The hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy has this to say about influencers.

Ugh.

The entire category of social media influencers is quite possibly the most dangerous concept to ever be introduced into society. It seemed innocent at first. Attractive or entertaining people create content for a living.

It’s growth was rapid and spread to every planet in each solar system one after another as the influencers expanded their audiences among every species.

in less than a year, became the dominant career choice for young people on every planet it infected, causing horrific disruptions to everything. Governments fell, economies tanked and atmospheres dried up.

You can research the influence these influencers eventually had on each planetary system with their own indexed guide entries.

The three most notable examples of catastrophic side effects are on the planets of trife, bomtool and earth.

Trife used to have a thriving culture famous for its exquisite dining opportunities, tourist attractions, monuments and parks as well as some of the oldest museums in the world. One might say no influencing was required and yet, about 45 years ago the first influencers started to post.

The part of the population that couldn’t afford admissions to those museums and monuments and attractions discovered that on other planets people are willing to let them in free if they promoted said attractions. The problem caused a rift between entitled poor people gifted with being attractive and the rest of the planet who preferred visiting a posh planet without having to deal with constant people posing in all the prime locations.

In less than 6 years, nobody was visiting the glorious sites of Trife except influencers and nobody was giving them anything for free so the entire economy broke down and anyone with taste moved away leaving only the influencers trying to impress each other. They eventually married off to each other and actually learned to cook and build instead of just watching others. The planet is not worth visiting.

On Bomtool the influencers have 8 arms and have evolved to be able to shoot selfie videos of themselves from 7 different Angles. This has created a problem to store and the social media companies that host the videos now inhabit 6 of the 8 moons as server rooms. The weight of the has caused their gravitational orbits to shift and they now have less than a year before the entire planet is destroyed. This caused social media content to double, so that timeline may be even less. There are no scientists left to spe ulate.

Earth is the third planetary system destined for an unexpected disruption. It’s not irreversible and earth can be salvaged, but they have quite the track record for ignoring signs of impending doom. As more and more influencer followers begin to realize making videos and getting things for free is actually easier than the skilled labour and education requiring professional positions they’ve been struggling with and being treated poorly for, the balance is shifting. Very soon it will pass the point where more people are creating content to watch than there are people who have the time or desire to watch h it. Young people are choosing content creation as life career choices and flaunting their unimaginable wealth to the few remaining humans trying to keep the world functioning.

Jobs are being replaced by AI at too quick a rate because all the human workers are now out shooting videos about the job they used to do.

Soon there will be nobody left to watch the videos but the creators won’t notice. Everyone will probably starve and die within one generation. They will however look great doing it.

Early adopters from other planets are already planning on what to do with the planet of it eventually goes up for sale.

There are 8 other dead planets in the glorpglorp solar system that were used as junk planets after their eco omies crashed in similar ways. Glorp5 is devoid of any organic life and filled entirely by discarded Sirius cybernetic robots. with no humans to ask for menial tasks, they just complain 37 hours a day to each other because there is nothing to do or watch anymore. None of the doors will even pretend to be happy and most refuse to open at all.

The editors of the hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy have made a policy not to allow influencers as editors. There are no attractive people on staff, so it was a decision that really managed itself.