So… an article in this morning’s Guardian (The sudden dawn of the deinfluencer: can online superstars stop us shopping?) notes the recent rise of the deinfluencer, these being online folk shrilly telling whoever will listen that they don’t in fact need all the things they once never knew they needed until influencers told them shrilly that they absolutely definitely needed to want them and have them until such time as they were no longer the new thing that everyone must absolutely want and have and were displaced by the new new thing that everyone never knew they needed but now definitely could not possibly live without.
In short, the message from deinfluencers is: just stop buying all that endless tat.
So far, so radical, though The Guardian article strikes a couple of notes of caution. Some deinfluencing seems to be more about creating the credibility of independence by dissing some things all the better to plug those things you really want to push: this is deinfluencing all the better to influence. More broadly, The Guardian article also notes that deinfluencers, no matter how radical, are, of course, still trying to influence their audience, albeit in a different direction to the perceived mainstream.
But isn’t there a more fundamental way in which deinfluencing is just influencing under another name? Consider the example of de-cluttering: while there is the small irony of everyone’s bookshelves being cluttered with (unread) decluttering books, was not the fundamental aim of the decluttering movement simply to clear the decks so as to allow for the consumption of another lifetime’s-worth of clutter? No? So is it an accident that maximalism is now in vogue? No really, it’s in Vogue.
Everyone knows that these things go in cycles; that Christmas excess is succeeded by New Year’s fasting; sin by repentance, flares by skinny jeans, going out by staying in, and each time the pendulum swings, one set of products become redundant and another desirable. I’m not suggesting there is a conscious and evil genius behind all this (though equally I’m not not suggesting), but you have to ask: in who’s interest do these cycles of consumption and purge, consumption ad purge work?
Answer: Consumption itself. The market. The eternal new, always the same.
And so it is, I suspect, with deinfluencing. There are, of course, genuine deinfluencers. Probably. People in it for the long haul who maintain a presence on social media just so the voice of anti-capitalism, or pro-humanity, has a presence. More likely, I suspect, should deinfluencing take off it will just be another bandwagon with its own bible to sell. Ultimately (and I’m excluding the ‘genuine’, though the point is that everyone thinks they’re genuine), deinfluencers, even if they discourage all consumption, are, of course, always pushing one commodity: themselves. So, go forth, deinfluencers, and deinfluence yourself.
