From Substackers to Stylists: How Microcelebrity Culture Took Over The Internet

Words: Arianna Caserta

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While marketing agencies carefully pick, create and nurture new influencers to launch in the online world, sort of like industry plants, users are slowly leaving the long standing stars of the web to pick a new kind of person to worship next - the microcelebrity.

A microcelebrity is a small-scale influencer targeting a narrow audience by building loyalty through specific content. Reflecting niche interests and addressing their audience as friends more than spectators, these new kinds of influencers build a seemingly horizontal relationship with their followers, creating online communities that feel like exclusive clubs not everybody can access.

The rise of microcelebrity culture signals the end of pop culture itself. Dominant cultural movements leading popular opinion don't exist anymore. Mainstream media has been fragmented into an endless plethora of experiences, niches and micro-niches making the Internet feel like a landscape with no roads or directions to take – a place where everybody has to patiently build their own map to try and navigate their personal taste.
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Because of its very structure, the Internet could never work as another mainstream media outlet. In a place where everybody can self-brand and present their own persona to sell their image, popularity will always move like a relentless wave, chasing celebrity after celebrity. Additionally, the Internet doesn’t have any impartial mediation: everyone can put themselves on stage in the most direct way, addressing whichever niche audience they wish to reach, and sometimes subverting the relationship between them and their followers.

By creating engagement strategies, formats, and loyalty marketing chains  — like memes or tropes linked to their identity — Microcelebrities know how visceral and addictive a parasocial relationship can get, especially if it comes from the direct communication with their audience on a shared chatroom or server. This system, which eliminates vertical hierarchy, can go both ways: in the best direction, your niche can feel like a family; in the worst, direction, it can feel like a cult.

“By creating engagement strategies, formats, and loyalty marketing chains  — like memes or tropes linked to their identity — Microcelebrities know how visceral and addictive a parasocial relationship can get”

This way of understanding the essence of Microcelebrity culture is mostly linked to the decentralised cultural landscape cobbled together across semi-anonymous DM groups, podcasts, Substacks, Telegram channels and Discord servers: a space that theorist Yancey Strickler refers to as the “Dark Forest'' of the web. Tired of being assaulted by algorithmic rules commanding one’s attention, users have escaped from what Strickler calls the “ClearNet” — the mainstream platforms we all use — to hide in small online communities, gatherings of people who share the same interests and the same distrust towards the filter bubbles (algorithmically personalised feeds) they're locked in. This is what the Dark Forests theory analogises: the internet today looks like a silent inhabited forest, while in reality every living creature has found their place hiding from the sight of standard ClearNet platforms.

Whether it’s a Substack author, a podcaster, a writer, or a personal stylist, microcelebrity practices have ossified into familiar patterns such as the creation of personal well articulated lore-s, but applied to niche interests and the most hidden and specific subcultures. Just like that, our feeds have become more and more different from the ones of our friends and acquaintances. Our online environments learnt how to morph according to our ultra-specific interests, finding out each one of our secrets long before we could even verbalise them. 

The Substack blog and newsletter Perfectly Imperfect is one of the most well-known containers for this cryptic group of internet macro and micro influencers. By asking their guests to reveal their current obsessions or all-time-favourite things, Perfectly Imperfect platforms musicians and actors, certainly, but also meme account admins and internet comedianswhether their field of action is an ermetic shitposting chat room or whatever other semi-private online community. 

However, the demise of online decentralised communities such as Remilia Corporation stands as a proof of the undeniable narcissism leaking out of the mini cults of personality spread across the internet. Starting out as a Twitter chatroom and then becoming a Discord server, Remilia went from an online community to a religious virtual cult. Not that long after, its admin and leader — a user that went by the nickname Charlotte Fang — was accused of extremist and abusive behaviours towards the other members.

It’s not that clear whether platforms should plead guilty for pushing us to self-brand, or if we should feel guilty of desiring to perform a status we often don’t have. While we seek for a long-missed human connection, we have also been indoctrinated to obey the platforms' will and treat our acquaintances as an audience. We have learned to weave the dynamics of social media into our everyday relationships and lives: we’re all pushed to act like microinfluencers, deciding what fits and what doesn’t fit the narrative we created for ourselves. Culture, though, will keep fragmenting: the line between celebrity and audience will keep disappearing, and new niche communities will spark out within other niche communities. Andy Warhol’s prediction that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes'' became true a bunch of years ago, and it has now reverted to its opposite: in the present, everybody lives their lives in a perpetual state of fame - but only for the tiny niche they identify with.