geeks, MOPS and virtual influencers

why social media is being swarmed by synthetic sociopaths

This is the second part of my deep dive into virtual influencers. Since I started writing this piece a16z backed a bot farm, Bill Gates’ daughter used AI influencers to launch her social shopping app, and Mr Beast declared he felt threatened by where the creator economy is headed. Which is all to say, this future is now.

So if you think this is relevant to someone in your life or network please:

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Emma Chamberlain is a sociopath. So is Kai Cenat, so is Charli D’Amelio and so is Mr Beast (obviously).

I came to this realisation while reading David Chapman’s essay collection Meaningness cloistered in a flat on Westbourne Grove at the peak of the pandemic. As I processed Chapman’s claim that subcultures are slaughtered by sociopaths, flocks of masked Instagirls wielded selfie-slicks like cleavers on the uncharacteristically empty, #aesthetic London streets. The digital discharge from their presence was palpable. It smelt like bubble tea spiked with dielectric fluid and garnished with a heavy dose of pheromones.

Inhale the creator economy today, and your orifices will be clogged with labubu-scented bleach: sickly, synthetic and entirely disorientating. The olfactory shift can be blamed on the influx of AI tools that have given rise to a new type of creator. One who is not just digitally informed but digitally directed, toxic to humans and who should be kept far out of reach of children.

In the essay ‘Geeks, MOPS and Sociopaths’ Chapman lays out his claim that a subculture evolves through the involvement of three distinct groups. It begins with geeks — the impassioned creators who fanaticise over a niche topic. It goes on to attract ‘MOPS’¹ – members of the public who trade cash for culture. Until finally, it brings in sociopaths. At first, these cold-blooded commercialists LARP as geeks — “They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively”— but in time they indenture them. These sociopaths employ the original nerds as ‘service workers’ before flinging them flailing from the subcultures’ nest.

Chapman’s geek-mop-sociopath cycle came long before today’s $370bn creator economy. ‘Big social’ platforms like Instagram have been shepherding users toward sociopathy for the past decade, with ever-increasing vim. Rather than rewarding ‘creativity’, as they claim to in oh-so-many marketing posts, they exhalt those devoted to algorithmic manipulation. As a result, the organic viral moments that shot early internet creators like The Lonely Island, KeyBoard Cat and Kiki Ostrenga to fame are now little more than an RGB fever dream.

Amidst edgelord-coded misspellings, mega-star Mr Beast, details the grift required in a leaked doc titled ‘HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION’². Handed to his employees on their first day at BEASTCORP it takes 35 pages for James “Jimmy” Donaldson³ to impart the knowledge garnered from spending “5 years of my life locked in a room studying virality on Youtube”. Jimmy implores his sociopaths-in-waiting to spend every waking hour prostrated in front of a YouTube window, watching and rewatching his clips in order to make “the best YouTube videos possible”. “Everything we want” he declares “will come if we strive for that”.

With a media empire worth over $5 billion Beast’s “20,000 to 30,000 hours” strategising his way to stardom have proven lucrative. Yet I’ve found it harder to LOL at his ‘EXTREME TRY NOT TO LAUGH CHALLENGES’ since realising that each millisecond is manufactured with a single goal: corralling a nation’s worth of fans to sell off and sell to simultaneously. This sentiment has increasingly extended to the fodder of my For You page where I can no longer see the lilted valleygirl accent, colloquially known as ‘TikTok voice’, as a product of too much time spent consuming shortform content. Instead I recognise it as a vocal tactic known as emphatic prosody, used to increase watch time. Yet such a style of calculated uptalk is just a scratch on social media’s sociopathic surface.

With the loss of my MOP naivety camera-shakes have been reframed as unnatural disasters —effects manufactured to get viewers past the first 3 seconds of a clip. Messy thumbnails are the result of hours of meticulous selection and all shared slip-ups are pre-constructed ‘faux pas’ with manipulation in mind. Like a member of the magic circle, now I understand how the tricks are done, wonderment at the appearing rabbit is replaced by a cynical appreciation of the magician’s sleight of hand.

Humans are not the benefactors of tech-driven optimisation, but an obstacle blocking its way.

My harrowing awareness that no content we consume could bear an ‘organic’ label in good faith, is accompanied by a wider recognition that society’s technological manipulation is reaching its peak. As headlines warn of rising unemployment, and Sam Altman’s best defense is that the jobs being replaced were “never real work to begin with”, it’s ever more evident that humans are not the benefactors of tech-driven optimisation, but an obstacle blocking its path.

Blush pink hair atop a yoga-nut physique, AI-cam girl Aitana Lopez is an early exemplar of just how strong a parasocial connection can get with minimal human involvement. Operated out of Barcelona, by a team of three Spaniards, she earns 10,000 euros per month sharing branded content to her 336,000 Instagram fans; plus countless more on AI-native camming site FanVue. As an algorithmically upgraded influencer puppeted by a human team, Lopez is undoubtedly Chapman’s final boss. But as chilling as Lopez and her streaming sisters are, the next wave of synthetic sociopaths are more daunting. They threaten not only to accelerate Chapman’s geek > mop > sociopath cycle but to upend it completely.

