You gotta be in it to win it

(or for them to win it, which is kind of the point)

Last post, I talked a little bit about the “lottery ticket moment” that happens when certain influencers are able to rise above the grind and go viral. It’s a metaphor (social media is like a lottery) that I’ve personally believed for so long that I tend to use it almost unconsciously at this point. But I realized, following my post, that it’s not something that I’ve talked about here.

Strictly speaking, I suppose that the idea is more of an analogy than a metaphor, because I think that the process of finding success through social media bears a strong resemblance to playing and winning the lottery. (I don’t intend that to sound complimentary.) When I see stories about how so many kids want to become influencers (or think that it’s easy), it’s an analogy that leaps to mind. What if those surveys revealed that, for a growingly large percentage of young people, they saw winning the lottery as the only viable model for their career or life? What would it say about our culture that this feels not only feasible or desirable, but aspirational?

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

What does it say? Maybe this is my age speaking, or my own skepticism about the actual value of virality as an organizing cultural principle, but it feels symptomatic of a certain desperation. I understand wanting to be rich or famous, or to be a celebrity, even as I think those “aspirations” are pretty disconnected from the real world (except maybe for nepo babies?). And to be clear, I’m not saying that the people who are answering these surveys are necessarily desperate. Nor, if I’m being fair, did this begin with social media—I’m old enough to remember the early days of reality television, and the way that some of those “stars” morphed into proto-influencers. But it says something pretty demoralizing about a culture if this becomes increasingly the only path that its youngest generations can imagine towards success or achievement, to say nothing of meaning and fulfillment.

I don’t want to launch into a curmudgeonly rant about how “kids these days” should want to work hard and appreciate the value of a dollar and blah blah blah. I don’t want to suggest either that there isn’t a great deal of work that can go into social media success. But there’s a subtle disconnect here, one that the metaphor of the lottery begins to get at. The lottery is a fantasy, a before/after meme that elides the monumental odds against “success.” (I put that in quotes as a nod to the persistent myth of the lottery curse, a myth that sticks around precisely because I think most of us know that our lottery fantasies are fundamentally rooted in the inequity of something for nothing.)

As I suggested last post, there’s an extent to which the influencer industry is basically a machine that generates confirmation bias at scale. That is, every influencer is, at the very least, a walking advertisement for the idea of becoming an influencer. The folks who are successful at social media become that way, in part by keeping the “hard work” invisible for the most part—making it explicit would drain the authenticity and parasociality that they’re looking to achieve. The ones who burn out publicly are often quite frank about how monotonous, soul-crushing, and artificial achieving their success actually is.

And even those stories tend to downplay how fundamentally extractive the influence industry is, which is another comparison that we might make to the lottery. Much like the “tax disguised as a game,” so-called influence is a process of attracting attention, collectivizing it, capitalizing it through sponsorships, and then (perhaps) crossing over to other ventures. It is advertising disguised as friendship, which certainly benefits the talent and perhaps the advertisers themselves, but the real value here accrues primarily to the platform. As Dannagal Young explains in her book Wrong¹, 99.4% of Meta’s 2021 revenue (from Facebook, Instagram, et al.) is generated through advertising, more than a hundred billion dollars. It’s far more lucrative to be the one running the lottery than it is to play, even if a small handful of folks do manage to buck the odds and win.

There are at least a couple of important ways that the influence game differs from the lottery, though. The lottery, at least, is fair in the sense that your ticket has the same chance of success as someone else’s, and those odds, however microscopic, remain the same from one drawing to the next. Social media, however, operate as what Albert-László Barabási (and others) describe as scale-free networks, which don’t grow in the same way. Your odds of winning the lottery remain the same regardless of how many people purchase tickets. Your odds of hitting it big on social media are affected by others, because scale-free networks grow through what’s called preferential attachment—not all links are equal. The more popular something is, the more likely it is to attract new attention. This sounds circular, I know, but it’s a system that rewards early entry, popularity, originality, and other factors—it’s a system where the rich get richer, and entry into the market gets progressively more difficult the longer it exists.

Imagine a bookstore that stocks thousands of books. Certain books and authors are featured on the tables and shelves that greet customers as they enter the store. Even if the book that you want is in the back corner, you’re encountering the implicit influence of those customer-facing displays. The New York Times bestseller list functions a lot like those displays—we don’t hear about every book that comes out, so bestseller lists and store displays and Amazon recommendations filter our awareness of new titles for us. And once you understand that, you can game the system, as Cory Doctorow discussed recently. Given enough money, you can bypass the idea that a bestseller list is a faithful account of books that have actually been purchased and read. Or you can pump up your follower count by paying bot farms to mass-subscribe to your social media handle. Given enough of this artificial attachment and network growth, you can describe yourself as a New York Times bestselling author or a YouTube celebrity, and begin earning the attentional equivalent of passive income. For instance, as Doctorow explains,

Once your book is a Times bestseller, every bookseller in America orders enough copies to fill a front-facing display on a new release shelf or a stack on a bestseller table. They order more copies of your backlist. Foreign rights buyers at Frankfurt crowd around your international agents to bid on your book. Movie studios come calling. It's a huge deal.

Bookstores and best-seller lists predate social media, obviously², and Thomas Merton wrote about this phenomenon more than fifty years ago (it’s called the Matthew effect). Part of the myth surrounding social media (and aspirations towards influence) is that it is somehow more “democratic” in its repudiation of traditional media “gatekeepers,” when it may be more accurate to say that it’s a distillation of the dynamics that made those older systems unfair. Imagine a lottery where your odds of winning depended not on how many tickets you purchased, but instead your income when you purchased them. In other words, the wealthier you were, the better your odds. That’s what a scale-free lottery would look like.

Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash

And of course, another important difference is that wealth is not the only factor that increases one’s odds when it comes to social media. Let’s not forget the “ruggedly handsome” fellow snapping Instagram pics of his #dailycortado on the marble countertops of NYC cafés. The closer you get to the top of each platform’s pyramid, the more the influencers begin to resemble one another demographically and aesthetically. One of the important lessons of Merton’s work on the topic, viewed from a more contemporary standpoint, is that the unfairness that we’ve (rightly) diagnosed as part of those older, traditional institutions wasn’t as intrinsic to those institutions as we’d hoped when we “disrupted” them (and as we continue to do so).

In some cases, those structures were holding back, however imperfectly, even more unfairness. At the very least, they provided some ability for us to fight it. And if you’re hearing echoes here of Doctorow’s arguments against our current malaise of monopoly capitalism, you’re right. Deregulation made it possible for a tiny handful of people to take over and turn the economy into a lottery. Not only do you have to be “in it to win it,” as commercials for the NY State Lottery used to remind me; we don’t have much choice but to be “in it,” thanks to the folks who have already won.

There’s another piece to this that I’d like to get at, but I feel like I’ve gone on long enough for now. Maybe I’ll keep at it during my writing group next week.

1. I’ll be talking about Young’s book in more detail one of these days soon.

2. Although we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that social media can’t/hasn’t made it worse.