Who wouldn’t want to be an influencer? You’re famous and maybe even rich, just for doing what you’d be doing anyway: working out at the gym, hanging out with your mates and mucking about on the internet. You get paid to say what you think (or are at least sent free stuff), and no one’s telling you what to do. Surely only a sucker would do anything else.
At least that is the influencing dream, and many young men are buying into it. “Content creator” has for years been cited as the most desirable career by generation Z and now gen Alpha. The preferred platforms might have changed over time, with streaming on Twitch and Kick now supplanting posting on Instagram and YouTube, but the aspiration remains the same: to escape the drudgery of a desk job.
But Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary reveals the catch. Though focused on the misogynistic online manosphere, it is equally compelling as a grim look behind the curtain of influencer production, revealing it to be at best shabby and at worst soul-destroying.
Theroux’s featured “creators” claim to have seen through the false promise of conventional careers to find success on their terms. Yes, they have all the trappings: pools, girls, luxury cars and watches, and jaunts to Dubai (though the last may be curtailed now). But going behind the scenes, you see what is absent from the social media highlights and edgy viral clips: life as an influencer is often banal and just as much of a trap as the standard nine-to-five. It is also much harder to get out of.
Even the manosphere, characterised in the mainstream as a hotbed of dangerous misogyny, might more accurately be characterised as a large-scale grift, as Theroux told the Guardian. Though it undeniably harbours toxic views, it is perhaps best thought of as a masculine counterpart to the female-focused online world of wellness, with influencers peddling an aspirational image and with it, products and services. For many in the manosphere, the misogyny seems almost besides the point. Like racism, homophobia or antisemitism, it serves only as a button to press to generate attention and profit.
Take the main case study in Theroux’s documentary, 24-year-old Harrison Sullivan, or “HSTikkyTokky”. To his audience of hundreds of thousands across TikTok and Kick, “HS” is not just living the dream but selling it, too, showing off his built body, harem of bikini-clad models and life of leisure in Spain. He tells his typically young followers that they can achieve the same for themselves by signing up to a dubious investing platform; Sullivan takes a cut, even if they lose money.
Relative to arch-villains like the accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate (who denies wrongdoing), or even the “looksmaxxing” provocateur du jour Clavicular, Sullivan is small fry within the manosphere, but perhaps also more representative. He comes across as more motivated by lining his pockets than he is restoring men to their rightful place in the social order, and though he routinely broadcasts himself saying and doing outrageous, offensive and cruel things, it is seemingly only to provoke a reaction.
“With the attention, I can get more fame [and] monetise,” Sullivan explains to Theroux. He doesn’t believe the offensive things he says, Sullivan maintains, but it’s also irrelevant: he can “profit off it”. By the time he is Theroux’s age, Sullivan says he wants to be valued in billions, for the sake of his future children.
Later on, two baby-faced Tate fanboys tell Theroux they look to Tate for advice on how to build “intergenerational wealth” – “no job is going to be able to give you that,” one says. The thing is, he’s not wrong: declining social mobility and stagnating wages have made it next to impossible to improve your financial position through work alone. The influencer marketing economy, meanwhile, is a potential goldmine, valued at $21.1bn in 2023. Clavicular reportedly earns $100,000 a month from streaming on Kick alone.
To many young people faced with a lack of opportunity and grim outlook, it may seem like a cheat code akin to marrying rich (as young women are increasingly aspiring to, with the manosphere’s conservatism reflected in the rise of “tradwives”). Certainly it may yield a better return on investment than climbing the career ladder or a costly, time-intensive degree.
Sullivan tells Theroux he dropped out of uni to sell online fitness programmes, and was soon making £1,000 a day, prompting the shift to streaming. He wound up influencing not because it was his passion, but because it was the quickest path to riches. He soon found that the more provocative the content, the more profitable it was. “If I’d just done good things, I would never have really blown up on social media,” he says.
Sullivan is contemptible but he isn’t stupid: he knows what he does is no more complicated than sales, knowing what buttons to push and “playing that game”. But if he was selling insurance or used cars, he would get to go home, switch off and have a life beyond his job. As an influencer, Sullivan’s entire existence is organised around producing content. He exists only as an economic agent, and for all influencing’s apparent glamour and perks, the reality is as grim as it sounds.
Sullivan spends his days narrating his workouts, having slack-jawed interactions with his entourage (you wouldn’t call them friends), and prowling the Marbella strip. Even he looks bored much of the time, scanning around for ways to spice up the livestream and enacting commenters’ demands. “I gotta be entertaining the chat,” he says, glued to his phone at a bar, ignoring the OnlyFans model next to him.
Though he prides himself on not having a boss, Sullivan is arguably less autonomous than a salaried employee, existing at the mercy of algorithms and his audience, performing ever more outrageous provocations just to hold their interest. (At one point, part of his entourage seemingly assaults a stranger live on camera, egged on by his faceless followers.)
When Theroux asks Sullivan why he does not try to be a good person and lift people up, he responds with a mix of defiance and fatalism: “I’m not living for other people, I’m living for myself.” Watching him be puppeteered by his audience, it’s at best disingenuous. But even if he believes it to be true, it’s also not much of a life.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
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