They are not influencers but they act as if they were.

I recently ran the Valencia Half Marathon. Normal brand with no aspirations for anything. From the exit I found dozens or maybe hundreds of runners with their arms extended filming themselves. During the race it was a constant. From time to time I would find someone with their arm raised looking at the camera. Compromising posture and performance, and making it difficult for those of us who came from behind to overtake. But without putting down the phone.

The arrival at the finish line was already an explosion. Many, as soon as they crossed it, took out their cell phones again and danced the same choreography as if they had agreed: exhausted look at the ground, triumphant look at the sky, smiling snort, bite of the lower lip during a long blink and a face of transcendence.

A few days later, discussing the moviola with friends, they showed me the rest of the iceberg: tiktoks with music by Hans Zimmer, monologues about personal improvement. Everything packaged, everything monetized. Even if it is in likes.

None of the ones they showed me and I guess almost none of the ones I saw at the race were professional influencers. They don’t have sponsors waiting for their content, but They have voluntarily assumed the burden of documenting and performing their own lives. They are unpaid workers of their own digital narrativescompulsive editors of experiences that no longer know how to live without mediating.

The race is just the decoration. What they record is not the half marathon: they record themselves. His sensations, his overcomings, his protagonism. He running is interchangeable: could be crossfitit could be a trip, it could be motherhood. What is important is the self as content, the self as an audiovisual product.

Perhaps they are not even dedicated to documenting their own life, but rather something that sounds similar but is very different: they are dedicated to living a pre-documented, pre-edited life, designed to be told. They have so deeply internalized the grammar of digital content that they can no longer experience anything without simultaneously thinking about how it will look on screen. They don’t think “how hard this is” but rather “how epic it’s going to be when I play the music.”

We have created a generation that works for free as a documentarian of its own existence. Without a contract and without salary, sometimes not even with the aspiration of seeing that effort turned into pasta one day, but with the discipline of a professional. The arm extended for half a race was the perfect image of this new voluntary servitude: we sacrificed the immediate experience to produce its distributable version.

We no longer live and tell it later. We produce content about ourselves while pretending to live. The algorithm has achieved its definitive victory: it does not need to pay us to work for it. We have forgotten that there is a difference between running and producing content about running. Or put more generally: between living and performing life.

In Xataka | I increasingly like technology that doesn’t want anything from me: the one that has a purpose and leaves you alone

Featured image | Xataka