Babble,
, On influencer authenticity, aestheticity, authority, and availabilityBeen thinking more about the neurotic platformal intellectual (of which I am one, though I'm thinking we might all be in some regard.)
But specifically I was thinking about certain ways of shaping the corporate person that emerges from this, and like, the feeling rules of the different places on the Web I am, and how those relate to what kind of affect can be a commodity there.
This is all related to my public image and my corporate person, and all of that relates to being an influencer and thus authenticity.
I'm on the Fediverse, I have my website, I have my Substack, and I'm in Turntide Islands, a Discord server. (And a few other places, like my Ko-Fi, but I don't really use those at present. (Though I'm realizing I might want to participate in 2025 Ko-Fi Share-tember Challenge.))
The Fediverse likes shitposts: anger, snark, and brevity are favored (even if folk like to think they like the thoughtful pieces). This is aestheticity.
My website is a huge part of my authority, in ways that are difficult to explain when it comes to humans, but are a bit easier to point to with Web algorithms: the permanence, the density, the depth, are all things that search engines love, and as artificial intelligence becomes a larger portion of the Web user demographic, the semantic density lets me develop authority for long-tail terms.
My Substack, where I syndicate my Letters to the Web, people there like authenticity, in the standard influencer sense.
And the Discord lets me do availability, another component of influencer commodity stuff.
Lemme ground that in the theory, for future reference:
- Emily Hund in The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media, talks about authenticity as a currency of influencer labor.
- Arlie Russell Hochschild's feeling rules explains why: authenticity meets all the feeling rules of social media.
- Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube, talk about how influencer brands function as corporate persons, operating on authority
- Dunno who to cite, but for academic persons, authority is H-index, which is a measure of how many papers published divided by citations.
- Loes van Driel and Delia Dumitrica highlight the aestheticity of authenticity
- Taina Bucher (If…Then), platforms incite expectation of availability
- Theresa Senft and Alice Marwick also talk about availability related to microcelebrity and parasociality
- Tiziana Terranova also talks about the commodification of producing knowledge under digital labor conditions.
- Richard Dyer back in 1998 with star theory and aesthetic persona
So these things, authenticity, authority, aestheticity, and availability, are normally all available from an influencer brand.
What I'm talking about, thinking about, is in order to approach this currently-unavoidable neuroses with jouissance, I'm going to intentionally produce content along with these feeling rules, to gamify the process for me, in a way.
So, I'll do my good work on my files. This'll overflow into my Website. It'll also lead to things I feel like I need to say to others, that'll be my Letters to the Web. And it'll also lead to things that could be aestheticized.
On that note I'm thinking about how I recently was thinking about aphorisms, in the context of intellectualism and my ontology, and how I work to construct aphoristic expressions of the terms I use.
And I'd already had the thought that there is probably also an ecclesiastical expression for them, as well (if by explaining their heresy), and a bunch of other form of expression - but, notably the aphoristic and ecclesiastical expressions are quasi-determinate, or quasi-formal, or something: they are derivable from other information, in a way that you'll get a similar result every time, unlike other forms of expression, like visual art, where you might get something very different trying to express "love."
But, going back, it makes me realize I could probably, when crafting another expression of a term, craft an aestheticized expression of it, and that could be material for the Fediverse posts.
Thinking on this further, I'm realizing that it may be good, in an intellectually ethical way, to center the aphoristic expressions: include them in aestheticized expressions, if feasible, and within the letters.
This would be similar to Byung-Chul Han's matric expression of some ideas, but where the mantra are hyperlinks and themselves broken down: aphorisms where every meaningful word is explained with another aphorism…
…Until you get to more core vocabulary like including which have more formal expressions.
And the justification for the aphorism - not the meaning of the terms in it but the logicalness of the aphorism itself - is what's generally cited.
I think that's all the babbling I have on this for now. I like the four-part definition of authentic I've built here, and think it'll be useful for producing my brand.