I understand their cynicism, but I’m too old and soft to share it. It seems to me that both things can be true: these young influencers can be in real emotional distress over the pressure to produce mediated widgets and the cruelty they continually face from those they have invited into their lives, and they can simultaneously be figuring out how to monetize that pain. Because that is what they have been told they must do if they are to avoid becoming attention-economy roadkill. And, like so much else, it’s a vicious cycle. If you successfully thing-ify yourself, then other people will begin to believe you are a thing and will throw all kinds of hard objects at you, sure that you will not bleed. And then you have to conjure up even more revealing forms of self-exposure—up to and including having a full-blown nervous breakdown in your bedroom with the webcam rolling. Don’t come for me, these influencers seem to be pleading to their fans-turned-foes, I’m wounded—can’t you see that I’m bleeding here? Forgetting that the pack loves blood and there is nothing bloodier than performative trauma.

XREF: Echoes the commodification of self and attention-economy dynamics seen in other writings on performative vulnerability and digital labor.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 207