Influencers, For Good or For Evil?

When I was in high school I first heard a “<Topic>…for good or for evil?” joke that lodged into long term memory.  Physics class - the instructor, dealing with the topic of vectors, force of gravity and effects on movement of objects.  Friction, for good or for evil?  It was well received by the nerd crowd.

On one side friction will help stop a moving body, which can be annoying when you don’t want the moving body to stop.  But if you actually want your car brakes to work, it’s a good thing.  Like friction, influencers are not a bad or good thing without the context of what it is they are influencing.  They are simply a fact of life.

And I absolutely mean these high level influencers.  The “famous for being famous” crowd, that in general makes the smarter people roll their eyes and wonder what it is people see in them.  The friction joke was presented in front of a class students that eventually got whittled down to about 15 students for advanced physics the year after.  15 students out of a graduating class of 400.  Nerds are definitely not the target audience of these high level influencers.

After being stuck with (hopefully) the same family as a child, many of the same schoolmates that you befriend during your school year, inevitably you strike out into being into somebody outside your sphere of being in close physical contact with.  Be it sports heroes, movie stars, rich businesspeople- there will be someone you constantly hear about in the media that you admire.  Somebody that you don’t have close enough contact with to get the additional context you might need.

I have the luxury of not having the need to make up the next part.  In the media during my high school days was a lot about pollution.  As someone being more conscious of bigger picture issues than most I already had a good idea that the overpopulation/pollution/global warming talk was serious.  And Mr. Friction Joke was in a habit of regularly interspersing his lectures with personal quotes about how “the damned environmentalists won’t let us burn perfectly good coal.”  I always found that odd how science was embraced, yet somehow he seemed to have a blind spot on that issue.

Now it could be that he had stock in a coal company.  It could be he was just joking and I misunderstood him terribly.  Whatever, I am missing important context.  Influencers do not deal in context openly.  Stuck in a feedback loop, they continue to just keep doing the same things that will maintain their status of fame and fortune.  And nothing helps with this more than social media in this day and age.  Do those TV interviews, walk the red carpet, and all that other stuff.  But the real way to get noticed is millions of followers on the social media sites.  It’s apparently incredibly easy to be thought of as smart by follower count instead of actually being smart.  Because social media algorithms always did and there’s no end in sight to manipulation by real humans utilizing the weaknesses.

Going back to the comparison of conspiracy theories being a pyramid scheme.  The top influencers of all media have huge followings.  The top conspiracy influencers (e.g. Alex Jones) put effort into building large followings.  Medium level conspiracy influencers seek to mimic the Alex Jones method.  The low level conspiracy influencers, they seek out someone like Zach to try to build a following.

In the gematria world it’s common to see someone start off with one of the most common hooks.  The two most common are sports gambling and something spiritually related.  The goal is to get mentioned on a Zach livestream or a shout out on Facebook or Twitter, thinking that if Zach has his thousands of Patreons that they can grow their shitty little YouTube channel from 150 subscribers up to a level where they can make soooo much money off YouTube videos they can quit their job.  The difference between now and 5+ years ago is that there has been a saturation in the market and there isn’t enough of the sweet grifting pie to support the growth of the low level conspiracy influencers.

It can be considered a minor victory of sorts that low level channels are not so active anymore.  The food chain has been disrupted.  Although the court case had a huge penalty it’s difficult to predict whether Alex Jones is going to actually have to pay up.  He’s actively still trying to maintain his previous influence.  But the influencer chain works in the other direction.  Now Zach explodes anytime a low level gematria clown looks like they might be rebelling and taking away part of his market share.  Starting your spiritual guidance channel with an interview with Hubbard doesn’t have the luster it used to.

In theory, social media could do a lot more to break up the food chain.  But for now let’s settle for the best that we can get.  Awareness that context about someone with influence really seems to about is out there.  You just need to know how to look for it.