HBO recently released a short teaser clip for The Last of Us season two, but there is no need to wait until 2025 to watch the end of days on television. Here comes The Influencer, a Korean reality TV series that pits online stars against each other in a bloodless Battle Royale of social media clout. It offers a bleak assessment of the future of the human psyche and it is horribly compelling. All that matters in the world of The Influencer is attention; how you get that attention is irrelevant. The world is doing its best to prove that, as a general rule, this is terrible news for us all.
There are 77 competitors, which means the first episode is an hour and 20 minutes long and half of it comprises introductions. These introductions are not unwelcome, unless you are already familiar with Korean influencers, and they demonstrate the wide range of ways to attract a substantial online following. There are hair and makeup artists, models and rappers, gamers and fitness instructors, but also a man who cooks meat, an “actual shaman” and a silent character, which prompts another competitor to ask why they have bothered giving him a mic.
Each contestant is provided with an electronic tag to wear around their neck. It is difficult not to see it as the grimmest of satires. You can view the collar as an albatross, although I am not sure that is the intention. At first, it shows the number of followers that each person has on their most popular platform, which range from 27.5 million all the way down to the tens of thousands. The show then uses their follower counts to calculate each person’s value and worth as a proportion of the 300m won (£170,000) prize pot .
If it sounds a bit convoluted, it is. In short, they are reduced to a financial figure, based on how popular they are, which is turned into digital branding – and I mean branding of the old-fashioned kind. The talk quickly turns to shame and embarrassment. “We need to cover our collars,” advises one contestant.
Just as they are already feeling vulnerable, The Influencer steps in with the first round, to really pummel their remaining self-worth into the floor. Each person is given 15 likes and 15 dislikes to dole out to their fellow contestants. This reveals an obvious problem with the show: it explores a digital world, but not always in real time or digitally. The immediacy of social media is a big part of how it operates; without that, it’s not really social media. Here, getting likes or dislikes within a closed app, made for the show, is essentially an analogue task involving contestants talking to each other in the same room, forming strategic alliances and working out whom they do and don’t like, in real life, before voting for or against them.
Round one, then, is basically Big Brother with 77 people, but the tactics are more ruthless and far more post-truth. At one point, you think it might go down an eat-the-rich route, as one person suggests targeting the people with the most money on their collars (the theory being, I think, that booting out those who possess the most wealth would allow it to be redistributed among the less wealthy). Then they change their minds: “Let’s target short-form creators instead.” Yeah! The revolution will not be digitised! Real-world followers come into it in episode two, but, again, they have to massage things to give the impression of a fair competition.
There are fascinating hierarchies at play. The YouTubers look down on the TikTokers, because they don’t rate short-form content. There is disdain for actual celebrities, seen as distinct from influencers, who are considered out of touch and, if they are involved in social media, to be operating with an unfair advantage. People like content that shows a bit of effort, but they don’t like content that is too slick or pretentious. Being meek isn’t popular, but neither is being a showoff. The parameters are slippery and vague. It is exhausting to watch. You can only imagine what it must be like to take part in it.
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Certain messages emerge from the twists and turns of the gameshow format. It rewards attention. Early on, attention is shown to be most easily achieved through noisy lies. Truth doesn’t matter if a statement draws all eyes towards you. This is a sensitive time for online myths and falsehoods that catch fire. If you want to feel low-level despair about how and why we got here, then The Influencer should fill in some of the gaps.