I keep landing on the same frustration. The people who have the most to say about what is good are usually the people who know the least about it, and the more I trace why this is the case the more it points back to the same place, which is the gap between who is talking and who has actually done the work. It started for me in a HSR co-working space last year where I sat close enough to read a guy’s screen in a Uniqlo polo and he spent three hours on a single slide for a millet snack brand. The line on it was something like this is not just a snack, it is a return to ancestral wisdom and a quiet rebellion against industrial food and a philosophy of eating the way your grandmother did. I could not stop thinking about it. The product was roasted ragi tossed with ghee and salt, the kind of thing every grandmother in Karnataka has been making for free her whole life, and a roomful of people had decided that the way to charge a hundred rupees for thirty grams of it was to invent a mythology around it. The move only makes sense if nobody in the room has ever been hungry enough to just eat the ragi plain, which is probably true, and the part that should worry us is that the same playbook is being applied to everything now. Every commodity wrapped in the costume of a movement so the price can go up and the buyer feels like they joined something.

A friend showed me three Shopify stores last month, all selling the same bundle of incense sticks made in a factory near Mysore. The first one was calling it a wellness ritual at four hundred rupees for a hundred sticks, the second a mindfulness tool at five hundred, the third ancient aromatherapy at six hundred. Same product, same factory, three different costumes. The whole thing was a Canva logo and a Razorpay key, no maker, no factory floor, no actual ancient wisdom, just a target demographic and a Pinterest board. An influencer burned it in their reel and the agarbatti borrowed a mood for the price of a sponsored post. That is the whole economy in a single transaction.

MrBeast Burger launched in fifty states at once and it was not even a real company. It was a virtual brand running out of other people’s kitchens, a child of a service that builds delivery-only celebrity culinary brands, which is a sentence that should not exist but does because the influencer had enough reach to make the marketing work without the supply chain having to make anything real. You get a burger with his name on it that is not his, made by people he has never met in a kitchen he has never visited, and the whole illusion holds because the platform gave him the audience and the audience gave him permission to be the brand. The burger might not even be a burger anymore. It might just be a notification that something happened.

The pattern is the same every time. The influencer is the last mile of the supply chain, not the source of the thing, and the marketing copy needs them to look like the source so the machine can pretend it is making culture when it is just moving boxes. Calling it out would mean admitting that the curator is a courier, and a courier is not a curator. Those are different jobs. One needs taste and the other needs a follow count, and we have been confusing the two for a decade.

Culture had gatekeepers once. I am not romanticizing that era, it had plenty of problems of its own, but the gatekeepers at least had to have spent years inside the thing they were gatekeeping. You could not become the voice of a generation at twenty-three if you had not made anything yet. An editor developed a real ear through years of actual editing, a gallerist learned to spot a bad show on sight by walking enough rooms, and a critic earned the right to an opinion by reading more than anyone was paying them to. Their opinions carried weight because they had paid the cost of being wrong many times. The cost is invisible on a feed. The feed only rewards momentum.

The feedback loop got hacked. The old one was slow and imperfect and full of bias, but creators put work out and audiences responded and critics interpreted and over time some kind of consensus formed about what was good, and the people who had done the work had room to be heard. The new loop collapsed all of that into one signal, which is engagement. Engagement does not care whether you have read the book, it cares whether you can hold attention for fifteen seconds, so the people who win the new loop are the people who are best at performing the appearance of expertise, which is not the same skill as having expertise. We have lost the ability to tell the difference because the loop rewards the performance more than the thing itself.

Every endorsement an influencer makes is compromised the moment it leaves their mouth. Their livelihood depends on the next post, the deal pays for the post, and honesty would cost them the deal. The whole machine runs on the gap between what is being said and what is true, and that gap is where you and I are supposed to live, on the receiving end, scrolling through it.

Most influencers are not malicious. They did not set out to do this. The problem is that the system picked for being visible, not for being good at anything, and now we have a culture shaped by the most skilled performers of attention in the room, most of whom have not actually tried the things they are shilling. They have no firsthand experience with the place or the book or the restaurant or the routine. They have only the brief they were handed and the check that came with it, and looking alive is the only thing they have been paid to do. The recommendations feel hollow because they are hollow.

I call influencers the flu on purpose. The flu does not kill you on its own and it does not rob you. It lowers your defenses so the real infections can take hold, and that is what is happening to culture right now. The influencer is the gap in the wall, the lowered defense, the thing that lets a hundred low-quality signals pour through and settle in the lungs of whatever used to make the conversation worth having. After long enough on the low-grade infection you stop noticing the symptoms because the symptoms become the weather. Then one day you cannot remember what it felt like to trust your own taste because you have been outsourcing it to a feed for so long that your taste is just a list of things other people told you to want.

Do not take an influencer’s word for it. Not because they are lying, most of them are not, but because the system that produces them does not allow for the kind of judgment you actually need. The system rewards volume and visibility and being relatable, and none of those are the same as knowing what is good. The shortcut feels free but it is the bug, and the moment you take it you have already become a node in the network that is feeding on your attention the same way the feed is feeding on theirs. The whole thing is a closed loop, and you are inside it whether you wanted to be or not.

Find me on Twitter if you want to argue with any of this. I am @troysk704.