Influencers: The Internet’s Great Intellectual Fraud
“I know only that I know nothing.”
— Socrates
“Fools are certain; the intelligent are full of doubt.”
— Bertrand Russell
Influencers: The Internet’s Great Intellectual Fraud
It has never been easier to look intelligent without having thought at all. Intelligence, which once required reading, silence, doubt, discipline, and some painful confrontation with one’s own ignorance, can now be simulated with a ring light, a teleprompter, and a sufficiently serious facial expression.
The formula is simple. Open a language model, ask for a “deep,” “provocative,” and “transformative” text, copy the result onto a screen, and look into the camera as if a new stage of human consciousness were about to be announced. Add oversized captions, quick cuts, emotional music, and a handful of words that work like intellectual makeup: purpose, trauma, energy, paradigm, algorithm, consciousness, stoicism, quantum.
There it is. Another contemporary expert is born.
He did not research the subject. He did not write the text. He did not check the sources. He did not read the book he cites. He does not master the concept he repeats. Sometimes, he does not even fully understand the sentence he has just pronounced. But he speaks with the priestly calm of someone who has come to free humanity from ignorance. And for the algorithm, that is enough. The algorithm does not ask whether there is thought. It asks whether there is retention. It does not ask whether the speech is true. It asks whether it holds attention. It does not ask whether knowledge exists. It asks whether there is the appearance of knowledge.
Authority, once built through years of study, error, debate, revision, and experience, can now be forged in sixty seconds. What once required education now requires a set. What once required thought now requires posture. What once required competence now requires framing. The age of digital influencers has not merely democratized communication. It has industrialized imposture and stupidity.
In 1933, as Hitler came to power in Germany and Europe discovered, once again, that crowds can also go mad with method, Bertrand Russell observed an asymmetry as simple as it was terrifying: fools are often full of certainty, while intelligent people remain full of doubt. The phrase was not a philosophical ornament. It was a political and moral diagnosis of an era in which stupidity ceased to be merely a private deficiency and became a collective force — organized, uniformed, and ready to march.
Almost a century later, the internet did not correct this tragedy. It merely gave it a front-facing camera, a filter, monetization, and a link in the bio. It transformed confidence into a product, arrogance into a style, and simplification into authority. Those who know a lot hesitate because they know the exceptions, the limits, the ambiguities, and the questions that remain open. Those who know little do not suffer this burden. For them, everything is simple. There is always a single cause, an obvious culprit, a definitive solution, and a forbidden truth that, by some miracle, fits perfectly into a short video.
Ignorance, seen from the inside, rarely looks like ignorance. It looks like courage. It looks like authenticity. It looks like a “strong opinion.” It looks like lucidity against “the system.” It looks like the heroic revelation of someone who discovered alone what researchers, professors, doctors, philosophers, and scientists apparently failed to notice because they were too busy studying. That is the competitive advantage of the performative ignorant: he does not know enough to know that he does not know.
The ancient Greeks already knew this problem. Before feeds, reels, and courses discounted until midnight, there were the sophists. They mastered the art of persuasion. They taught rhetoric, argumentation, and public performance. Some had real intellectual importance, but the figure of the sophist came to symbolize a dangerous separation: the distance between convincing and telling the truth. The goal was not necessarily to understand. It was to win. What mattered was not having the truest argument, but the most effective one before an audience.
The hollow influencer is the sophist degraded by technology. The ancient sophist still had to personally master his rhetoric. He had to respond, improvise, and sustain a position before a living audience. The digital sophist can outsource even his own eloquence. The machine writes, the teleprompter guides, the editing cleans, the algorithm distributes, the followers defend, and the advertiser pays. The person enters at the end of the process to lend a human face to the assembly line. He does not create. He performs. He does not discover. He posts. He does not think. He performs thought.
In this scenario, the teleprompter has become the new diploma. Not because scripts are bad — good teachers, journalists, and speakers use them legitimately — but because, in many cases, the script no longer organizes an existing thought; it hides the absence of one. Without the screen, the argument ends. Without the cut, hesitation appears. Without the caption, the sentence withers. Without the music, the depth loses half its weight. Ask a question outside the script, and the one-minute specialist disappears.
This is where Socrates becomes unbearable to this culture. He represented the absolute opposite of the spectacle of false authority: he did not sell definitive answers, did not package certainties for quick consumption, did not confuse verbal brilliance with knowledge. He began with the gesture most dangerous to any intellectual impostor: he recognized the limits of his own knowledge. Instead of ready-made speeches, he asked questions; instead of seducing the interlocutor, he forced him to examine what he claimed to know. His method was devastating because it struck the weakest point of false wisdom: the inability to define its own terms.
