by Karen Karbo
Before the digital age we were exposed to advertising through much slower forms of media. TV and radio commercials could be ridiculously memorable, but radios and televisions could be turned off.* They didn’t come with you everywhere you went. Glossy magazines sat in a row on the newsstands, minding their own business. Maybe you had a magazine subscription or two. They were powerful message bearers, but after they arrived, you flipped through them, sniffed the perfume ads, then dropped them on the coffee table or decorative basket beside the commode. Or they became fodder for adolescent art projects.
These leisurely delivery systems allowed us to forget for long stretches of time that we and our lives were imperfect and in need of fixing. Our self-esteem may have plunged upon reading that full-page ad for boots worn by a tan supermodel in a gold bikini, but we couldn’t stare at that picture indefinitely—well, maybe you could if you were stoned out of your mind—and then real life intervened and distracted us from our feelings of inadequacy. We had things to do that helped us reassert our self-image as a human being with agency. The homely demands of reality saved us. The passage of time, during which we lived our lives, free from the onslaught of advertisements, provided a bit of a corrective. Back then, reality could still compete with the emotions of yearning and self-abasement churned up by advertising. We were not being waterboarded nonstop with the message that we needed to improve ourselves.
Social media may not be the fount of all evil, but it’s also naïve to assume it’s simply the next iteration of a glossy women’s magazine. A seductive digital mind shaper, these platforms condition us moment by moment to long for other lives, always better than our own. No matter how lousy our habitual scrolling makes us feel—and there is now plenty of evidence that social media makes us more anxious, depressed, and despairing—we still don’t unfollow someone who makes us feel fat, ugly, poor, or unloved. We become more attached; we don’t just “follow” them, we follow them. Our inner thirteen-year-old is rekindled. Oh, to be like the popular girl! To have that hair, husband, kids, stamina, “passion,” slender fingers on which to display delicate gold rings, that perfect recipe for a refreshing healthy pasta salad, that evolved spiritual outlook, that collection of equally cool friends with whom to raise fish bowl–size goblets of wine.
While social scientists and psychologists are dutifully performing carefully designed longitudinal studies to assess whether our heavy phone usage is destroying what’s left of our attention spans, rewiring our brains, and making us itchy with impatience when forced to endure a face-to-face encounter, advertisers have quickly figured out how to leverage our addiction.
As I write this, the average cell phone user picks up her device fifty-two times a day. Allowing for eight hours of sleep, this works out to about every twenty minutes, or three times an hour. Three times an hour, day in day out, we’re assaulted with messages and advertisements, and they aren’t just any old messages and ads. Thanks to the wonder of the algorithm, they have been fine-tuned to stir up our deepest insecurities. Doing the math, that means eighty times a day we get a message, however brief, of who we aren’t, what we don’t have, and what we are never likely to have unless we take proper measures. Unless we do something to improve ourselves.
Just now I checked my bank balance. I logged out of my bank app and opened Instagram. The first sponsored ad to pop up before I began my customary slack-jawed scroll featured a tall woman of a certain age. She was still catwalk slim, with immaculate posture. She strode into frame wearing a brightly colored caftan that looked like something Eileen Fisher might design for South Sea royalty. But the ad wasn’t about the caftan; it was about a webinar for women and money. “A year to get rich with purpose. This is how you transform your financial world.”
Nothing makes me break out in a cold sweat more than the suggestion that I need to get my financial act together. I felt terrible about myself, immediately. Terrible that I couldn’t rock a brightly colored caftan in any way that didn’t make me look like your crazy aunt gone to seed, terrible that I wasn’t thinner, and terrible that I have the money-managing skills of a seven-year-old whose primary source of income is the tooth fairy. I am not a webinar person—really, isn’t it just someone blathering at you on Zoom?—but I was tempted to click on this one.
