Viva Virality
How to be an influencer
Welcome back to Stock Fiction, a living laboratory of creative experiments conducted by yours truly, Meg Oolders.
After a lengthy and painful estrangement from my funny bone, I was mercifully gifted a live grenade by the humor gods which allowed me to pen the virulent diatribe that awaits you.
If you or someone you love identifies as an influencer, my apologies.
If you’re new to Stock Fiction, welcome to my snark side.
Warning! Time sensitive content ahead!
If you’ve been delaying your launch into influencer stardom, now’s the time to light a fire under your ass and charge up the clip-on ring light on your phone. AI entities are already moving in on influencer jobs, and it’s only a matter of time before this opportunity (like all opportunities once afforded to humans—and only humans) is dominated by the robot menace.
Fortunately, the skill set required for influencing is non-existent minimal, and by embracing one or more of the paths to sellout viral glory outlined herein, you too can reap the benefits of abandoning your moral code and contributing to the dumbification of society.
Please note: I am not an influencer myself. I was born with a defect in my programming that makes me projectile vomit when I witness, or participate in, disingenuous behavior or scammy sales pitches. Particularly when they’re directed at my insecurities. Which they all are.
But clearly, you are a stronger BRAND of person and will undoubtedly find success on your journey to unimaginably shady wealth, fickle popularity, and rampant identity dysmorphia.
Proceed with caution wild abandon.
How to influence.
While there is no magic combination of traits that makes one individual more adept at “influencing” than another, there are a handful of weapons trade secrets you can deploy to heighten your chances of achieving viral success on a number of social media platforms. Which platform you choose is irrelevant. They are all soul sucking dumpster fires that should be publicly dismantled down to the impotent studs from which they spawned for the betterment of humankind.
But rather than harbor highly erotic doomsday scenarios, let’s talk about what you need to do to “make it” as an influencer.
1. BE HOT
Before you walk away, take comfort in the fact that “hot” no longer means beautiful or pleasing to the eye. There is no “classically” hot anymore. There’s only “Straight Out of The Capitol of Panem” hot. The more you’ve messed with (or are willing to mess with) yourself, the better.
Women: Think slug-implanted lips, prison tat eyebrows, sandblasted and/or bleached skin, bone saw sculpted nose and cheekbones, airlifted cleavage. If you look anything like an actual person affected by time or gravity, you’re doing it wrong.
Men: Be chiseled from granite or roll out from under a rock. Either of these types can work for you. If you can achieve both, you’re golden.
2. BE NOT HOT
In other words, be a person who looks completely normal and then BECOME HOT through the magic of bullshit clever photography and shapeshifter cosplay. Here are two, tried and true, routes to commodifying your natural beauty by taking a dump on it for monetary gain.
The Two-Face
Rub nuclear waste-product based lubricants (or random shit you find in your refrigerator) on your makeup-free (but still digitally airbrushed) face while cooing softly about how amazing it feels. Do this on one side of your face only, so that after, you can switch to a mirror selfie and falsely claim the side of your face now riddled with boils and peeling skin is the untreated side, and the side you left alone is the miracle beauty reveal.
The Body Swap
If you’re soft and squishy around the middle (like 90% of western society), you can choose to shove your ass, tits, and abdomen into a military grade Lycra mech suit and become an hourglass, literally. While the clock runs out on the function of your internal organs, rub your hands over your body and say “oh my god” a lot. Women want to know that subjecting themselves to iron maiden-level torture will be a religious experience for them.
3. BE COOL
No matter what you’re selling, doing, wearing, stroking, or eating, start every single video you create with the staunchly informal and marginally tone-deaf greeting—
“Hey guys!”
Trust me. This is the gold standard.
4. BE A DUMPY DAD
Document your parenting fails and women will flock to support you.
Look tired and disheveled. That’s hot AF.
Almost cry a lot. Yeah, that’s it.
Now, talk about how amazing your wife is. Oh god, YES!
5. HAVE ADORABLE PETS
Spoil them rotten on camera.
Exploit their intimate moments (sleeping, eating, pooping, canoodling) for your own personal gain.
Take credit for their appeal by occasionally appearing in the videos hocking products you would never buy or couldn’t afford before your dog got famous.
Be certain not to read the fine print on any documents supplied by the corporations you’re now a puppet for. No sense in losing sleep over the questionable practices of a company willing to pay a zoophilic rando tens of thousands of dollars to fake “like” a product they’ve never used but swear they’ve always used and always will use until it is taken off the market for giving dogs cancer or poisoning the water supply of a small fishing village in a country they’ve never heard of.
6. HAVE ADORABLE CHILDREN
Exploit your children the same way you exploited your pets, thus proving to the world that your children ARE your pets, and you are gross. Record their best or worst childhood traumas moments and get rich while simultaneously ensuring your children have no future outside of the public eye. They will need decades of therapy and mood-altering medications to quell the unease of knowing the video of them peeing their pants on stage during the Nutcracker is all over the dark web. Good job.
7. BE THE ANSWER
To any question or problem that didn’t exist for people until you came along with the solution.
Final Straws. Grasp While the Grasping is Good.
If you haven’t found your entry point into viral domination yet, worry not. There are still countless ways a relative loser nobody with bush league basic video editing skills can reach persuasive greatness. Here are a few to consider.
Have no shame.
Have no integrity.
Have no day job. Or night job because your entire life will be spent alone in front of a camera hating the way your nose looks and wishing you had 2K more followers because you only have 2 million and the other woman who looks exactly like you and is selling the same crap you are on another platform is 2K followers better and more fake-loved than you.
Be crafty. Knit condoms out of chenille or make a paper mâché school bus for a group of underprivileged youths.
Be crafty. Steal jokes and artwork from legitimately talented people on the internet and pass them off as your own. Do this over and over and over again until you convince the masses it is you who are talented. It will take next to nothing to convince them. They are idiots.
Be vapid. If there is a soul behind your eyes, you’re doing it wrong.
Be a JACKASS knockoff. No pain for you, no gain for you.
Be an old lady with sick dance moves.
Be a sick lady with old dance moves.
Be a famous actor during a writer’s strike.
Be a street artist with a trust fund.
Be a millennial who hates Gen Z.
Be a Gen-Xer who hates millennials.
Be a boomer who doesn’t give a fuck.
But above all, be yourself!
Because that’s what the public really wants to see.
-
Oh no, honey.
Not like that.
Get it out of your system and then bend all your efforts to ignoring as much of it as possible.
The first time I saw the term "thought leader" I thought they were being derisive. Little did I know it's supposed to be a GOOD thing. Silly me; I've been doing my own thinking all along!