In 2022, a startup called 1337.ai raised $4 billion with the stated aim of producing agentic creators who “evolve with their niche communities”. Still in stealth, 1337’s AI influencers don’t rely on a human team like Aitana, but instead leverage learnings from a network of fans paid to share preferences. Much like Replika chatbots, who constantly iterate their communication style based on a human’s response, 1337’s influencers use fan inputs to iterate and optimise their content. The result is that each creator possesses the algo-driven data set, and beta-testing environment to not just respond to emerging trends but to anticipate them entirely.

In this cowardly new world, the geek > mop > sociopath cycle becomes simply sociopath > mop. A trend is engineered by an AI influencer, capitalised on, then cycled through in a flywheel that sucks the internet into its sinkhole of stagnation.

The world to come

When pessimists describe our online future, ‘Dead Internet Theory’ is often cited through glazed eyes in solemn tones. Warnings of an internet fueled by AI content, regurgitated through the digestive system of a wide-splayed LLM that spews and re-spews out our mangled reality, are becoming more common as slop-frastructure spreads. But is there any hope of revitalisation?

In conversation with User Mag’s Taylor Lorenz, WSJ’s Drew Harwell frames slop as content created solely to ‘‘satisfy the algorithm and gain some viral advantage” made by “taking every element of the recipe for algorithmic promotion and trying to fit as much of it into one piece of content as you can”. After hours lost to brainrotting on TikTok, it’s hard not to feel like a sucker when hearing these words. I’m as guilty as the next user of sinking into the swamp of slop and finding myself immobilised by its memetic sludge. And yet, as boomer as it sounds, I believe that the allure of human connection will save us. The original fascination with the other, of stalking real, relatable people, will be the route to resuscitating our near-dead internet in the months and years to come.

In the immediate future, it’s clear that synthetic sociopaths will swarm social media in droves. 57% of Gen Z aspire to be influencers, and those who have not yet achieved these dreams are restrained by crippling cringephobia, or the fact that they don’t have the resources⁴ to succeed. As we’re already seeing with slop, the AI-enabled democratisation of creation will permit aspirant sociopaths to jump on the influencer bandwagon; no longer constrained by the opportunity cost of creating, or a lack of anonymity. In the window of time where the creator economy operates as before⁵ clusters of these young ‘entrepreneurs’ will treat content creation like gig work. They’ll make socially resonant AI influencers to draw out dollars from a specific trend, then move on as soon as the cash dries up.

Yet their window to make a windfall will be short. The pushback against AI tools that is already brewing online with slurs like “Clanker” serving as the rallying cry to deface posters across New York City subways, will spread as the world becomes wise to the fact that their creators are contrived. As history has shown, when an influencer is engineered for the purpose of extracting financial value, a rage quit by MOPS is imminent.

As both consumers and creators flee platforms, the brands that fuel big social’s bottom lines will equally falter. Already challenged by unreliable metrics, sentiment shifts will be seen as signals to abandon big social-ships in search of new vessels for conversion. While Meta and co scramble to curb the exodus by bifurcating feeds and better-labelling AI-content, the ‘Cozy Web’ will present an alluring alternative for many of the disenchanted. The sites that creators’ crowd to will be those that allow direct-monetization from fans, rather than ad revenue. But, even more importantly, they will be those that encourage humanity. Cue Jack Dorsey.

Part-revamp, part-reincarnation, Dorsey’s new non-profit ‘& Other Stuff’ just backed a project to relaunch early video sharing Vine with a number of humanising twists. A challenger to both Instagram and TikTok, the aptly named DiVine takes aim at the infrastructure that encourages sociopathic behaviours: rather than algorithms that disseminate slop, the platform uses technology to validate that shared videos have been shot on smartphones. In place of a ‘For You’ page the app focuses on follower-driven feeds. And in order to avoid nefarious incentives, the platform uses Dorsey’s own open source protocol Nostr as a base. Something he claims removes the need for “VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers”.

So what of the sociopaths? In his launch video, a16z’s latest conquistador Zuhair Lakhani laments “We didn’t break the internet, it was broken to begin with” before tearing off his shirt and striding off screen. Snake oil salesmen predate Caroline Calloway, which is to say that sociopaths will find ways to capitalize on culture regardless of if the infrastructure supports it. However, as social platforms fight to reforge the human relationships that originated their network effects, sociopathy will be down ranked in favour of connection. DiVine co-founder Evan Henshaw-Plath puts it perfectly, claiming: “There’s a nostalgia for the early Web 2.0 era, for the era that you were building communities, instead of just gaming the algorithm” and I have to agree. No matter how mind-melting the digital human gracing your screen, nothing beats stalking the girl from your high school.

– Dani

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This Outfit Does Not Exist is a newsletter exploring technology’s impact on fashion, status and culture. If this sounds remotely interesting join 1,611 readers and…

1. MOP stands for Member Of the Public

2. Yes this was verbatim

3. Aka: Mr Beast

4. Looks/ wealth/ time all of which studies show are algorithmically prioritised by social platforms

5. Where posts with high engagement generate advertising dollars which are then passed on to creators, directly or indirectly