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
I don’t hang out with white dudes who use mustache wax anymore bc it’s only a matter of time b4 they fall in love with me and find out I’m gay and write a song on their…idk..their fuckin harpsichord or banjo or ukulele about the girl from the forest who broke their heart but also they don’t even like hiking
i know this seems oddly specific & that’s bc it is
Storytime. Cooking in a different country makes you realize how many things you take for granted are just, Not A Thing Here. Like apple juice. Surely you can find apple juice at your local Athenian grocery store, right? Wrong. Greeks drink orange juice and peach juice and mixed fruit juice and sour cherry juice, but… plain old apple juice, nope, not so much. You’ll have a hard time finding vanilla extract in Greece too, since Greeks are used to vanilla powder in little plastic capsules and you have to go to specialty shops for the liquid stuff. Sour cream is virtually nonexistent here (but hey, it’s the land of yogurt, which is a good enough substitute). But surprisingly cornmeal (which is a specialty ingredient in the UK) is everywhere, since Greeks have their own versions of cornbread and corn pudding.
So basically: I knew it might be impossible find vegetable shortening (aka Crisco) for my Thanksgiving pie crust here in Athens. Crisco is pretty uniquely American, and Greeks are more likely to use phyllo than shortcrust anyway. That said, there are a handful of specialty shops in central Athens that sell things like Heinz baked beans and custard powder and Worcestershire sauce and other Weird Foreign Foods™ so us Sad Homesick Expats don’t have to go hungry (I’m always reminded of A Passage to India and their corned beef and tinned peas). So I went on Skroutz (the search engine for buying stuff in Greece) and typed in “vegetable shortening” to see if any stores carried it.
A notification came up asking me to confirm that I was over 18 years old?
???
I clicked “yes”??
Turns out there is, in fact, one shop in Athens that carries vegetable shortening. It’s a sex shop. The shortening is listed under “sex essentials”, as lube. For fisting. It’s literally called “βούτυρο για fisting” – “butter for fisting”.
I decided I didn’t need a flaky pie crust that badly.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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