ABSTRACT
Critics of “post-truth” tend to focus on challenges to traditional arbiters and institutions of truth, such as science or journalism, but why not also consider changes in institutions whose primary methods have never involved truth per se but rather deceit, deflection, and obfuscation—marketing and public relations? This chapter examines the newly ubiquitous figure of the “social media influencer” and the practices of reputation-seeking and influence on more banal online spaces, such as automated credit and lending platforms, as material conditions of post-truth. Against a backdrop of democratic crisis, labor market uncertainty, and deepening levels of personal debt, self-promotion becomes a “survival discipline,” coercing the most vulnerable to participate but subjecting them, yet again, to the repressive “truths” of entrenched political power, white supremacy, and patriarchy via opaque forms of algorithmic discrimination. What can “truth” or sociality mean in an environment where we must perpetually hustle each other under conditions we cannot perceive, let alone control, where all our social relations are “infected with doubt”?
