Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: A shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number “6,” shot from above on a concrete background. It featured the branded hashtag tied to the phone’s launch, and tagged OnePlus’sInstagram handle. And it looked similar to posts from the company itself announcing the launch of its new android phone. Joshi’s post, however, wasn’t an ad. “It looked sponsored, but it’s not,” she said. Her followers are none the wiser. “They just assume everything is sponsored when it really isn’t,” she said. And she wants it that way.
A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may have been seen as selling out. Now, it’s a sign of success. “People know how much influencers charge now, and that payday is nothing to shake a stick at,” said Alyssa Vingan Klein, editor in chief of Fashionista, a fashion news website. “If someone who is 20 years old watching YouTube or Instagram sees these people traveling with brands, promoting brands, I don’t see why they wouldn’t do everything they could to get in on that.” […]
Sydney Pugh, a lifestyle influencer in Los Angeles, recently staged a fake ad for a local cafe, purchasing her own mug of coffee, photographing it, and adding a promotional caption, carefully written in that particular style of adspeak anyone who spends a lot of time on Instagram will recognize: “Instead of [captioning] ‘I need coffee to get through the day,’ mine will say ‘I love Alfred’s coffee because of A,B,C,’” she told me. “You see the same things over and over on actual sponsored posts it becomes really easy to emulate, even if you’re not getting paid.” […]
When Allie, a 15-year-old lifestyle influencer who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, scrolls through her Instagram feed, sometimes the whole thing seems like an ad. There’s a fellow teen beauty influencer bragging about her sponsorship with Maybelline, a high school sophomore she knows touting his brand campaign with Voss water. None of these promotions however, are real. Allie is friends with them and so she knows. She once faked a water sponsorship herself. “People pretend to have brand deals to seem cool,” Allie said. It’s a thing, like, I got this for free while all you losers are paying.“ […]
Henry, a 15-year-old beauty influencer who asked to be referred to by his first name only, said he doesn’t post fake ads himself, but said he noticed his social status rise as he got more attention online this year. “People come up to me at school like, ‘do you get sponsored?’ When I say I do they’re like, ‘OMG that’s so cool.’ I noticed the more followers I gain the more people in the hall come up and talk to me.”
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
read this then read this other post i wrote and appreciate that this article describes not a sea change into some nightmarish new reality, but in fact a natural extension and elaboration of the way you yourself used brands to express yourself as a teen (and do right now!!!!!!!!)
everything! is! disordered!
teens, in unison: today we will advertise corporations for free
ppl don’t binge eat bc ~processed food tastes too good~ or whatever paranoid reasoning diet culture has taught us, they binge bc they have a history of deprivation and restriction, often self-imposed.
if you think you’re not allowed to eat this or that food, you’re going to binge
if you think your “good” diet/lifestyle/behavior will start tomorrow, you’re going to binge (aka last supper eating)
if you have a history of food insecurity, you’re going to binge when food is available
if you have a history of dieting or being put on diets, you’re going to binge to be sure your net energy needs are met
if you have an eating disorder, you’re going to binge… and if you don’t, you’re more likely to die of the illness
the body drives hunger for very good reason, and it takes a long, stable period of eating sufficiently to get its hyperphagic (extreme hunger/eating) mechanisms to stand down. more deprivation means more out-of-control eating; more response to hunger means more regulated eating patterns. it really is that simple.
this bastard of a printer situation where it can print but prefers not to until a trivial error is fixed is identical to the Douglas Adams scenario of a flight delayed for a million years while they wait for civilization to rebuild so they can load the packs of lemon-scented tissues that the flight can’t possibly go without.
“Odds are a civilisation will rise again. There will one day be, lemon soaked paper napkins”
I’ve actually been on a plane that couldn’t take off until they’d replaced the printer cartridge, so that if necessary they could print out a (legally mandated) emergency weather report.
The survey found 70% of respondents who needed prompting in order to eat had missed meals because they did not get this support and 86% said they had not washed for the same reason.
Nearly two thirds of those surveyed needed prompting to help them wash, dress or feed themselves.
So I was automatically thinking, “maybe I’m not doing too badly, then”. Never mind that Mr. C was offering to call and remind me to eat during the day when I was having a particularly rough time for a while there 🙄
(His own lousy executive function and all, but that’s another story. He was certainly willing to try.)
Just ran across this while searching for something else. Ouch 😵
The survey also found 44% of respondents stayed at home because they feared abuse or harassment…
Two thirds felt depressed because of loneliness and over a third do not leave the house most days.
And most of the respondents there probably did not stand out in as many other ways. Can’t even figure out what exactly is setting these assholes off most of the time, but it really can be a problem.
(Popping into mind from another context: “cannot distinguish the racism from the homophobia from the sexism”. Throw in ableism to complicate things further.)
Anyway, probably not just imagining there is something not right there, or severely overreacting to minor stuff–along with almost half of people asked.
For me, it’s more likely to be that I am sick/in pain and low enough on spoons going out to begin with, and just do not have any to spare for dealing with totally unsolicited obnoxious behavior from randos. That has been a major deciding factor for just saying fuck it and staying home on so many occasions.
I still don’t feel like I can talk about that much, in case it gets interpreted as all “just” a mental health issue. Including being sick/in pain at all. (Not to dismiss what really are primarily anxiety-driven reasons. I’ve just had too many bad experiences in that direction when anxiety was really not the main problem.)
My partner does not seem big on that kind of approach, or I wouldn’t want to live with that. But, again, enough bad experiences–including with straight up victim blaming–that I would rather have most people think it’s just the physical disability stuff keeping me at home. It all gets frustrating.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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