🔒 Parasocial Media: How We Became a World of Influencers

On the now quite rare occasion that I scroll through my Facebook feed, I see a hell of a lot of this one guy:

That’s Jason Pargin, my old boss, who is now a prominent TikTok/Reels influencer. We haven’t spoken in nearly a decade, but Facebook spams me with his videos because I do tend to watch them, and that trains the algorithm, so this is all it shows me now.

 He does a great job. This is also the absolute last thing I could ever have imagined him doing with his life when we parted ways in 2018, during the fall of Cracked.com which saw the termination of my contract plus those of dozens of writers much, much more talented than myself. Jason played no role in those layoffs, understand, except for how hard he fought for us. Now he does this instead. And you need to know just how crazy that is, how private this man is: I probably knew him about ten years before I knew what his real name was, and it was longer than that before I knew what he looked like. He’s not doing this because he wants to, he’s doing it because he has to.

 Jason is a novelist now, but he can’t do that unless he does this. Hear him explain it in his own words:

The idea that we are living in a “world of influencers” goes deeper than what he explores, here. Cracked was a long-form comedy and infotainment website that ruled the internet briefly in the late 2000s/early 2010s just before social media came along to kill it. You can’t really have a website like that, now. Cracked still exists, but it’s largely a social media aggregator, regurgitating funny tweets and Instagram posts and Reddit threads. There’s a reason for that.

 Social media and algorithms did this to us. They trapped us all on these apps and locked us into a constant battle for attention. Suddenly the internet became so noisy. There is too much to consume. Have you noticed that writers and artists of any type are now called “content creators?” All creative output of any kind has become part of a single mass that we call content. We flit between one piece of content and another, consuming it quickly in nibbles. Any creator capable of drawing more than just a nibble of their content—even so much as a bite—is called an influencer. They can influence the ripples and the tides of the mass.

 You can’t do that from behind a keyboard. Or you can, but it’s extraordinarily difficult. The days of creating art that your audience gets to enjoy for its own sake, without feeling like they know you personally, are finished, because folks don’t subscribe to works, anymore. They subscribe to people.

The traditional route to success as a writer is in a state of decay and those who want it dead, sensing weakness, are moving to hasten its destruction. It once was that a writer could join some sort of media institution and be paid for their talent, but as soon as that business model began to falter, as soon as its shields were down, the Borg army of right-wing capital marched in to assimilate and bring it to heel, to dismantle any capacity it had to question power.

 Rupert Murdoch was the first ghoul to start rounding up the media, but then billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk started doing it. Trump loyalist David Ellison is currently acting like The Matrix’s Agent Smith, ramming his hand through journalists’ chests and cloning himself. He bought Paramount last year, which gave him CBS, and now he’s bought Warner Bros, which gives him CNN, HBO, TNT, and Batman. Recently, Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr vetoed an anti-monopoly law that would have prevented Trump loyalist media company Nextar from taking over Tegna, which will give it 265 television stations.

Around the same time that Jason put out the above video, I listened to a podcast episode by two other former Cracked alumni, Daniel O’Brien and Soren Bowie, who now do a YouTube show that I listen to at work. They’re both successful, but work for the aforementioned vulnerable media conglomerates. Daniel is a senior writer for John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, and Soren is a writer for Seth MacFarlane’s American Dad.

What happened to all of us at Cracked was the same brutal business reality that John Oliver and his staff, including Daniel, need to contend with as their parent company—Warner Bros—is looking down the barrel of the Ellison takeover. They’re all acutely aware of what happened to Stephen Colbert five minutes after Ellison ate Paramount.

 As the business oligarchs consume the western world, they are turning the remaining aspects of our lives that aren’t work into work. Not just creative endeavor, but also casual relaxation are being converted into the duel states of capitalism: Hustle, and consumption.

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