For the next three minutes I continued to scroll, during which the almighty algorithm presented me with sponsored ads for:
Cute suede ankle boots
Salad with homegrown greens
Ultracomfort bra
Yoga philosophy reading list
Gorgeous black-and-white photograph of a woman washing her thick black hair
“The Wellness Special”
Recipe for baking a gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate cake
Picture of a bunch of women with tiny asses celebrating #globalrunningday
A celebrity wearing super cute $185 shoes made of recycled something or other
Customize your very own bangle stack!
Facetune app 2
This anti-aging cream really works
Beautiful tiny cabin
Have you tried our bestselling tinted lip sculpting oil?
Sleep like a baby
Perfecting skin tint. Sheer, beautiful coverage. Breathable formula autofits to skin
Radical creative productivity
Lean legs and thighs in 14 days
Install this app and get your personal fasting plan
Heist: revolutionary summer shapewear has arrived
Taking your writing business to the next level
You are everything you think
I don’t imagine this list makes you feel as despondent as it does me. This specific assortment of come-ons was designed to make me feel crappy. You have your own list, derived from your own clicks and likes. Although we prefer not to think about it, it pays to recall that the free social media platforms to which we’ve attached ourselves like a barnacle to the hull of a ship are designed to do one thing: hoover up our data, then blast us with personally targeted ads that feed into our concerns, worries, obsessions, and desires.
It gets more complicated. Flowing alongside sponsored ads is a gushing stream of chipper posts created by so-called influencers, all peddling a similar version of the elusive feminine ideal. Will Storr, writing in Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us, pretty much nails it. “It’s not difficult to detect the general model of ideal selfhood that the culture of today has come up with. It’s usually depicted as an extroverted, slim, beautiful, individualistic, optimistic, hardworking, socially aware yet high-self-esteeming global citizen with entrepreneurial guile and a selfie camera.”
Influencers were the beginning of the end of self-improvery for me. Sponsored ads never got to me: they were labeled and obvious. The cloying, inspirational messages from the stratospherically famous were also relatively easy to enjoy, without my feeling as if I needed to drop everything and do a juice fast or get myself a productivity guru. But beyond the ads and beneath the famous, a peppy army of pretty, photogenic, articulate women endlessly shilled products and programs they promised would improve us and our lives, and I didn’t know what to make of them. The influencers I followed were enough like me to give me a glimpse of what my life would be like if I just buckled down and improved myself. The very fact of their existence, adorably gardening, enjoying a communal meal outdoors at a big wooden table with a bouquet of sunflowers stuck in a chipped jug, snuggling with their dogs as they read a popular yet enriching novel ’neath an alpaca throw, flung me into a panic. If they could have this life, couldn’t I? Or more to the point, shouldn’t I?
Before the turn of the twenty-first century the division between the image makers and the image consumers was still clear. No matter how many thousands of advertisements and photoshopped fashion spreads we consumed, we knew they came from people who were paid to make them. Selling us stuff was just their job, the same way defense attorneys make a living ensuring the rights of psycho killers and scu
mbags are protected. It took me a while to realize it was the same with influencers, with their faux affection for their followers (many of whom have turned out to be fake) and their contracts to mention a product a specific number of times. It was their job, and part of their job was to make it not look like advertising.*
There’s a subset of influencers I’ve had some experience with in real life: successful cisgender heteronormative middle-class white women (like me) who’ve managed to make a great success of their lives. They practice something Canadian writer and feminist marketing consultant Kelly Diels identified as FLEB, Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand. FLEB is a marketing narrative driven largely by female entrepreneurs, most of whom were at one time in the “display professions”—actresses, musicians, or models. On their Instagram feeds the FLEB entrepreneurs come across as best girlfriends, generously offering their life lessons, exercise tips, and skin care secrets. The underlying message is “I’m the best, most improved version of myself, and you can be too.” Predictably, the result is not empowerment but, rather, says Diels, to encourage other women to “be hotter, tauter, richer, more positive, more productive, and more serene. In other words, be more of what our mainstream media and culture already demands of women.”
