The influencer trend I am flat-out refusing to participate in

Okay, so I am going to say something that might make a few people uncomfortable, and I’m fine with that.

There is a trend flooding every corner of the internet right now that is being sold to you as ‘real’ and ‘raw’ and ‘unfiltered’ — and it is the single most calculated, produced, committee-approved piece of content strategy I have ever seen in eighteen years of doing this. It makes the old perfectly-staged flat-lay look like journalism by comparison.

I don’t know what to call it exactly, so I’ve been calling it Performed Chaos. And we need to talk about it.

What does ‘Performed Chaos’ actually look like?

You know it when you see it. Someone films themselves looking exhausted — hair undone, mascara slightly wrong, sitting in a car or on a bathroom floor. They start talking in a kind of halting, vulnerable way about how hard things have been lately. Maybe there are dishes in the background. Maybe they cry, just a little. Just enough.

Then, about forty-five seconds in, they pivot. Discount code. Product link. Limited time offer.

The mess was the setup. The breakdown was the funnel.

Why is this worse than the old influencer fakery?

The old fake was easy to spot — everyone knew a ring light and a color-coordinated pantry wasn’t real life. We all understood the game. It was aspirational fiction and both sides knew it.

This is different. This borrows the visual language of actual vulnerability — the shaky voice, the unmade bed, the ‘I almost didn’t post this’ caption — and uses it to sell something. It’s not just dishonest. It’s specifically designed to disarm the part of your brain that would normally be skeptical.

Research on parasocial relationships has been showing for years that people extend genuine trust and empathy to creators they feel they ‘know.’ Performed Chaos weaponizes that trust directly. That’s the part that bothers me.

Is it possible some of it is actually real?

Sure. That’s the maddening part — some of it probably is. Some people are genuinely burnt out, genuinely sitting on a bathroom floor, and they happen to also have a brand deal to fulfill that week. I’m not saying every person doing this is a cynical operator.

But when the format is this consistent — the undone hair, the paused exhale, the pivot to the product, the comment section full of ‘thank you for being so real’ — at some point the pattern IS the product. It doesn’t matter if the individual feeling was genuine. The performance of it was engineered.

The ‘I almost didn’t post this’ caption deserves its own sentence

‘I almost didn’t post this’ is the ‘no offense but’ of content creation. It’s a disclaimer that means the opposite of what it says. Nobody who almost didn’t post something posts it with a full brand partnership tag, three hashtags, and a link in bio.

I’m not saying this to be mean. I’m saying it because once you see it, you can’t unsee it — and I think it’s worth being honest about.

The strongest argument FOR this kind of content

Here’s where I’m going to steel-man it, because it deserves that.

The people who create this content would say — and some of them have said — that showing messy reality alongside a product recommendation is MORE honest than showing a perfect kitchen with a seamless ad drop. That the rawness is actually the context, not the manipulation. That showing you’re a real person who has hard days AND uses a particular protein powder is just… life.

I can see that. I don’t think it’s nothing.

But I think there’s a difference between ‘here’s my real life and also I’m going to tell you about a thing I use’ and spending forty minutes crafting a video designed to look like it took ten seconds. The craft isn’t the problem — hiding the craft while selling authenticity as the product is the problem.

Why I’m not doing it

I’ve been at this since 2006. Long enough to have watched a lot of trends roll through — and long enough to know which ones I could live with and which ones I couldn’t.

This one I can’t. Not because I think I’m above it, but because I think it makes everything worse for everyone. It makes actual vulnerable moments harder to trust. It makes it harder for creators who ARE being straight with you to get that across. It muddies the water for everyone.

I wrote a whole thing back when I got into what ‘authentic’ even means anymore that still feels relevant here — the short version is that authentic isn’t a vibe, it’s a practice. And a practice doesn’t have a discount code attached to it.

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is just the new normal and I should loosen up. But I think my ongoing rant about content that treats you like a mark is one I’m going to keep having, because you deserve better than that — and honestly, so does the craft of this whole weird job.

Look, I’m not here to cancel anyone over their content strategy. People have bills. Brand deals are how this works. I get it.

But I do think we’re allowed to notice when something that’s being sold as ‘real’ is actually very, very produced. And we’re definitely allowed to decide we don’t want to participate in making more of it.

That’s where I’m at. Notices it, named it, opting out.

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