We Asked For Authenticity. Did We Mean It?

Sometimes the universe dreams a little bit bigger for us than we can dream for ourselves. I suppose that’s how I ended up on a billboard in Times Square last month! Of all the things I’ve tried to manifest over the course of my lifetime, being on a billboard was never really one of them, let alone for this very newsletter. Let’s hope this isn’t my last ;) All my gratitude to beehiiv for making it happen and asking me to be a part of this activation. I migrated my newsletter here in March, and I truly love this platform (and I promise I’m not being paid to say that). It has genuinely made building this newsletter so much easier and thus made my life easier. The way I was doing it before was essentially double the work, and I can’t believe I worked that way for so long. What I appreciate most about beehiiv is that they actually care about giving creators the tools to build and grow a newsletter—not just trying to create another social media platform.

I decided to pivot a bit with today’s newsletter because all weekend there’s been a lot of conversation around the influencer space: the OpenAI influencer trip, Nara Smith’s appearance on Call Her Daddy where she pushes back on the tradwife label, Alex Cooper doing an ad for Polymarket, which is a cryptocurrency “prediction” (aka gambling) site, Paige Lorenze going to war with a store in Nantucket in the name of “feminism,” and in general, there’s a lot of fuckery going on in the influencer space as people are desperate to stay relevant and keep engagement up—and it’s hard to watch. I think everyone is very aware that there is something very broken about this industry, and the conversation actually feels bigger than just influencers. In a lot of ways, it feels like a reflection of what we’re seeing happen more broadly in society and politics: the consequences of rewarding attention over accountability.

So much of this feels like it's coinciding with the changing of the lunar nodes (of course there's always an astrology angle). On July 26, the South Node moved into Leo and the North Node moved into Aquarius, where they'll remain for roughly the next 20 months. We may continue to see the unraveling of attention-seekers and people who misuse their platforms, while also being called to reimagine what community, collaboration, and collective responsibility can look like—both online and offline.

Is it asking too much that people use their platform for good?