‘Time’s’ Most Influential People Are Mostly Terrible or Six Years Old
Time put out their annual list of the 25 most influential people on the internet, and thank god they did or I never would have realized that The President of the United States is as influential as a six-year-old who plays with toys on YouTube. I really could have gone my whole life not knowing who had more power to shape our lives, the leader of the free world or Jake Paul.
Much like their Person of the Year award, being on Time’s most influential list isn’t exactly an honor to the recipient as much as it is a warning to the rest of us. Hitler, Stalin and Reagan were all named Man of the Year, after all. This is just about who has the most influence, and it’s a sad indictment of the state of our world, honestly.
The list reads like a who’s who of f**k you, with Logan and Jake Paul appearing towards the top of the article so you know exactly what you’re in for. The article tells us that “combined, Logan and Jake tally more than 33 million subscribers on YouTube, 27 million followers on Instagram and 21 million fans on Facebook; Forbes estimated Logan’s net worth as $12.5 million and Jake’s at $11.5 million.” Oh, but buckle in because we’re just getting started.
Things take a turn for the disturbing when the lists reaches ‘Q’, the anonymous conspiracy-theory peddler who claims to be exposing how the deep state is collecting unicorn horns to turn children into pizza or something, I couldn’t really follow it, it’s just too fucking dumb. You have to be a brain genius like Roseanne Barr to get what he’s saying, I guess. It takes all the conspiracies like the Illuminati and Men in Black we used to have a laugh about in the 90’s and turns them into a jumbled web that somehow paints Donald Trump as a secret hero who is bringing down these hidden conspirators behind closed doors. It’s basically like someone watched The X-Files and thought it was a documentary.
At the very end, we find out that Kylie Jenner is making a fuckton of money on Instagram, “with each sponsored post worth the equivalent of $1 million (about a fifth the cost of a Super Bowl commercial).” Seriously, all she’s done is have a famous sister, put her name on make-up and screen-print her face over a used Tupac concert shirt. I don’t get it.
Most of the rest of the list is, somewhat hilariously, made up of people most of us have never heard of. There’s a 6-year-old who opens toys on YouTube, a teenager who lip synchs on Musical.ly, a guy who played video games with celebrities on Twitch and a cartoon character with an Instagram account called Lil Miquela. Actual celebrities Kanye West, Rihanna, Naomi Watanabe, BTS and Busy Phillips also managed to make the list.
We really live in a cultural wasteland, and it’s clearly exacerbated by being online. Sure, actual journalist Shaun King made the list, but I counted zero scientists, zero authors, zero filmmakers and one politician, Donald Trump. It’s mostly a list of people who are famous for being famous, random YouTubers and Instagram mommy bloggers. The promise of social media was that it bring us together, let us connect with people all over the world and hear diverse thoughts from all sorts of people; what it actually became is a 24-hour TV show, and Time’s list is almost exclusively just the people who have found the best ways to sell us ads.
