It’s Cool to Have No Followers Now

There are many ways to be big on social media, but they are not created equal. Maybe an account belongs to a popular brand or to a famous person, whose online following is preordained, no exertion required. Maybe one’s internet fame is homegrown and hard-won, the result of hustling for followers on a particular social network, the way Emily Mariko hit it big on TikTok, in 2021, building a viewership that has now reached twelve million with silent cooking videos of salmon rice bowls and the like. Maybe an account has attained digital renown as a source of trusted expertise in a given area, like that of the economic historian Adam Tooze, who has more than two hundred thousand followers on X—big but not too big. In many cases, though, a huge audience today could mean little in terms of human enthusiasm—the majority of followers might be bots, hate-followers, and dead profiles, as evidenced by low engagement on the user’s actual posts. Moreover, now that social media has dominated culture for more than a decade, many big accounts belong to figures of an earlier era of notoriety; they are the establishment rather than the vanguard. The music producer Jack Antonoff, who hit his creative peak in the twenty-tens, has more than a half million followers on X, whereas the acclaimed up-and-coming musician Nourished by Time has just over three thousand. Which is a better follow? The large numbers don’t quite mean what they used to as signals of relevance or clout, as social media has become more aged, more manipulable, and more automated by artificial intelligence.