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The news last week that Instagram personality Caroline Calloway was all smoke and mirrors was only shocking if you believe people go onto The Bachelor to find true love. You can’t spell the online in online influencer without lie and if you take away the lie you’re left with non.
Where there is money to be found, people will game the system. This is human nature and also bot nature.
That Caroline Calloway was dishonest in what she was peddling misses the point. She was never selling truth, she was only ever selling perception. She was selling her fake lifestyle to her bot and human followers – for them, it was something to aspire to.
Those outraged that everything she wrote was ghosted – do you have the same outrage when politicians read speeches they didn’t write? Do you have the same outrage about the cost of tea at a restaurant? (It’s just a teabag and hot water!!)
When stars on YouTube or Instagram sell this pipe dream, they’re called scammers; when Silicon Valley does it, they’re called startups.
While Caroline Calloway was finding fame via infamy, WeWork found a spanner in their works. The company began last week valued at $47 billion and by Friday it was down to around $10 billion.
Any kid with a lemonade stand knows that for a business to thrive, your revenue needs to exceed your expenses, but yet many don’t seem to be bothered when startups have a business model that doesn’t adhere to this.This isn’t a knock on WeWork – it’s a knock on the industry of sycophants that attach themselves like parasites to startups. It’s a knock on many supposed journalists who wouldn’t know one end of a balance sheet from the other, it’s a knock on many of the VC’s, Investment banks and financial services companies who seem to make money no matter what happens and it’s a knock on those who don’t fuel the bubble as much as pour kerosene on it.
There is no greater honor for a startup than being perceived as a unicorn, especially if it’s just a horse with an ice cream cone on its head.
What people don’t seem to grasp is that the unicorn is a mythical creature – 3 and a half years ago there were 82, now there are 393.
What we’re seeing with WeWork is no different to what we saw with Uber and Lyft, it’s no different to what we saw with Slack, and it’s only a little bit different to what we saw with Theranos.
People love unicorns, their brand is fun and sexy, they’ve got cool ads, there’s a constant stream of articles gushing over them – if they’re being judged on the basis of perception, why wouldn’t you want to invest in them?
Who wants to be constantly peddling conspiracy theories that everything is rigged, fixed and faked? Who wants to be that guy raining on everyone’s parade saying that flash mobs aren’t real?
Once people start to cotton on that if something is too good to be true, it probably isn’t, a lot of people, money and vested interests will do whatever they can to prevent people from seeing the naked emperor.
As Natalie Beach wrote re Caroline Calloway’s book deal: “she took a series of meetings with literary professionals who informed her that no one would buy a memoir from a girl with no claim to fame and no fan base. And so Caroline made one online, taking out ads designed to look like posts to promote her account and buying tens of thousands of followers.”
A fake persona with fake followers trying to sell a fake book with fake stories to real people?
This should scream Fyre Festival, it should scream Enron, it should scream a London shed being the top rated restaurant on TripAdvisor.
If you attain fame and fortune and people want to peek behind the curtain and see how your sausage is made, you should not fear being caught. There should be no need for a cover up.
Whether you’re a somebody or a nobody, everybody should live a life where perception aligns with reality. If not, you should ask yourself why.
Excerpted from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ponzi-scheme-perception-david-wiseman