> 1) An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators, who have achieved success through alternative routes (make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels) than the standard middle class snake person career path of "being born into the right family, liberal arts education, job at BuzzFeed/Vanity Fair/Teen Vogue/New Yorker while building out performative angst Twitter persona." Following that line, for most people without the right background/connections/ability to take an unpaid internship in New York for three months, results in them becoming on several levels completely unemployable.
The "professional influencer" career path though, especially done the way the platforms want it done (i.e. NON STOP) requires that the person attempting it eschew any and all activities that don't work towards their perceived "career" in favor of ones that do.
It would be like if struggling to be an actor for a decade left to completely incompetent to even wait tables.
I'm all for approaching a utopian future where no one needs to work, but we're not there yet. If 1 in 4 young women are going for this kind of work today, we're going to have market saturation at peak levels. We already have way too many twitch streamers for it to be reasonably successful unless you slavishly dedicate your life to doing it, and I'd say the YouTubers are maybe a couple of years before they hit the same problem, if they aren't already.
We have an entire section of our economy right now based on, for lack of a more eloquent term, bullshit. Bullshit people pushing bullshit products with bullshit content published on bullshit platforms. And yeah sure, this has always been a thing, it's not new, but it's never been this HUGE. We're already seeing cracks forming from the sheer number of young women (and men too, it's for both sexes) who are dedicating every minute of every day of their lives to this "influencer" nonsense, combined with the fact that digital advertising is tanking, and long overdue privacy rankings are going to take the wind out of all of these platforms sales, and then we'll have to deal with having millions of people who's only once-marketable skill is smiling into a camera like an idiot, and peddling shit that no one needs.