Mino Maccari (1950)
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I’ve been watching a lot of weird shit lately.
Stuff that inspires, thrills, and freaks me out, like YouTube videos of professional high-divers. And then there’s the content I hate-watch, like influencer vlogs by MBA-brained-moneyed couples who quit their corporate jobs to travel the world (get brand deals).
In both cases, I’m watching people I have absolutely nothing in common with, but only one of those groups is made up of people I’d actively avoid.
Too much has been said about it:
Influencers are dipshits.
We have always known this.
I’m not here to talk about that. Instead, I’d like to reflect specifically on their impact on restaurants and other hospitality workers. How the influencer class takes hostages in essentially every business it interacts with, and the psychology behind this.
If you’re interested in reading other thoughts I’ve had about our relationship to service, you can do that here.
Once again, we have given the objectively stupidest people the most power. Beastly, these sycophants enter any space armed with delusions of superiority. Delusions that are spoon-fed and coddled by nervous and desperate hoteliers and restaurant owners who then impel their employees; saddling them with babysitting duties on top of everything else.
The invisible weapon of clout.
The phone too, then, becomes a gun.
Everyone’s afraid of the review.
There’s nothing new about certain people getting special treatment in the world of hospitality. Still, the influencer class differentiates itself from your run-of-the-mill celebrity. Unlike the average Hollywood actor—who is usually trying to be incognito— influencers want to be seen. Need to be seen—the exigencies of recognition. The potency of their threat (treat me well or I’ll drag your name through the mud) is dependent on acknowledgment, on identification.
Shamelessly they enjoy their perks, the worst of them rationalize their lagniappes as earned, while the others exist in idiotic bliss, a twisted sense of gratitude that fails to consider the how or the why of the matter. Either way, these people have become the scourge of service workers everywhere.
Understandably so.
In many of the vlogs I’ve watched in the past month or so, an influencer will find gift bags and whatnot on their hotel beds when checking in, which they always seem astounded by. They simulate surprise, labeling what is simply calculated and obligatory ass-kissing as something sincere, even personal.
After all, the truth is too ugly: having turned themselves into commodities, they can no longer be sure what is real and what is strategic.
While most of them consider what they do to be Work, it is, in fact, closer to blackmail, or a schizophrenic robbing someone at gunpoint.
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