The rise of influencer capital
This is only tangentially related, but this article reminds me of Galbraith&#x27;s &quot;The Affluent Society&quot; which should frankly be required reading for undergrad social sciences. In it, he argues that, at the time of writing (late 50s), the industrialized West has largely solved what had previously been the main preoccupation of economics - improved standard of living. As evidence, Galbraith points to advertising.<p>The argument is simple: when important productivity improvements take place, say the invention of a new way of baking bread, they don&#x27;t need advertising to gain mass use. Their benefits are so obvious that they don&#x27;t need to be sold. Demand doesn&#x27;t have to be created, because demand comes from human existence.<p>The existence of advertising, in contrast, shows that the thing being advertised probably isn&#x27;t that important. Indeed, the item is so trivial as to require advertising to create demand for it. This then leads us to wonder what benefit is being served by both creating this product and the demand for it; Galbraith argues that we&#x27;ve essentially fetishized economic growth at all costs (a holdover, in his view, from the early days of econ which was concerned with our metaphorical bread making instead of our metaphorical advertised widget making). He then attacks planned obsolescence as the dumbest outcrop of this process, because now we&#x27;re purposefully wasting materials on things which we hope to replace in the near future for no reason other than to keep making the things, things which we don&#x27;t need anyway - as evidenced by the fact that they&#x27;re advertised.<p>Anyway I think this fits in perfectly with the whole influencer economy phenomenon, because that&#x27;s literally all they do. Their raison d&#x27;etre is to generate demand for items nobody needs or even previously knew about.