It’s the same old bamboozlement, reconfigured for the digital age.
The jewel in the FLEB crown is goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle and e-commerce site. Founded a thousand years ago in internet time, the site still claims two million wellness seekers per month. There they purchase $185 “active” botanical serum and hoover up pseudo-scientific medical advice. The most famous, for which Paltrow was fined $145,000 (pocket change) for unsubstantiated claims, involved Jade Eggs for Your Yoni, inserted to “balance hormones, regulate menstrual cycles, prevent uterine prolapse, and increase bladder control.” Vox reported in 2018 that despite the ruling, goop was still selling the infamous eggs, with a revised promise that using them would “increase sexual energy and pleasure.” In the summer of 2019, the Jade Egg was still available, minus the description of what it does or why you would want one. What remains is a wonderfully surreal bit of genuinely useful information: eggs are pre-drilled for a string add-on; unwaxed dental floss is recommended.
Every dustup in the press about goop’s dubious claims does nothing to discredit the operation.* Her followers still click on “What I Packed for My Weekend at Shou Sugi Ban House, a Gorgeous New Hamptons Spa,” which features a $35 packet of “The Martini” Emotional Detox Bath Soak.
It’s easy to poke fun at Paltrow, who is, after all, just an attractive, very clean-looking businesswoman/snake oil salesperson and, at one time, a pretty good actor. It’s hardly her fault that we’re happy to abandon all reason in the hope of becoming a fully detoxed spirit warrior. Of course, the other thing she’s selling is class identity. The invisible, and bogus, free gift that comes with a $125 tub of exfoliator is the illusion that we are in Paltrow’s tax bracket and can easily afford the shockingly overpriced stuff she sells.
Over the years, I’ve been contracted to ghostwrite books for a handful of prominent FLEB entrepreneurs. Each one was a powerhouse in her own right. Each one rose to success in her field under her own steam. Each one has stamina, grit, smarts, and ambition. Each one has struggled and triumphed. I was awed and inspired by all of them. They are also rich women in a rich nation, which makes all the difference in how they live. While they are devoted to authenticity, these women were shy and unforthcoming when it came to addressing the freedom that goes with having boatloads of money. They could not very well admit that their (well-earned) wealth allows them the freedom to invest, literally, in “radical” self-care, wellness, spirituality, satisfying their curiosities and yearnings through travel, and pursuing their passions and goals. For all the talk about transparency, it’s the one thing they are not comfortable talking about, and the thing that makes all the difference.
I know, because every time I brought up money during our work sessions it would be the beginning of the end of our partnerships. I would never say anything as crass as “but you’re a millionaire—no wonder you can go to India for six months, even if you did sleep on the floor at the ashram.” I would try to broach the subject diplomatically. “Um, shouldn’t we reassure the reader that your ideas are useful to everyone, even the mom with three kids, two jobs, and a neighbor with insomnia and a drum kit, who is looking for a way to incorporate meditation into her life?”
As I said, these were very smart women. In their defense, few of us have been raised to discuss money openly and honestly. They probably saw and see themselves as average wage earners, and certainly they didn’t want to come off as being privileged, a member of the 1 percent in good standing. They could see that I had issues with the parts of their well-meaning philosophies that could only be given so much attention because they had the time and the money and the privilege to do so. One had an entire walk-in closet devoted to her purse collection. One had a $900 French candle on the table in her entryway. When their assistants brought in healthy food—well, say no more. They had assistants.
I have a not-unsuccessful writing career, but I have never had an assistant to bring in healthy food, unless you count my husband bringing me the occasional cranberry juice and grilled cheese. I want to make this clear: I don’t begrudge them their purse collections, their high-three-figure candles, their assistants and helpers and trainers and private chefs and personal tattoo artists. I liked these women. Even after I was fired by some of them, I liked them. I still like them. What I disagree with is their underlying message: that with the proper thinking, essential oils, and plenty of greens you too can have a life like theirs. It’s nonsense. The biggest real problem most of us have is how to pay the bills. How to pay our taxes. How to afford our medication. How to pay for a new water heater or braces for the kids (and even that problem is one of affluence). How to carve out a half hour a day where something is not required of us. Most of what they’re peddling does nothing to help solve the challenge of making ends meet.