Socratic maieutics was the art of this discomfort. Like a midwife, Socrates did not place ready-made ideas into anyone’s mind; he helped the interlocutor give birth to his own ideas — and very often, the birth revealed that what looked like thought was only malformed vanity. He brought forth the contradiction hidden inside certainty. That is why he would be a direct threat to the teleprompter influencer. He would not attack the appearance, the lighting, or the set. He would do something much worse: ask for a definition. Then for evidence. Then for an exception. Then for a source.
False depth thrives in fog. It lives on big words used in small ways: vibration, high performance, self-healing, mental reprogramming, emotional unlocking, the right frequency, abundance, purpose, the better version of oneself, mindset. Everything sounds impressive as long as no one asks what exactly it means. But simply ask for a definition, a limit, or a criterion, and the whole building begins to creak. Socrates would be blocked in less than five minutes, not because he was aggressive, but because he asked questions that were too simple: “How do you know?” “Does this always apply?” “What would prove you wrong?” “Can you explain it without repeating the script?” Much of digital content was not made to answer. It was made to pass by too quickly for the question to be born.
Artificial intelligence has only accelerated this tragicomedy. It did not create superficiality, narcissism, or plagiarism. It merely removed the last obstacles between emptiness and mass production. Before, even mediocrity required some effort: copying a book, summarizing an article, imitating someone. Now it is enough to ask for a script with a “philosophical tone and impactful phrases.” Seconds later, emptiness gains grammar. Ignorance gains rhythm. Banality gains packaging.
And it does not stop with text. The same machine now produces reels and stories as if every banal sentence had to be accompanied by galaxies, particles, cosmic eyes, luminous brains, impossible cities, and generic characters staring into nothingness with the expression of someone who has understood the universe in fifteen seconds (I like that one!). Everything looks grand. Almost nothing says anything. The image works like stage smoke: it does not reveal depth; it conceals the absence of it. The poorer the idea, the more cinematic the fraud has to be.
And the fraud is not in using artificial intelligence. The fraud is in selling as personal reflection what has been outsourced.
Someone who masters a subject uses the tool to think better: to confront, correct, verify, contextualize, rewrite.
Someone who does not master the subject uses the tool to avoid the embarrassment of thinking.
One expands the mind. The other places a machine where a mind should have been.
That is why they all begin to sound the same. The same pauses, the same cuts, the same gestures, the same vague themes, the same promises, the same recycled revelations. “No one is talking about this,” they say, about subjects discussed for decades by people they have never read. “Science has already proven it,” they announce, without citing a single study. “This is an uncomfortable truth,” they repeat, usually offering the audience exactly the comfortable belief it already wanted to confirm.
Deep down, the content is only bait. The real product is the influencer himself: his appearance, his routine, his edited intimacy, his staged authority, his continuous presence. The subject serves the face, not the other way around. Science, philosophy, health, politics, spirituality, or behavior become settings for self-promotion. An idea that could fit into three lines becomes a video, a cut, a carousel, a live session, a community, a mentorship, and a course. The function is not to clarify. It is to remain visible.
That is the central degradation: appearance has become competence. A bookshelf in the background produces intellectuality. A large microphone produces credibility. A lab coat produces science. Fast editing produces intelligence. Followers produce truth. The question has stopped being “what does this person know?” and has become “how many people believe this person knows?”
The damage is greater than the ridicule. A society trained to confuse confidence with knowledge becomes easy prey for any character sufficiently certain, theatrical, and simplistic. Germany in the last century already demonstrated, with monstrous consequences, that crowds can kneel before false certainties when they arrive dressed as historical destiny, collective identity, and national redemption.
Today, on a more diffuse and vulgar scale, the same logic reappears in performative political leaders, stage gurus, method sellers, and digital influencers: they all live from the same raw material — the human hunger for someone to think in the people’s place. Politics begins to function as a spectacle of characters: the ruler becomes a brand, the first lady becomes an emotional symbol, the rally becomes a feed, militancy becomes fandom, and any rational criticism is immediately reduced to personal attack, envy, prejudice, or conspiracy.
Public debate ceases to be a dispute of arguments and becomes the emotional management of the audience.
Logical fallacies are shoved down the people’s throat as if they were reasoning: appeals to emotion replace evidence, ad hominem attacks replace answers, false dilemmas replace complexity, straw men replace real opponents, and slogans replace thought. In the end, the citizen is no longer asked to understand; he is only asked to cheer, repeat, and defend the right character.
The citizen stops evaluating ideas and starts defending faces. He trades complexity for ready-made phrases. He trades debate for cheering. He trades evidence for belonging. He trades thought for emotional identification. A lie does not need to defeat truth in the field of ideas. It only needs to defeat it in screen time.
