influencers – Steven Savage

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort. Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

In one of my recent readings of Cory Doctorow’s valuable blog, he discussed the value of “vultures” in the economic ecosystem, and reminded us of an important idea by Douglass Rushkoff explaining the weird “abstractions” we see.. To quote Doctorow:

“Douglas Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don’t rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don’t start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don’t invest in the company, but options on the company’s shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk.”

Going meta is something we see everywhere, to the point we are used to it. Giant companies with packages of packages of companies. Financial jobs that are, as I heard it once put “sloshing money around and scraping up what falls out.” Hell, with Kalshi and Polymarket and the various betting markets, we’ve gone meta on reality, allowing people to bet on anything, including things that are already pretty meta.

A friend recently summed up the overwhelm of modern technology by noting how much of what we do is metadata. You can fill out a paper form and have to store it and retrieve it – but if you put it on a computer it needs a name and a location – and cloud storage involves even more metadata behind the scenes. New software that lets you “easily” track information often has “new” features that require you to enter even more data to use features. At some point paper seems easier because the metadata can take more effort than the data.

(Remember, I once interviewed at software company that did Scrum with post it notes, having given up on tools.)

The ultimate meta is AI. AI takes our data, our metadata, and approximates us. It’s a world of data centers funded by this group, run by that group, and owned by another group. The power and water consumption are abstracted away. That’s if things are even being built, which seems to be a point of confusion – but boy companies want AI in everything.

It feels like our world is more and more meta all the time. Actual, hands-on, reality has layers of layers over it and we consume the reality to power the unreality.

Everything else is pretty meta too. Ever notice how these days in 2026 that our health care decisions by the federal government seem to be driven by internet conspiracy theories not based in anything? How memes and rumors can drive actions even if they have no existence in reality? Watch the news and people are trying to talk about reality with a thick layer of marketing and political opportunism. Even the propaganda seems meta, if people even know it’s propaganda, and sometimes I’m not sure the propagandists know.

So what I wonder is how much time and energy are we wasting doing meta but you know not doing stuff? I mean here in May 2026 farmers seem to be pretty impacted by whatever the hell is up with the non-ceasefire in Iran but it’s not making the news enough. Various Influencers famous for being famous are going around being famous and Influencing, but what are they about? People are betting on various important events in the world while others short markets, making us suspicious of what’s happening why. Also software seems to get exponentially harder to use as we add more stuff because of . . . I dunno, sales or something?

I mean how much time and energy are we burning here? Well time, energy and planet. Not sure much meaningful is happening, you know.

The problem with all this “metaness” is I think we won’t notice it breaking down until a lot of other stuff does. All the meta stuff, all the abstraction, the financialization, the investment vehicles, the BS media hype, that can keep going for awhile as it has money and momentum. But there comes a day when memes don’t fill your bank account, you can’t use AI as fertilizer, and you didn’t bet on very angry people being upset about unemployment. The people who think meta miss this stuff.

It’s best we don’t.

Steven Savage

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort. Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

There’s something about American culture that is all about Standing Out, and I think it explains a lot of our problems. Or is part of our problems – our many, many problems.

Anyone remember when Personal Branding first hit? I actually loved it because it was a vision quest to ask who you are and communicate it. In time it became more about standing out and marketing, being visible but not being who you are. I probably “got out of it” too late for my own dignity, but in the end I realized it had become marketing and standing out.

Then there’s all this Influencer Culture. I keep trying to figure out what’s there, but there’s no there there – it’s standing out so you can sell projects. The goal is to be Known but not be something worth Knowing. I resent the fact that, to understand the world, I actually have to understand who Mr. Beast is – and further resent he’s not a metal singer or superhero.

Then there’s the usual business advice of standing out. I think I resent that a lot as a Project Manager, because my job is to make sure nothing noteworthy happens. If my status reports are not filled with the color red and panicked comments, then I did my job. But a lot of business gurus and youtubers want to tell me to stand out even though if what I do is interesting it’s probably time to worry.

But standing out is part of our technology, economy, and culture. And I think it’s a problem because it seems it may be all there is in our politics and economy.

We’re conditioned to stand out, to market ourselves, to be noteworthy. Sure, it gets into the job search, but Social Media has made everything about standing out. We’re in a race to get hits, get likes, be better than that other Instagram addict. The Modern Web 3.0 feels like everything is a social media competition and a job search. In short we’re all trying to be Influencers without being anyone.

(While of course the Social Media companies make bank).

So many people are now in a competition to be celebrities, we also treat people who have made themselves into celebrities as the most trusthworthy. How many people out there with real financial, cultural, and yes, political influence are indistinguishable from some supplement-hawker Social Media Influencer. You can’t tell the difference, and maybe they can’t either.

Survival of the fittest? No survival of the most noticeable.

Being noticeable gets you money. Being noticeable gets you elected. You can end up getting people to throw venture capital at you, CEO positions, etc. It doesn’t mean you’re good at any of this, but boy will you get it handed to you especially if you fit certain demographics.

When getting noticed pays off, then that’s all you do. That’s all you aim for. That also attracts a certain kind of person that probably should not have their sweaty hands on the levers of power and loads of money. Once you have loads of money you can buy people to say you’re right, and you probably believe it.

It doesn’t seem to be working out for us. I want my politicians to solve problems, not be posting internet memes and Instagram photos. I’d like to see more talk of people doing their job as opposed to making that killer LinkedIn profile. I want to stop having the suspicion that people with lots of power and money are so performative that’s all their is to them.

I kinda want things to be like me and my status reports.

When standing out is all that matters, people’s ability to assess aptitude and character atrophies. It certainly isn’t doing too hot to judge by the state of the world.

Steven Savage