Social Media Influencers

Recent years have seen the exponential growth of talking heads and social media influencers in the so-called mass media and social-media platforms. There are still a good number of truly expert content providers to be appreciated and enjoyed, and we can all be grateful to them and salute those experts in their field who are so generous as to share their knowledge with the public. However, for every true expert in any particular field, there are exponentially many times more content makers who are frauds, incompetents and liars that are in it for something undisclosed to their listeners, fans, and followers. Those somethings are the hidden motivations behind the often-false facade of expertise and/or behind their messaging. With a little contemplation on the subject, we can easily discover what are those hidden motivations, who and/or what is behind them and how they are deployed. We can then recognize some of the various forms of subterfuge and trickery that are employed such as catfishing, gaslighting, innuendos, controlled opposition, bait and switch, coercion, scare tactics. We can see how these “campaigns” are extended and amplified with bots, fake “fact checkers”, advertisements, and more. The main goal is very often simply to dupe the public into accepting their narratives and products - generating a consensus of the misinformed.

I’ve often wondered, like I am sure you have too, what is really happening when you watch a product review? Well, first let’s separate the chaff from the wheat. How does anyone know whether or not the person you are watching or listening to is really qualified to review or demo any particular product? Since you can’t trust or rely on the crowd to tell you, and you can forget about “fact checkers” which have largely been proven to be paid shills and lackeys; it might help to take a close look at the influencer’s actual portfolio of projects. If they don’t have one prominently available for all to see, buyer or shall I rather say listener beware! If you are new to the particular field, you might not know what a really accomplished portfolio looks like. Look around and you will find various levels of competency staring you in the face. Try to gauge the competency of any influencer you might be considering as a source of advice or how-to information. Comparison with physical works shown on Instagram or in other venues might help give a newcomer some bearings. In addition to perusing and critiquing the influencers portfolio where you will be looking for unusual competencies that rise above the crowd in citations, designs, executions, and detail - you will also want to see just how many years of hands-on experience they actually have in the field. For example, someone with five years’ experience for example is far less experienced than an accomplished woodworker with a decade or more, but the quality of their finished work is the true test. The other thing to look for is red-flags, such as - do they seem to be sponsored by a product supplier or some other organization related to the field? If their post is product oriented, do they bounce from one supplier to the next with the tides and the whims of the market? Are they promoting the next new thing this month versus last month or last year? Do they back up their recommendations with sound logical and scientific explanations? You will have to call on your inner voice and sense of discernment and discrimination in order to separate the chaff from the wheat instead of simply following and accepting their claims blindly.

Those Hidden Somethings...

So just what are some of those hidden somethings that motivate people to become social media influencers? Some are very good things, some not so good. I don’t want to pass judgement on anyone’s motivations, as a motivation must always be considered contextually. So, in one instance a particular motivation may be good, in another instance it may be a bad thing. Still, I will provide a list of common motivations here for our consideration:

• As a business, i.e., to earn a living

(while there’s no shame in that, it’s all about how you play the game and that’s where the devil is in the details which we will- look at shortly)

• To simply share knowledge with others

(for the love of it and altruism - rather rare these days but OK, there are some that post for these reasons)

• For puffing up one’s ego and bragging rights among friends and peers (self-promotion)

• To promote one’s own shop or business hoping to draw in new customers

• To get paid from product manufacturers

(depending on the number of followers one has, the more or less one can be compensated)

• To run interference for various competing suppliers of products

• To maliciously damage a brand or company

(usually motivated by payoffs, but sometimes motivated by ego)

• To profit the easy way but jumping into the fray with nothing new to offer users

• To advance the lies and appear to be part of a consensus

• To further immerse the viewer in a false reality for the purpose of anchoring in the ubiquity of their product or ideology in the marketspace

We all know that some big corporations (just like agenda-driven political organizations) employ an army of bots and trolls, to attack, discredit, and interfere with competing ideas, businesses, and alternative product adoption. Likewise, they employ media personalities big and small to sometimes do the same by promoting their brands, products, and ideas. These people are for sale, and they rarely care if what they are promoting is good or bad, truth or lies. When you become a “follower” of such influencers, it is you who have become the product that they sell to their overlords, their moneyman or wizard behind the curtain. This state of affairs is, after all, a plague on modern society and commercial ecosystems because the whole scenario confounds truth and can in fact turn reality on its head. Again, the listener is reminded to use discernment and discrimination in separating reality from fiction, truth from lies.

The cacophony of voices in unison can be compelling like the siren’s voices in Homer’s Odyssey, but it can also serve as a big red flag of danger to those with the capacity to discriminate truth from lies. Unfortunately, many people have underdeveloped sensibilities in this function of intellect, insight, and intuition. So, at the very least we should ask, what are they actually promoting here, why are they promoting it (are there really any good reasons that they should be promoting this thing over something else) and who is paying them? If you can see through these things, you can have a good start on applying your discrimination. It is important because that rope you are going to pick up off the ground might very well be a poison snake!

So, we may wonder how we got here, where the average person is basically blinded to the truth and reality is turned on its head. Facts are opinions and opinions are facts, where the loudest voices set the terms and the people bow down to them as the arbiters of truth? Where in the finish coating industry for example, the vast majority of users are hooked on inferior and toxic finish coatings.

It all boils down to money and the control that money can buy, the programming they can deploy on the unsuspecting public.