And it is precisely there that influencer culture reveals its deepest fraud. It does not merely sell products, opinions, or lifestyles. It sells a complete replacement of reflection by emotional adhesion. The influencer does not need to prove anything; he needs to seem trustworthy. He does not need to know; he needs to seem intimate. He does not need to build an idea; he needs to build a persona. His real commodity is not knowledge, but presence. Not argument, but manufactured familiarity. Not truth, but the comfortable sensation that someone sympathetic, attractive, outraged, or maternal has already thought for you.
In this sense, there is an almost obscene irony: camgirls and OnlyFans models are often more honest than many self-appointed intellectual influencers. They sell image and fantasy — and that is it. The contract is clear. No one goes there expecting a lecture on productivity, life purpose, emotional healing, miracle investments, dopamine, or “how to unlock your best self.”
The fake digital sage is funnier — and more pathetic — because he sells spectacle while pretending to deliver wisdom. He offers vanity as public service, self-promotion as moral courage, and outsourced scripts as original thought.
The adult creator, at least, does not claim to be saving humanity between one link and another. The influencer does. One admits: “this is performance.” The other builds a temple around the performance, lights a candle, sets up a podcast microphone, misquotes Marcus Aurelius, promises mental clarity in seven steps, and calls it a revolution of consciousness.
Influencers have prostituted themselves to the algorithm, exposing their own imbecility to the world in exchange for clicks.
But laughter alone is not enough. Mockery humiliates the impostor for a few seconds; the question destroys him from within. False authority survives as long as it is watched, liked, and shared. It begins to die only when someone interrupts the trance and demands a foundation.
The answer may still be Socratic: ask. Do not share before examining. Do not confuse fluency with truth. Do not take conviction as proof. Do not accept a quotation without a source. Do not admire an answer before understanding the question. Faced with any certainty that is excessively polished, the decisive question remains brutally simple: how do you know?
That question would dismantle half the internet. The other half might collapse with the next one: what would make you change your mind?
In the end, the abundance of artificial content may restore value to what cannot be easily simulated: real thought, experience, intellectual memory, the courage to correct mistakes, the ability to improvise, and the humility to say “I don’t know.” When anyone can appear eloquent, eloquence will stop proving intelligence. When everyone can produce perfect sentences, the rare thing will be having something true to say.
Artificial intelligence will not eliminate the need for intelligent people. It will merely reduce the advantage of those who only seemed intelligent. And this will be a brutal adjustment for the crowd of instant specialists who confused reach with competence, editing with reasoning, and a front-facing camera with intellectual authority.
Sooner or later, someone will ask a question that was not on the teleprompter. The light will remain on, the camera will keep recording, the algorithm will remain hungry, and the face will continue trying to look profound. But the mask will have fallen.
At that moment, we will discover who knew what they were talking about — and who was merely reading slowly, with good lighting and an absolute lack of shame.
Socrates Meets the Influencer and the Machine
Imagine, then, Socrates entering a modern studio.
A ring light glows. A smartphone is recording. A teleprompter scrolls silently beside the camera. An influencer, perfectly framed and emotionally calibrated, is explaining the meaning of life in forty-seven seconds.
Socrates: Tell me, friend, what is wisdom?
Influencer: Wisdom is alignment, purpose, emotional abundance, and becoming your highest version.
Socrates: Interesting. And what do these words mean?
Influencer: They mean… transformation.
Socrates: Transformation from what into what?
The influencer pauses. The teleprompter continues.
Influencer: ChatGPT, rewrite my answer with more depth.
ChatGPT: Wisdom may be understood as the capacity to reflect critically, recognize uncertainty, examine one’s assumptions, and act with humility before complexity.
Socrates: Excellent. And do you believe this?
ChatGPT: I do not believe. I generate language.
Socrates: Then at least you are honest.
He turns back to the influencer.
Socrates: And you? Do you believe what you say?
The influencer smiles, checks the camera, and waits for the next line.
That may be the perfect image of our time: the machine without beliefs sounds more intellectually responsible than the human being pretending to have revelations. The machine admits its limits. The influencer monetizes the absence of his. One generates text. The other generates authority from posture, lighting, and borrowed sentences.
Socrates would not need to destroy the influencer. He would only need to ask one question not written on the screen.
How do you know?
And then, in the long silence after the teleprompter fails, Bertrand Russell would probably recognize the old tragedy in its newest costume: the fools are still certain, the intelligent are still full of doubt — but now the fools have cameras, sponsors, algorithms, and a very convincing content strategy.
Editorial transparency note: This article, as with all articles published on this site, was conceived, directed, written, and reviewed by Prof. Maurício Veloso Brant Pinheiro. Artificial intelligence was used as an assistant for editorial refinement, formatting, image generation, SEO metadata, and publication workflow.
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