Surely if you rule the manosphere, you can be your own boss? These influencers aren’t even that | Elle Hunt

Surely if you rule the manosphere, you can be your own boss? These influencers aren’t even that Elle Hunt Content creators claim they’ve escaped the 9 to 5, yet as Louis Theroux’s new show reveals, they are mere serfs to algorithms and audiences W ho wouldn’t want to be an influencer? You’re famous and maybe even rich, just for doing what you’d be doing anyway: working out at the gym, hanging out with your mates and mucking about on the internet. You get paid to say what you think (or are at least sent free stuff), and no one’s telling you what to do. Surely only a sucker would do anything else. At least that is the influencing dream, and many young men are buying into it. “Content creator” has for years been cited as the most desirable career by generation Z and now gen Alpha . The preferred platforms might have changed over time, with streaming on Twitch and Kick now supplanting posting on Instagram and YouTube, but the aspiration remains the same: to escape the drudgery of a desk job. But Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary reveals the catch. Though focused on the misogynistic online manosphere, it is equally compelling as a grim look behind the curtain of influencer production, revealing it to be at best shabby and at worst soul-destroying. Theroux’s featured “creators” claim to have seen through the false promise of conventional careers to find success on their terms. Yes, they have all the trappings: pools, girls, luxury cars and watches, and jaunts to Dubai (though the last may be curtailed now). But going behind the scenes, you see what is absent from the social media highlights and edgy viral clips: life as an influencer is often banal and just as much of a trap as the standard nine-to-five. It is also much harder to get out of. Even the manosphere, characterised in the mainstream as a hotbed of dangerous misogyny, might more accurately be characterised as a large-scale grift, as Theroux told the Guardian . Though it undeniably harbours toxic views, it ...