Being an Influencer Is Becoming Embarrassing Again

Caroline Huckeba
20 hours ago
3 min read

Every era has a preferred spokesperson. The 1950s had the smiling housewife. The 1980s had the celebrities. The 2010s had the influencers. I'm beginning to think the late 2020s will belong to someone else entirely.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across Corner, a new maps app with an unusually simple promise: zero ads, zero influencers. Instead of asking Who has the biggest audience? they ask a different question. Who actually knows this place?

Their philosophy is almost radical in its restraint. Places matter because they're where our lives happen, not because someone filmed a fifteen-second TikTok there.

For the first time in years, I saw a company selling the absence of influence. That feels important. Not because influencers are disappearing. But because trust is. A few years ago, the internet was obsessed with authenticity. Now, it's suspicious of it.

When Timothée Chalamet appeared in a commercial for Kalshi, the prediction-market platform, the debate wasn't really about sports betting. It was about whether one endorsement could undo years of carefully cultivated indie credibility. Had he simply gotten the bag, or had he sold out?

A similar conversation unfolded when Kylie Jenner became one of the faces of Meta's AI-powered smart glasses after the product received criticism over privacy concerns. Rather than leading with engineers, privacy experts, or transparent explanations of the technology, Meta led with celebrity. The campaign wasn't asking us to trust the glasses. It was asking us to trust the people wearing them.

Brands have discovered something we've been slow to admit. People don't trust corporations anymore. They trust people. Or at least they used to.

For the better part of a decade, companies outsourced credibility to influencers. Instead of convincing consumers a product was worth buying, they convinced someone we already followed to buy it first. Authenticity became advertising's most valuable commodity.

Take Alix Earle. Her appeal wasn't perfection but proximity. Hangovers, acne, messy mornings, getting ready on the bathroom floor; she felt less like a celebrity than someone you'd gone to college with. That perceived intimacy became enormously valuable, transforming relatability into one of the most profitable business models of the social media era.

But influence depends on trust. And trust has an expiration date. The de-influencing movement exploded on TikTok as creators encouraged viewers to skip viral products rather than buy them. Billions of views accumulated around videos questioning luxury skincare, trendy water bottles, and endless cycles of consumption. Researchers have observed a broader decline in confidence in influencers as advertising becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine recommendations. As communications scholar Jodie Shaw argues in her essay on the rise of anti-influencers, audiences are becoming more sceptical of curated authenticity itself. The anti-influencer isn't rejecting influence so much as redefining what credibility looks like.

That shift feels bigger than social media. It explains why a company like Corner feels so refreshing.

Their mission isn't simply to build another map. It's to reject the premise that every meaningful experience should be mediated through algorithms, influencer itineraries, or five-star averages. "Zero ads. Zero influencers." The slogan isn't just a marketing strategy; it's an argument that places matter more when we discover them ourselves.

Ironically, anti-marketing has become one of the strongest forms of marketing available. Consumers aren't just buying products anymore. They're buying relief from advertising itself.

The irony, of course, is that even authenticity can become a brand identity. Every generation develops its own visual language for honesty. Millennials preferred minimalist typography and oat milk. Gen Z preferred "Get Ready With Me" confessionals. Now we're entering an era in which refusing sponsorships and criticizing consumer culture may become just another way to accumulate cultural capital.

Even anti-influence can become influence. Which raises a question I keep returning to. If your career depends on being perceived as intellectually honest, a cultural critic, philosopher, therapist, journalist, or wellness creator, what happens when you accept a brand deal? Does sponsorship simply pay the bills, or does it inevitably reshape how your audience interprets everything else you say?

Perhaps the issue isn't whether creators should work with brands. Most deserve to be paid for their labor. The question is whether credibility can be rented. For years, companies borrowed trust from influencers because institutions had lost it. Now, as audiences grow sceptical of influencers themselves, that borrowed trust is becoming harder to find.

Maybe that's why brands like Corner feel so culturally significant. Not because they're rejecting advertising. But because they're betting that the next luxury isn't influence. It's believing someone means what they say.