How the Celebs Rule Us
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Who should we call the first “Instagram billionaire”? It’s a mark of the new Gilded Age we’ve entered that both women vying for that title belong to the same family, the illustrious Kardashian-Jenner clan. In 2019, it looked like Kylie Jenner had passed the ten-figure mark, only for Forbes to revise its estimates, declaring that Jenner had juiced her net worth with “white lies, omissions and outright fabrications.” (Her real wealth, the magazine thought, was a paltry $900 million). So, as of April this year, the accolade belongs to Jenner’s no less enterprising sister, Kim Kardashian West.
Social media has ushered in a new fusion of celebrity worship and celebrity entrepreneurship, giving rise to an elite class of “influencers” like Jenner and Kardashian West. Reality TV stars who were, in that wonderful phrase, “famous for being famous,” they now rely on their vast social media followings to market advertising space and fashion and beauty products. As such, they are closely entwined with another freshly minted elite, the tech oligarchs whose platforms are the crucial instruments of celebrity today. Word has it the good people at Instagram are all too happy to offer special treatment to the likes of the Kardashians, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga — not to mention His Holiness the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church (that’s @franciscus to you and me). And there’s every reason for social media companies to accommodate their glamorous accomplices: in 2018, Jenner managed to wipe $1.3 billion off the market value of Snapchat with a single tweet questioning the platform’s popularity.
It’s perfectly obvious, of course, what hides behind the embarrassingly thin figleaf of “influence,” and that is power. Not just financial power but social status, cultural clout and, on the tech companies’ side of the bargain, access to the eyeballs and data of huge audiences. The interesting question is where this power ultimately stems from. The form of capital being harvested is human attention; but how does the tech/influencer elite monopolise this attention? One well-known answer is through the addictive algorithms and user interfaces that turn us into slaves of our own brain chemistry; another invokes those dynamics of social rivalry, identified by the philosopher René Girard, whereby we look to others to tell us what we should want.
