Although they might have every right to be concerned. Because this whole status show was happening in a country where you can’t drink the water. A country that has serious problems with povertyCorruption, femicidesewage spills, the occasional metro collapse. Every once in a while you were reminded when a unit of stocky teenagers in paramilitary police gear would patrol the beach twice a day, filled with assault rifles, balaclavas and off-road buggies.
Still, influencers didn’t seem to lose sleep over it. Indeed, I was beginning to wonder what kept them awake at night, beyond the few scattered allusions to the existence “too much hate in the world” or “going through hard times” on their social media. Maybe there were people who were completely rounded beyond all status symbols and artifice – but from my position, they all looked like children. They were frustrating children at that: hesitant, demanding, prone to great disappointments and mood swings. Occasionally, I would catch them getting angry with blurry photos or quietly jostling each other when they found themselves in the wrong place for lunch. Often they were entirely silent, seemingly more comfortable with the person on the other end of their post, rather than their immaculate life partners.
Quite who was paying for all of this remains a point of mystery. Seemingly with no swimwear startup or juice brand to foot the bill, I imagined them to be the children of German washing machine exporters or Argentinian corned beef tycoons, the occasional war criminal or steel stripper. assets. They certainly weren’t super rich – they wouldn’t be here if they were – more likely they were descendants of the maker class. The bored and vain offspring of 20e success of the century.
What struck me perhaps the most was that ““influencer” is no longer really a job description, nor a far-off grotesque, confined to the bars of Dubai‘s skyscrapers and the pastel-colored houses of Notting Hill. You could say it was a subculture, a tribe – but it’s also the standard pattern of behavior for many international travelers now. Those old clichés about sunburn, karaoke, Spanish waiters fucking? They may have been replaced by this strange, pampered, hyperaffected way of approaching the world.
It is very easy to feel depressed by all of this, by the superficial, childish, international blanket of security it seems to create; entire continents and cultures smoothed into one big sweet sixteen party. But when I look at my own friends’ travel posts, which are full of images of smoky techno dives, toilet mirror selfies, weird storefronts, “difficult“ local cuisine, I wonder how different we are.
Because, really, we are all products of an age of perpetual documentation, where the LCD screen has become both mirror and window. It’s just that some of us are a little more distant than others.
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