The Age of Influencers

Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash

The light came soft, a halo circling the edges of the phone screen. Heads bowed low, necks bent, fingers tracing patterns on glass, murmurs slipping out like prayers. The glow kissed their faces, faint and holy, as though they had found some sacred thing in the palm of their hands. A quiet, collective worship. This is us now: each a prophet of pixels, each a bearer of the new gospel. That small rectangle of light — couldn’t it be the Grail? The thing we drink from, the thing that drinks us?

Before the camera, humanity mounts its stage. Filters sweep away the years, the folds, the weight. Wrinkles retreat, and flesh reshapes itself in an instant. Cinderella gilded, not by midnight’s magic, but by a finger’s swipe. A face hollowed by time becomes porcelain, untouched. But what are these faces? Masks, maybe. Masks that hide not just skin but the soul beneath. And who are these performers? Actors, every one.

It wasn’t always so easy. The old performers, the ones who lived their art, they bled for it. Winter’s bitter cold bit at their bodies as they trained, summer’s heat burned their backs. But they worked, worked until the sweat on their skin meant something. And the stage, when it came, was earned. Not this. Not this quiet, effortless stage built with a flick, the kind that vanishes as fast as it appears. I think of those old theatres, West End, backstage, where old hands painted their brows carefully, reverently. The mirror holding their history, their labour, their lives. Now? Now it’s all quick, hollow, easy.

Live. Stream. Live. Stream. Over and over, the chant wraps itself around us. On the train, I looked up once, just once. And what I saw: faces bent low, the glow of their screens pooling at their chins. A sea of quiet, of silence. Nothing but the hum of their scrolls. Islands of people, but none of them whole. Watching and being watched, a loop of emptiness. The noise of it — so silent, so loud — wrapping itself around the heart.

And there are those, the ones who will give anything for just a moment. The man on the street, his teeth crunching on live cockroaches, his shame broadcast to the world. The cancer patient, pale and trembling, holding their phone steady while strangers type, “When’s the next video?” The timer ticks on the screen, a countdown not unlike the faint pulse of a heart monitor. And the sound, that sound, that hollow music behind it all — digital, empty, cold. A dirge for a soul no one remembers how to touch.

I saw one once, clasping their hands together, begging for likes, pleading for money, as though praying to an idol. And the likes came, the money came, flowing like some strange new currency. Not real, not quite, but heavy enough to weigh on the chest. What do we trade for this? What do we lose?

Seventy-five days. That’s all they get. The influencers, the stars — they rise, they burn, they fall. Fireworks in the night, bright and sudden, gone just as quick. Loved for a moment, forgotten in the next. It’s a cycle, a wheel turning, and it feels like something old. Like those wandering performers of another time, moving from town to town. When the show ends, it’s just them and the road.

But here we are, all of us. Building ourselves into gods, but losing ourselves in the rubble. Talking, shouting, streaming, but never listening. Never hearing. Is this what Babel looks like now? A tower of data, a structure of glittering, useless light.

And yet — once, just once — I saw something real. A girl, streaming her grandmother’s birthday. The old woman’s face appeared, marked with years, the weight of time carved into her skin. The girl turned off the filter, and there it was: the map of her life, the truth of her age. Mountains, rivers, valleys, every line a story. The girl touched her grandmother’s cheek, her hand trembling with something raw, something ancient. And for a moment, the light faded. The filters dissolved. And the truth — her face, her life, her time — was more beautiful than anything the screen could conjure.

Beneath the noise, beneath the glow, it is this: the real face, the real touch. That is what holds us, what anchors us.

We climb higher into the virtual, trying to crown ourselves with stars. But maybe what we need is to kneel. To bow our heads and feel the weight of what we’ve left behind. To touch what is real, to remember the stories etched in the skin, the quiet dignity in the lines of a face.

Behind all the filters, behind all the light, the truth waits. Unchanged. Untouched. Always there.