By the end of 2017, H2H Human to Human, a Spanish agency specialized in influencer marketing, set out on a project to demonstrate the dangers and abuses incurred by brands at the hands of this new batch of celebrities. The project, code-named Siren, consisted of creating a fake influencer with a mere five hundred-euro budget. With this end in mind the agency hired actress Almudena Ripamonti who would act as a lure to bait fashion brands into letting her promote their products. The first step was to delete Almudena’s real Instagram profile and create a new account named @almu_rimpamonti, which they proceeded to feed with high-quality photographic material.

Once the profile had enough pictures, the agency set out to accomplish the central part of the project: buying thousands of online followers from bot farms, which would mean that since most of her followers are non-human, @almu_ripamonti’s value to any brand would be fictional. Paradoxically enough, as the number of false followers increased, brands began to show interest in having Almudena model their products in her profile. And not only this, after having gained status in the local influencer community, she managed to attend the shows at Madrid’s Fashion Week and got free meals and drinks at high-end restaurants with the simple commitment to post a good review. According to H2H, the five hundred euro budget was enough to achieve one hundred thousand followers.

Beyond proving the inherent flaws of the new celebrity system, @almu_ripamonti’s profile exemplifies the process through which every celebrity or influencer looses its substance and meaning and, effectively, disappears as a social function. As life and reality become commodity fictions (5.18) the masks that make our social persona dissolve into thin air. The bios mask that served to sustain our political body has disolved in a media hallucination. Without it we are reduced to zoē, mere prey for our masters who have set up an enormous scenario, a hunting park (0.3, 0.19, 3.3, 5.15) that extends all over the planet. It is to a genealogy of this paradeisos, to which we will devote the second part of this study.