being 'offline' is also turning into a performance I think. rejecting social media yet having awareness of style and the current lexicon of detached irony utilized by internet artists is viewed as a sign of good taste.

to win is to have the right opinions/tastes/aesthetic curation without having to copy it from an online artist. its as if to signal that you intrinsically know or glean fashionable knowledges without online influence bc of the status of ur inner circle or ur innate propensity for good taste

Call it the Yelpification of the academy. Call it the retail logic of higher education. I mention this only to observe that if we sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, it might be because they serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways in which we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands. It is a logic that extends from the retailer’s smile to the professor’s easy A to the politician’s capitulation to the co-worker’s calculated post to the journalist’s virtue-signaling tweet to the influencer’s scripted photo. The angle of our pose might be different, but all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm.