in ourselves and other people by paying for the course, by following the steps completely. These are MLM tactic, also cult tactics, and now it is individuals who are just trying to loop in lower level workers. I think it's a selling of a dream by someone with a very friendly face. And I think influences in some way do act as like the high priestesses of marketing and of commerce and of consumption.

And I do think seeing these very confusingly written posts about, well, this is, you need to game the algorithm as though it is some kind of God that can be harnessed as though it's something that only these priestesses understand and can speak the language of. I find it really predatory. And I do, I don't judge all people that sell these courses. Like I say, it's a career and it's something that involves a close understanding of brand negotiations and views and hooks and all of these things. There's stuff to be learned there, but I don't believe that a lot of these people are genuinely teaching it. And she in the book says she wants to replace attention economy with anxiety economy because the former reads is quite benign versus what actually is.

And I do think that there is a level of trying to scare people into thinking that without the help of these courses and without the help of these creators, all is lost. I just, I don't. It just feels like it's a promise of like community and cash. financial security that really preys on people's, like I say, desperation. Thank you so much for listening this week. If you haven't already, make sure you go back and listen to our Everything in Conversation episode where we discuss the Katie Price of Fame.

If you enjoy the podcast, then please do you leave us a rating and a review wherever you're listening. It is truly one of our favorite things to get every week. It lights up my life, seeing that you guys have reviewed us. It makes me so happy. You can follow us on Instagram. and TikTok and Substack for extra content and to take part in our Wednesday episodes. See you next week.

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