In early 2013 I went into my Facebook account and found a small ad on the right side of the wall with a profile photo of a friend in which he seemed to sponsor a global chocolate bar brand. Puzzled and a little surprised with the matter I called him to tell him what I had seen. After much thought, we came to the conclusion that the only link between my friend and the chocolate brand was that a few weeks prior he had clicked the like button on the Facebook page of the company, which the social network took the liberty to transform into a brand endorsement. Apparently, the previous year Facebook had begun a program which cross-referenced likes and follows to marketing techniques like sponsorships. A couple of weeks later I decided to suspend by Facebook account. Back then, only over a decade ago, it seemed absurd that an ordinary person could be used to sponsor a global brand. By then the doors were already open so that the fictions of the market could penetrate and get confused with real life (2.2, 2.7, 4.5, 5.13). Little did we know back then what was coming our way.

With the democratization of technology that characterizes the so-called “digital era” the possibility arises for the celebrity status to spread throughout the population and take on a new form, that of the influencer: a consumer/commodity “famous” for its ability to collect likes and views in social networks and thus move digital masses toward the most diverse products, services or ideologies. This new generation of celebrities, coming from reality shows, youtube channels and Facebook and Instagram feeds are nothing but dictators of opinion: on culture, fashion, culinary, politics, music, sports, and even feminism, science and religion. These figures are the heirs to Marilyn Manson’s glam autocrat (3.3.3), tiny softened lifestyle dictators. The realm of these micro-dictators is a global market of images in which the human being becomes a fully aestheticized and produced object—an exterior without interior—which, like any other commodity, acquires its value when compared to other human commodities.

The virtual world where these micro-celebrities dwell is a genuine paradeisos, a threshold between fiction and reality in which the human is stripped of his political life and transformed into zoē. Once this step has taken place, the human can be degraded to the status of a thing and proceed to be homogenized and commodified.