Carina Chocano, author of You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks & Other Mixed Messages, wrote an article in the August 2019 issue of Vanity Fair chronicling the rise of some lesser-known practitioners of FLEB—the Instagram micro-influencers of Byron Bay, Australia. A beach town on the northeastern coast of New South Wales, Byron Bay was once a hippie enclave, but is now the dead cool hub of “midtier family lifestyle micro-influencers,” including a troupe of attractive “murfers” (mom surfers) who are practitioners of “slow” living, raising their equally beautiful children with wooden toys, no screens, impromptu picnics, “surf seshes,” and cheerful hipster husbands who go along for the ride.
The piece begins: “Courtney Adamo’s minimalist, Shaker-style kitchen is gorgeous, but you already know that if you follow her. . . . With its clapboard cupboards, wooden stools, bulk dry goods in mason jars, Blanc Marble countertops (‘slightly more expensive than the Carrara,’ she explains in a blog post about her kitchen renovation, ‘but we are so happy with the decision’), Dunlin Chelsea Pendant Lights ($669 each), SMEG refrigerator ($2,870), Lacanche oven and stove (‘range cooker of my dreams’ and, at about $10,000, a ‘splurge’), the kitchen is like a scene out of Little House on the Trust Fund Prairie. (@courtneyadamo, 250K Instagram followers).”
In her piece, Chocano worked hard to differentiate the five women from one another, but the first paragraph is so good, and so damning, few could see past Adamo’s $10,000 “range cooker of my dreams.” Chocano’s Twitter feed documents the confused response. Some followers thought the piece was “delicious,” and named their favorite murfer, others loved the takedown of these women and their disingenuous promotion of privilege, and others wagged their fingers at Chocano’s apparent criticism of other women.
There’s something futuristic and Black Mirror–ish about transforming your life into an aestheticized performance to sell products. It’s one thing to enslave yourself to creating a false narra
tive that spotlights products you are being paid to plug as part of your “brand,” and another thing entirely to monetize and exploit your family life.
On the other hand, I was deeply covetous of those fucking $669 pendant lights. It’s safe to say I’ve never had a single thought about pendant lights before reading about Adamo’s. I don’t think I was clear on how a pendant light differed from, like, a hanging lamp. Thus, in thirty seconds I’d become the poster girl for mimetic desire.
Mimetic desire is the psychological mechanism that makes influencers influential. One of our basic human impulses is to want what people we think are cool want. They have it, we want it, and together that escalates the value of the object. Look no further than the trend among the moms of Brooklyn’s Park Slope to wear clogs and affix a brightly colored handwoven Salt strap onto their Fendi handbag. These straps could have come straight from the guitar of the smelliest, most tone-deaf hippie in Haight-Ashbury—really, they’re no different—but because the cool moms have them, those who perceive themselves as less cool also want them. Thus, my position vis-à-vis the fucking $669 pendant lights.
Pioneered by twentieth-century French philosopher and literary scholar René Girard, mimetic desire is more than mere imitation of behavior or acquisition; you find yourself wanting the same thing your role model wants. In the case of so many influencers, as it is with goop, it’s a level of affluence most of us can never hope to achieve. Unless—or so we tell ourselves—we click on the link, join the program, go to the seminar, purchase the product. It raises our hopes before it dashes them. Once again, we feel the pinch of self-loathing that eventually sends us straight into the arms of another self-improvement regime. We’ve spent our time, energy, attention, and hard-earned cash, and have nothing but bad feelings about ourselves to show for it.