Like one politician recently said, I will paraphrase here so as not to suggest any personal politics: [ Big corporations captured media and regulators by funding them, the media disseminates their lies and propaganda, and big-tech then amplifies it.]. So, as they say - follow the money all the way from the top down or from the bottom up and only then you will see very clearly the box that they have most of us regular folks trapped in. Investment groups like SSC, BR, and VG (I am not mentioning their names here) and their secret stockholders control way too much of our world and our apparent reality. They own the marketspace of products and ideas often stealthily through a chain of stock holdings, board seats, subsidiaries, and similar schemes.

Most of the big chemical, and in turn the some of the smaller companies we know as the big-name finish brands belong to their portfolio. Sometimes they throw money at henchmen and selected entrepreneurs that they can control, as they will then run static and interference against truly independent companies, or they do it to create a smokescreen of apparent competition against their own brand, putting out less than viable products to control and ultimately dominate the shelf space in stores, assuring their flagship products and brands hold and maintain their market share. It’s all a big dirty game.

Here’s a flow chart of what it looks like for clarity’s sake, what is flowing is the money and the narrative.

The narrative flows down, while the money flows in both directions:

Many of us have heard the notion that we are in “the matrix”, and what that is at the most basic and fundamental level is exactly what is depicted in the above flow-chart. The false reality has been created by big money to meet their needs, not yours or mine.

The game as shown in the diagram is this for - big banks > big investment / holding companies > big business they own including big chem, big pharmaceutical, big food, big media that they own and fund > smaller brands who drank the “Kool-Aid” - ultimately, it’s all in-service to their cycle of capital flows. To them, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad a product is, they care only if they can get you to buy it and keep you in their sphere of influence and capital returns, if they can get you to buy into their manufactured consensus.

Advertisers historically have paid a lot of money to be on TV shows that often now just yield a fraction of the audience of some of the YouTube channels. As the advertising dollars began to pour in, platforms shifted their monetization algorithms. Savvy content creators realized they had a product to sell - and that product is You because nuevo-celebrities have influence over their audience.

The title "influencer' is now thrown out with pride, even though more often than not, it is undeserved.

Hence social media influencers are the latest iteration in big money’s campaign of capture, and we, i.e., you and I are the captured, we are the prey.

A surprising percentage of young people these days will say that their career goal is to be a social media influencer. It’s the 21st Centuries latest low bar to entry career, the latest boondoggle with plenty of money being thrown around and the benefactors (big business) getting a big bang for their buck. Charisma is not required. Good editing or proficient cinematography is not required. Being an expert in the subject matter is not required. It seems a lot of times the rise of a channel from tens of followers to millions is inexplicable. Celebrity is more attainable than ever before. Just take a good look at what is out there: YouTube channels (with millions of followers) devoted to things like doing backflips on trampolines, talking about things they know little to nothing about, and even things as simple as opening boxes of various products (they call it “unboxing”). It is really quite perplexing and perhaps it is not only by design from the capital controllers, but also a symptom of a “convenience culture” where one can avoid the efforts of the past by replacing them with the experiences of others. But viewers must ask themselves, “why should I trust this person if they are providing an opinion on something”? If you can’t come up with good reasons, then you probably shouldn’t.

So, how can we know what is truth versus fiction and lies with a motive?

We have seen this game far too often in the legacy media and in D.C. So, you have to question everything! Like the Buddha and other honest wisemen have said over the centuries, paraphrasing -

“Don’t believe me, try it for yourself, find out for yourself.”

For example, how much money is your time worth?

Why spend hours watching some shill, or an admittedly sponsored influencer, or some other unknown character review a product or even demo a product when you can simply buy the product and try if for yourself? In the case of wood finishes, Odie’s Oil is only $45.00 per bottle (and that bottle typically covers ten to twenty times more surface area than legacy finishes), so ask yourself, “wouldn’t it cost me less to simply try it myself” instead of wasting time watching talking heads on the internet?

If you want to learn the best method of applying it, how to use it, and what it can be used for, go right to the source our own website, our inventor and company owner is a real woodworker, a wood products factory owner/operator and hardwood forestry expert with decades of experience in the industry. We have dozens of how-to videos posted on our website, and as we all know, no one knows how to use a product better than the inventor himself. Another good source is our own Instagram page where countless actual users, industry professionals, and consumers post their actual experience with our products.

Still, there is no better experience than your own, so we suggest you try it and find out for yourself that what we and our fans have been saying about our product is true. We suggest that you do that with most any relatively low-cost product. Besides, in this manner you don’t have to worry about if you were being lied to by someone with ulterior motives. When it comes to Odie’s Oil products, try it, you’ll like it, we are sure of it.

Our mission is to wake people up and help them free themselves of the matrix of toxic consumerism and the capture of your capital by big business and their minions who perhaps might prefer if they poison you so you can spend even more money in some of their other holdings such as the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Odie’s Oil is the antithesis, it was made to protect surfaces in the most practical, logical, safe, natural, and scientifically-sound way and to do so with maximum efficiency in your time and money invested. Remember, Odie’s Oil products generally cover from ten to twenty times more surface area ounce per ounce and at a fraction of the cost than other finishes, it is far more versatile than other finishes, much more protective, and far outlasts other finishes, and represents zero heath risk to users.

Social media influencers, they can be good or bad, it all depends on many factors. It’s up to you to decide, yet I think we can all agree that there’s no better measure of the truth than your own experience. So, in closing, listener beware, question everything!

Like Odysseus, when you hear the Sirens of the giant corporations calling - use discipline and discernment, and if you can’t - then simply plug and cover your ears!