Durkheim warned us, in the chilly prose of 19th-century sociology, that when a society loses its moral framework—its shared norms, its collective sense of purpose—individuals suffer. They become unmoored. He called this condition anomie: a state of normlessness, where the social scripts we rely on for meaning dissolve. Now fast-forward to today, where the influencer—that curious avatar of hyper-visibility and curated intimacy—stands at the bleeding edge of this crisis.
Durkheim Meets the Algorithm
Influencers are not simply entrepreneurs of self; they are symptoms. In a world where meaning is increasingly extracted through metrics, they embody a terrifying paradox: total social presence and profound personal instability. Their job is to exist, perform, and be consumed—always.
For Durkheim, stable societies produce stable selves. But the influencer’s society is a digital marketplace in permanent flux. Trends shift hourly. Algorithms tweak behavior with opaque indifference. Audience moods swing like weather. There is no stable "we" to belong to, only a crowd to please. In this context, selfhood becomes a hustle, and identity is a brand under constant threat of irrelevance.
The Perils of Curated Intimacy
Influencers are paid to be relatable, which is another way of saying they are paid to simulate friendship. This creates a form of professionalized vulnerability: confessional captions, raw honesty, mental health check-ins—but on schedule, with lighting. The emotional labor of being "authentic" online, day after day, fractures the boundary between self and performance.
Anomie creeps in here, disguised as freedom. With no clear boundary between work and life, or public and private, the influencer loses the moral anchors Durkheim believed were essential. The more their content is validated by likes and comments, the more the "real" self becomes uncertain—a ghost behind the engagement metrics.
Suicide and Spectacle
Durkheim's Suicide identified different types, including anomic suicide, caused by social instability and sudden dislocation. Today, we see modern echoes: influencer burnout, breakdowns livestreamed, tragic deaths announced via Notes App screenshots. These are not just personal tragedies—they are structural symptoms. A society that demands constant exposure without offering collective support breeds this kind of psychic erosion.
The Audience is the Institution
For the influencer, there is no school, church, or workplace to confer social legitimacy. There is only the audience. And that audience is fickle, fragmented, and algorithmically filtered. Praise one day, backlash the next. Parasocial love turns into public execution with terrifying ease.
Durkheim taught that we become who we are through others. But what happens when those "others" are invisible, numerical, and largely unknown? When validation is externalized into a dashboard, and community is abstracted into followers, the self risks dissolving entirely.
Can Solidarity Be Streamed?
There are flickers of resistance: creator unions, digital sabbaticals, collective calls for better mental health support. But these are patchwork solutions to a deeper wound. What the influencer reveals is not just the fragility of individual identity in the attention economy, but the fragility of the society that made them necessary in the first place.
Durkheim's ghost hovers over every selfie. His lesson is clear: without shared meaning, without rituals that bind us beyond the market, we unravel. The influencer is not the disease, but the fever dream of a culture sick with loneliness and spectacle.
