Get Rich or Lie Trying
Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy Symeon Brown Atlantic Books, £16.99
The rise of the “influencer economy”, fuelled by social media, has “changed the way we work, rest and play”, says Chris StokelWalker in New Scientist. This has been a “boon” for some people – it has transformed celebrity culture and helped make millionaires of “people who might otherwise be trapped in a dead-end job” – but there is little dispute that it has been “far from a uniformly good thing for society”. As Channel 4 News journalist Symeon Brown argues in this book, “the seedy side of social media can be as harmful as it is helpful”.
Brown’s book focuses on interviews, which makes it more about human stories than statistics, says Houman Barekat in the Financial Times. This approach yields some “telling psychological insights into the hopes and aspirations of wannabe influencers”, and the tendency for their blithe “can-do” attitudes to lapse “all too easily into delusion”. One would-be influencer, we learn, “frittered away” almost 10,000 hours on trying (and failing) to become an expert in internet marketing. Brown reserves “particular scorn” for influencers who, as he sees it, have “piggybacked on good causes for their own ends”. The picture that emerges is one of the “emptiness of the socialmedia economy”.
The book is “well researched”, but I wish Brown had given his material more room to breathe, as the broader argument becomes lost in details, says John Phipps in The Sunday Times. He tries to look for a higher meaning in his stories by invoking the “spectres of modernity”, such as “digital monopolies, financial catastrophes and viral pandemics”, but “can’t quite find a way to connect these structural factors to his individual case studies”. Social-media influencing is clearly a “nasty and deceitful business”, but in the end, the story is not more complicated than the fact that “there’s a fool born every minute and, in the neighbouring ward, someone more ruthless who will be happy to take their money”.