The influencer bubble: the progress that never arrived

In the sixties, the future being sold promised interstellar travel, Blade Runner-style cities and a cure for cancer. The real 2020 has been something else: an attention economy where the most visible pogre is people sharing their lives on social media in exchange for fame and trinc. The gap between promise and bill has an economic explanation.

From space to cat videos

We were promised contact with other civilizations, and instead we have a businessman paying into SpaceX while promising a base on Mars. We were promised advanced cities, and housing is outrageously expensive. We were promised genetic engineering, and cancer diagnoses keep arriving earlier. As a bonus, the great leap since computing is a loop of viral videos and content creators.

What the futurists missed: social engineering

The failure was not technical but social. Education, values, relationships and marriage changed from the ground up. Social engineering has gone further than flying cars. No Big Brother was needed: an algorithm rewarding noise was enough.

The individual way out

Some argue that ignoring content creators costs nothing and that life improves when you stop consuming them. True. But the bubble feeds on the attention millions give away every day. The dystopia was already in Back to the Future: it was not the apocalypse, it was the noise. Swap Biff Tannen's photo for Chad Sánchez's and the diagnosis still holds. The open question is whether artificial intelligence will repeat the pattern or become the first promise to be fulfilled.