Babble, [2025-09-01 Mon 10:09], Mapping the neurotic platform intellectual

That definitely brought it closer to something that can have clear argument. But I also am realizing that public experts are also a form of influencer, inspired by this post on the CriticalTheory subreddit.

OP postulates that influencers operate through confession, connecting it to Foucault's theory of confession.

The History of Sexuality maps how modern forms of power rely less on prohibition and more on incitement to discourse: that is, they induce people talking about themselves, their desires, and beliefs: this lines up pretty well with how modern social media influencers operate. (And helps me see that perhaps rather than "public expert," I am trying to refer to "social media expert," though that is ambiguously an expert of or on social media.

Explaining Foucault's confession more: confession is an act of subjection, that is, an act that makes the penitent a subject to the ideology confessor. Related ideas: pastoral power.

An important part of Foucault's theory is that there is subjection¹ and subjectivation.

Subjection may be described as the process of systems inducing, cohering, and stabilizing an individual as a subject, while subjectivzation may be described as the process of how individuals cohere and stabilize themselves as subjects of those systems.

The reddit thread, someone shares some other resources.

I've heard of the back stage and front stage bifurcation that's in Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory before; I feel like a lot of people have a relatively intuitive understanding of that concept, though the theory definitely adds texture to the its shape.

Basically, there is a front stage, where performing occurs, and a back stage, where performance is planned and structured.

Some influencers complicate this split: their front stage is where they are performing a… scripted? performance for their audience, and their back stage, where influencers are performing personal life for their audience.

I'm trying to point to things like a beauty brand representative uploading a video where they're crying about their girlfriend in messy room, or the less caustic, homesteader who normally talks about cultivating tomatoes shows themselves walking their dog on the beach.

Both types of video from each person is a performance, but of a very different sort: one performs the front stage, the other the back. The influencer isn't aiming for intimacy, but an illusion of intimacy. I don't think I've said it yet, but the term parasocial needs to get a mention.

I also see here a sort of cascading confession, because social media influencers are not just broadcasting content: their audience is encouraged to engage… that is, confess, themselves. So the influencer and influencer audience member are both incited to confess to each other, by the social media system.

What this means for the pentinent/confessor relations is worth examining, especially from a Catholic perspective, given the origins of confessing (as I'm thinking about it) in the Church.

Moving on for now, I'm also previously familiar with Mari Lehto, for a few reasons, but it feels most important to share, because of my introspection on my mental health: anxiety is something I feel frequently, and I am curious about why. But I also think that there is a lot of important things to look at in the domain of social media influencers, especially as it relates to Marxism, radicalism, and counter-insurrectionary programs.

Lehto connected affect theory with influencer theory to come up with a few ideas:

• The affective practice of anxiety
  • Drawing on:
    • Margaret Wetherell and affective practice
      • coined affective practice as the embodied routine of doing emotionalism
    • Arlie Russell Hochschild's work on emotional labor
      • coined the idea feeling rules
  • THe affective practice of anxiety is what Finnish influencer mothers do produce and perform a self that is:
    • "agreeable to their followers"
    • "decrease[s] the discrepancy between their felt emotions and cultural expectations"

So, feeling rules lead to a practice of performing feelings in specific ways.

Lehto also draws on Vicky Loveday and her idea of the neurotic academic, which talks about how academic persons in (neo)liberal universities experience and perform anxiety.

Lehto uses this to coin the term neurotic influencer

I can connect this to my own relational dynamics, in a way: the neurotic influencer is the relational structure that holds the relational conditions of feeling rules, which shape the relational acts of the neurotic influencer anxiety, a mode of anxiety.

I'd argue that the neurotic influencer is actually a mode of the neurotic academic, as social media is itself a mode of dicourse that in the relevant ways is functionally identical to academia. Put another way, while the neurotic academic is clearly a traditional intellectual (Gramsci), it also may be true that the social media influencer is an organic intellectual. This is an I explored recently in "Citing for Containment"

There is, it seems, a way to construct the concept of "neurotic intellectual," but I'm not ready for that logical slog yet.

I'm going to move on, perhaps too early, with confidence that it is better to build the field of ideas, at this point, than perfectly cultivate what I've established.

So, crisis induces learning, which in the case of public intellectuals on social media combines with the induction of organic intellectualism and neurotic performance by social media, induces a form of influencer performance that is founded in being a the neurotic influencer form of organic intellectual and the neurotic academic form of platformed intellectual.

I'll call it the neurotic platform intellectual, realizing I haven't yet coined the term platform intellectual - though maybe it'd be more properly "platformed" individual, or maybe even "platformal intellectual"? That actually might be it…

(At this point, the jargon is so tightly woven that I can feel myself missing, but revisions of these ideas should clean it up. Personally, as someone in the position being mapped, this all feels somewhat true, even if poorly-expressed.)

