Hello and welcome to Downstream the Show about politics culture, political culture and

where you can get a free BBL. Today I'm very pleased to be with Simeon Brown author of

Get Rich or like try in ambition and to see in the new influencer economy. Simeon, thank

you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. So for our viewers, can you just explain

what the difference is between influencer culture and the models of celebrity that came

before it? I mean for me, I guess what the book is about is what it's like to live in

an age where the ordinary person can generate attention and effectively monetize that.

Celebrity in itself is not new but before it was quite selected or something that maybe

a few individuals could control. So I can give you a show or a major TV, I can put you

in a film and the realm of celebrity was very much limited or it was quite select, there

was a shelf life. But in age of kind of social media celebrity is far more accessible, it's

far more industrialized. I think the ASA say you only need 30,000 followers to be celebrity,

you have maybe over 20 times that. So you're definitely a celebrity in this day and age.

But it's like celebrity now is something which is, it's far more atomized, so it's far

more attainable and within that it's created a whole new industry, a whole new set of incentives

and the possibilities of that and the disruptive power of that. But also the new spheres of,

I guess, exploitation that are part of that is what I was interested in. And the particular,

I guess the book in itself is about influencer culture but really it's about the nature

of digital work, really it's about the state of capitalism, really it's about an age

where the monetization of the self is seen as a way of escape and precarity. And I guess

who would make up the new working class strata of this, of this spirit. But it does that

in a way which, with a book engaged with that in a way which is less academic and I guess

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