Nobody Walked Into Your Shot — You Set Up a Camera in Public

“Influencer”. The word repulses me so much. I stop reading anytime I see the word “influencer” in the title.

There. I said it.

It’s not because I don’t understand what the word means. I understand it too well. That’s the problem. It’s one of those modern job titles that seems to have crawled out from under a ring light, sprayed itself with entitled confidence, and demanded we all step aside because someone is filming.

Influencer.

It’s a word that arrives with its own smell. Protein powder, coconut oil, rented hotel linen, and entitlement. The kind of entitlement that makes a person walk into a public place, set up a camera, and behave as though the rest of humanity has entered their private studio without permission.

We’ve all seen them now. The Lycra missionaries. The tripod people. The ones who set up in gyms, cafés, airports, beaches, supermarkets, hotel lobbies, and anywhere else ordinary people used to exist without being converted into background props.

They don’t walk into a room anymore. They “create content” in it. They don’t eat breakfast. They “collab” with toast. They don’t have opinions. They “drop truth bombs.”

And we’re supposed to treat this as serious work.

I know. I know. Some people make money from it. Some brands pay them. Some of them have managers, rate cards, sponsored posts, audience analytics, and tax-deductible activewear. I’m not denying that an industry exists.

Lots of silly industries exist. That doesn’t mean I have to admire them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t ridiculous to me.

There is a difference between having a job and expecting the world to kneel before your phone.

That’s where the influencer economy starts to rot. It’s not the camera. It’s not the posting. It’s not even the self-promotion. Writers self-promote. Artists self-promote. Musicians self-promote. Businesses self-promote. I have no problem with a person putting work into the world and trying to find an audience.

What I can’t stomach is the belief that filming yourself doing something automatically makes the thing important.

A woman doing hip thrusts in a gym is exercising. A woman doing hip thrusts in a gym while filming herself is still exercising. She has not suddenly transformed the dumbbell area into a film set. She has not hired the building. She has not bought exclusive rights to the air. The person walking behind her is not “ruining the shot.” They are using the gym. The gym. That public, sweaty, noisy, shared place where people go to lift things, pant, stretch, fail, try again, and leave.

Somehow, in influencer land, the person exercising quietly has become the intruder, while the person filming herself becomes the wronged professional.

This is the madness of it.

A normal person accidentally steps into the background of a video, and suddenly, there’s a lecture about gym etiquette. Not the etiquette of taking up space with tripods. Not the etiquette of recording strangers who didn’t agree to appear in your self-improvement montage. Not the etiquette of turning a shared facility into a personal branding shoot. No. The etiquette lesson is aimed at the poor soul who wanted a pair of dumbbells.

There’s always a caption, too. Something smug and instructional. Something like: “Gym etiquette lesson number 47.” As though the rest of us are enrolled in their private academy of self-importance.

Then there are the plane people.

The plane influencer is a special category of social stupidity. They arrive at the airport dressed as though the aircraft is a beach club with wings, then act astonished when staff apply basic public standards. They film themselves afterwards, eyes wide, voice trembling with theatrical disbelief, explaining that they were treated “unfairly” because someone in uniform didn’t agree that a sports bra, underpants, string, mesh, and a pout constituted appropriate travel wear.

Then comes the real performance: the plea for validation.

“Can you believe this happened to me?”

Yes. Yes, I can.

What I can’t believe is that you filmed the grievance as though it belonged before a tribunal. Airline staff have dealt with delays, luggage meltdowns, seat disputes, screaming children, drunken passengers, medical episodes, and the general horror of modern travel. Now they also have to negotiate with someone whose emotional support item is a front-facing camera.

And the followers are invited to join the outrage. Not because a serious injustice has occurred. Not because someone’s rights have been trampled in any meaningful sense. But because a person whose life is built around being looked at was told, briefly, to cover up.

That’s the great wound of the age, apparently.

Not hunger. Not housing. Not loneliness. Not collapsing attention spans. Not the quiet despair of people doing hard, invisible work for very little thanks. No. The emergency is that someone in compression fabric couldn’t board a plane until they zipped up a jacket.

Then we move to restaurants.

Influencers love restaurants, especially when they aren’t paying. There’s a particular species of message that must arrive in hospitality inboxes all over the world: “Hi babe, I’d love to collaborate.” Translation: I would like food. You will provide food. I will take photos of the food, mention your business to people who may or may not live anywhere near you, and pretend we’ve made a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Exposure.

That’s the magic word. Exposure is what people offer when they don’t want to pay. It’s the currency of the entitled. The landlord won’t take the exposure. The electricity company won’t take exposure. The butcher, baker, dentist, plumber, mechanic, and vet won’t take exposure. But somehow the café owner is supposed to feel blessed when a stranger offers to chew through the menu in exchange for a story that disappears in twenty-four hours.

Some restaurants have started biting back, and good on them. One of the better responses I’ve seen was a restaurant offering to donate a meal to charity if the influencer paid for their own food. That’s a beautiful filter. It separates generosity from freeloading in one clean movement.

Apparently, the offer wasn’t very popular.

Funny that.

This is the thing about influencer culture that irritates me most. It dresses selfishness as enterprise. It takes the old, ugly habit of wanting something for nothing and wraps it in pastel branding. It makes begging look like marketing. It makes vanity look like labour. It makes public inconvenience look like ambition.

And before someone says, “You’re just jealous,” let me save you the trouble.

No.

I’m tired.

Tired of seeing ordinary public spaces converted into stages. Tired of watching strangers get dragged into videos they didn’t ask to be part of. Tired of the fake shock, the performative tears, the breathless explanations, the “story time” confessionals, and the endless assumption that every inconvenience is content.

A person can be attractive without being interesting. Fit without being wise. Popular without being useful. Visible without being important.

That last one is the part we seem to have forgotten.

Visibility is not a value.

Being watched is not the same as contributing something. Plenty of people are watched for the wrong reasons. Car crashes attract attention, too. So do arguments in shopping centres. So do people behaving badly on planes.

We have mistaken attention for achievement.

The influencer economy depends on this confusion. It asks us to believe that if enough people look at a person, that person must matter. If enough people follow them, they must be worth following. If a video gets enough views, it must have said something. But sometimes all it proves is that humans will slow down for almost anything if it moves brightly enough.

The saddest part is how small it all feels.

So much of influencer culture is presented as aspirational, but the aspiration is usually thin. Better abs. Better skin. Better angles. Better luggage. Better brunch. Better lighting. Better evidence that the person exists in a world more polished than yours. It’s not about living well. It’s about being seen as appearing to live well.

That’s not influence. That’s display.

Real influence is quieter. It changes a mind. It improves a room. It teaches, comforts, challenges, builds, repairs, warns, reveals, or leaves something behind that still matters after the phone battery dies.

A nurse influences. A teacher influences. A parent influences. A good book influences. A kind stranger influences. A neighbour who turns up when something goes wrong influences. A person who does the hard thing without filming it influences.

The rest is often just posing with captions.

So yes, I stop reading when I see the word “influencer” in the title. I’ve had enough of the manufactured outrage, the airport sob stories, the gym confrontations, the free-meal requests, and the belief that a public space becomes private property the moment someone presses record.

The world is not your backdrop.

The gym is not your studio.

The plane is not your runway.

The restaurant is not your sponsor.

And the rest of us are not extras in the ongoing drama of your personal brand.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)