How influencer culture turned honest labor into performance — and why I refuse to play along.
I make things and I sell them. That’s it. This isn’t content; it’s work. Bookmark it if you want to find it again. Subscribe if your bookmarks look as chaotic as mine.
The Uneasy Divide
I make things. I sell them. There’s no mystery in that sentence; it’s the oldest sentence in the world. I take time, attention, and material and turn them into an object that didn’t exist yesterday. You give me money so I can keep making time, attention, and material happen again tomorrow. That’s not revolutionary — it’s business. What it’s not is content creation. Somewhere between the blinking cursors of the old web and the choreographed sincerity of the new one, honest exchange got rebranded as performance. Everyone’s selling something; almost no one wants to admit it.
I don’t resent commerce. I resent the costume that insists we must pretend selling is a form of friendship and that art should be endlessly free as long as it’s called “content.”
The Linguistic Sleight of Hand
“Influencer” used to be a marketing descriptor. Now it’s an identity. “Content creator” used to mean “person who uploads videos”; now it’s a tarp thrown over every form of labor that can be measured in impressions.
We quietly retired older, truer words. We don’t say “advertiser” because it sounds manipulative. We don’t say “salesperson” because it sounds ordinary. We say “creator,” a word that feels divine, aspirational, disinfected.
But “content” is a flattening word. It means nothing except “something to fill a feed.” A painting, a poem, a protest, a product review, someone’s grief, someone’s cat — equally consumable, equally temporary, equally begging an algorithm for mercy.
That semantic sludge has consequences. It trains audiences to expect constant output rather than deliberate craft, dopamine rather than depth, the performance of process rather than the cost of production. Creation becomes a deliverable. A life becomes a pipeline.
“Content” is a flattening word. It means nothing except “something to fill a feed.”
The Psychology of Performed Authenticity
Influencer culture is the marketing industry’s most elegant magic trick: transmuting self-promotion into self-expression until the buyer forgets anything was sold.
You’re not hawking products anymore — you’re monetizing personhood. The pitch is intimacy; the product is access. Brand deals line up behind claims of authenticity, and “transparency” becomes a ritual performance of staged candor — the confessional as commercial. It’s method acting for survival.
Meanwhile, those of us who actually make things — jewelry, art, essays, pots, songs, stories — get conscripted into the same theater. The world expects our perpetual availability, our narrated workdays, our curated vulnerabilities, but without the sponsorships or the safety nets.
We’re no longer competing on craft; we’re competing on visibility. Skill is slow; visibility is hourly.
Honest Business vs. Personal Branding
I don’t have a brand. I have a practice.
I make things, I price them, I sell them. That used to be considered a respectable way to exist.
Now, if I don’t build a “personal narrative” around it, I’m “bad at marketing.” If I won’t aestheticize my workspace or narrate my burnout in shareable beats, I’m “unrelatable.”
But business doesn’t need to masquerade as friendship to be ethical. It is not manipulative to say, “This costs money.” It is manipulative to hide the transaction behind the language of belonging.
What passes for trust online is too often transparency theater — disclosure as bait, intimacy as funnel, a coupon code where a boundary should be.
I don’t want to audition for your attention. I want to be paid for my work without pretending the payment is incidental to a lifestyle we are supposedly living together.
The Audience Reconditioning
Audiences have been reconditioned, too. When everything is framed as content, labor disappears.
If it’s free to view, it must have been free to make. If you can scroll past it in three seconds, it must have taken three seconds to create.
Engagement — the hollowest currency — substitutes for support. Likes pretend to be patronage; shares pretend to be wages. The algorithm wears the laurel of benefactor while the artist starves neatly offscreen.
We normalize the idea that visibility is compensation and that asking for actual money is somehow greedy. People will tip an influencer to eat lunch on camera while asking an artist to “consider the exposure” for a commission that took a week.
It’s not that audiences became cruel. It’s that the system taught them to confuse access with value and attention with care.
“We’ve normalized the idea that visibility is compensation.”
The Moral Panic Around Selling
There’s a strange puritanism to it all. People cheer when influencers monetize every breath they take but cringe when an artist sets a price.
We’ve been taught that art loses its purity when it intersects with commerce — unless, of course, that commerce comes through a corporation.
I’m not ashamed of selling what I make. I’m ashamed that I have to defend it.
At least when I sell a bracelet, you know you’re buying a bracelet. When an influencer sells a lifestyle, you’re not even sure what you’re paying for.
Everything Is Content, Nothing Is Work
We’ve flattened the world into scrollable sameness. A protest, a performance, a painting, a product review — all swallowed by the same word: content.
When everything becomes content, nothing retains weight.
When everything is performative, authenticity becomes another aesthetic.
Art used to aim for resonance. Now it’s optimized for retention.
Craft used to require time. Now it requires output.
We’ve traded meaning for momentum, and we call that progress.
“Art used to aim for resonance. Now it’s optimized for retention.”
Toward an Unmarketable Humanity
I’m not arguing for a precious separation between art and money. I don’t believe in starving nobly.
I believe in groceries, in electricity, in the right not to have to beg for shelter every month like it’s a privilege instead of a baseline for being alive. I believe in paying craftspeople on time and paying myself at all.
I’m arguing for the right to do business without pretending that business is a personality. For the difference between a maker who sells what they make and a persona who sells who they are. For the dignity of price tags, invoices, lead times, shipping delays, and the quiet boredom of real work — the hours no one films because they are not a show and should not have to be.
Of course, I know why the influencer economy thrives. It offers certainty in a market terrified of silence. It promises a halo of relevance that can be purchased in increments. It simplifies the mess of human exchange into an easy subscription to a cultivated life.
It tells buyers they are part of something just by watching; it tells makers they are seen just by performing. But belonging isn’t a broadcast, and being seen isn’t the same as being sustained.
The more we lean on the theater, the less oxygen there is for the workshop. The more we worship the pipeline, the less we pay for the product. We end up with a culture where the loudest sellers of other people’s goods are called “creatives,” and the quiet workers who make their own are told to be grateful for comments.
“Selling isn’t the sin. Pretending you’re not selling is.”
Reclaiming Honest Exchange
Selling isn’t the sin. Pretending you’re not selling is.
There’s integrity in saying: I made this. It’s for sale. If you want it, you can have it. No illusion, no hierarchy, no algorithmic choreography.
That’s how exchange is meant to work — as a conversation with consequences, not a conversion funnel. It’s the difference between a fair trade and a tithe paid to the altar of someone else’s aura.
If we can reclaim that — the right to be proud of our labor — maybe the internet can stop being a masquerade of sincerity and return to being a marketplace where people meet as themselves.
The Wry Reference in Conclusion
So here is my heresy, which shouldn’t be heretical at all: I want a future that’s unmarketable in the one place it matters — inside the making.
I want to keep the right to vanish into the work without explaining it in real time. I want patrons, customers, peers, and neighbors — not followers. I want to talk about materials and methods and meaning more than metrics.
I want a world where “support small business” means buy the thing, not “engage with the post.”
Maybe that’s naïve. Maybe it’s old-fashioned. Maybe it’s simply human.
I’ll keep making things. I’ll keep selling them. I’ll keep calling that what it is — work — because it is, and because naming a thing correctly is the first act of respect.
I don’t want to be an influencer. I don’t want to be content. I want to be real. And that’s the one thing you still can’t fake, no matter how beautiful the lighting or how obediently the algorithm nods along.
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