The other sources introduced in the reddit thread I've mentioned are less familiar to me:

• Emily Hund, The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (2023ce)
  • Argues that influencer authenticity is an industrial construct, not (just) a social construct. (I want to point out/argue that due to platformization, all social media users are influencers, in some capacity.)
    • I can connect this to Foucault's confession, I reckon
    • And this construct can be some formation of Goffman's front/back stage
  • Grounds the influencer economy in its history, i.e. 2008 Financial Crisis
  • Names influencer authenticity as the je ne sais quoi of the differential of influencer engagement
    • social media metrics don't fully explain that diffferential
    • paradox of authenticity: manufactured performance of authenticity isn't authentic
    • social media bias is influenced by many biases: gender, aesthetic, racial
    • platformization is opaque, not lawless
• Loes van Driel and Delia Dumitrica, Selling Brand While Staying "Authentic": The Professionalization of Instagram Influencers (2021ce)
  • More on influencer authenticity, from studying Dutch Instagram influencers. (I will be surprised if that node ever gets another link.)
  • Looks at the professionalization of the influencer economy and influencer culture.
  • Looks at the structure of influencer labor
    • And how it's influenced by social media platforms and their norms
      • This could connect to "feeling rules"
  • Explains the social media audience as actually being two audiences:
    • the social media followers, who want authenticity and intimacy
    • the social media brand, who want professionalism and engagement
      • Connect this: authenticity is seen as the je ne sais quoi of engagement (Hund), so brands want authenticity too
  • The piece is good on getting at the nuts-and-bolts of how influencer labor and culture is shaped by relating to platforms.
• Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness: The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube (2024ce)
  • social media influencers aren't (just) individuals or workers, but are corporate persons:
    • "entrepreneurial subjects who function as corporations in themselves, producing value through their very existence online."
      • That feels like an accurate description of who I must be.
    • influencers are "factories of personhood":
      • living is put through an industrial process into a commodity:
        • living is living
        • the industrial process is neurotic confession
        • the commodity is fake-intimacy, fake-authenticity.
    • The logic holds, but is a different perspective on corporate personhood than normal: it isn't that corporations are becoming more human-like, but that humans are becoming more corporation-like.
    • alienation from having multiple concurrent roles
      • owners: of their brand, but depend on platforms
      • workers: of themselves, commodifying their own existing
      • products: whose public image circulate as capital
  • "The confession of everyday life on YouTube operates as the productive labor of the influenceer-factory, sustaining parasocial intimacy while expanding corporate database."
  • subjection: influencers are bound to platform logics
  • subjectivation: influenccers fashion themselves into entrepreneurial corporate selves
  • capital accumulation
    • platforms accumulate capital
    • public image (split (conditional?) ownership between influencer and platform)

• There exists some thing we can call the neurotic platformal intellectual.
  • It is any social media user, but especially those incited into performing expertise.
    • As every liberal subject is a naive scientist and every social media user is platformized into the platformal mode of liberal subject, every social media user is a naive scientist.
    • Some social media users are additionally incited into subjectivizing as intellectuals
    • These form the neurotic platformal intellectual.
  • It is produced under the confessional logics of social media platforms.
    • dual-audience
  • It is governed by affective labor regimes where anxiety is normalized and routinized as a performance.
  • It is situated in an industrial structure of social media platforms where authenticity is the primary production standard.
  • In this conditions, the platformal subject:
    • merges commensurable conditions from:
      • the neurotic academic (a form of traditional intellectual)
      • organic intellectual
    • operates in a Marxist framing as:
      • multimodal:
        • worker:
        • owner:
        • product:
      • corporate person
      • commodifier of life into affect via confessed anxiety

• When systemic crisis (i.e. Collapse) is an influence, the neurotic platformal intellectual is compelled into a specific paradoxical form:
  • Crisis, a form of destabilization, induces novelty, induces exploration, induces learning.
  • But the neurotic platformal intellectual is under pressure to maintain expertise to follower audience, to maintain professionalism to brand audience.
  • What they present as learned is influenced by afffective pressures.
  • What they present as learned influences their actual learning.
  • So what gets learned and circulated is whatever is authentic, not truthful.
• I really need to connect this to my ideas of californication, which is an affective process relating to how a liberal subject experiences crisis-induced anxiety
  • Like, if:
    • authenticity is a form of affective anxiety induced by platformization
    • and californication is a process of affecting the anxiety induced by crisis
    • and crisis is a part of living
      • and crisis is an especially fit part of living for material for producing authenticity
    • then:
      • californicizing is an especially fit process of producing the authenticity induced by platforms
  • So, californicizing learning is the induced preference for using social media?
    • That's a lot of logic connections, my next formation of these ideas might need to get more formal to make sure this holds up at all.

• So if people are learning from social media discourse as naive scientists, what happens when the epistemic foundation of learning is the affective resonance of how californicate something is?

—

That might be as far as i can reform this idea without developing my ideas on californication better. Feels like a good stopping point, like I'd be able to pick it up from here, though. And, regardless of how some of the claims and arguments hold up, the idea of a neurotic platformal intellectual seems solid, and I meet those criteria, so this is itself an artifact of the behavior of such a subject, which may be useful for further research.