1. Creators are not influencers (but some of them might be)

A content creator’s job is production. Serialized, platform-native, optimized for feeds. Their influence is often a byproduct: their reach scales when output is consistent and style becomes recognizable. They may build a loyal community that follows them wherever they go (this is the critical part of becoming an influencer). Technically, anyone on social media can be a content creator in the broadest sense, but we’re going to use the term exclusively for people who self-describe, with intention, their posting habit as an occupation.

An influencer doesn’t need to produce anything to hold attention. Actors, athletes, thought leaders — their cultural weight precedes their content. Unfortunately, they tend to be more expensive, harder to brief, and often don’t know how to self-create for social platforms. They tend to have photographers or videographers or producers or managers who do that work for them.

Yes, there is a Venn diagram with an overlap. This is it: the gold nugget, the perfect person for the job (one might say, cough cough… a peopleperson).#

The creator-influencer is the creator who has hustled their way into genuine influence, or the influencer who understands social media, and knows how to use platforms for themselves. This is what most brands want (not necessarily need). At the intersection of influence and content is usually longterm growth, engagement, but also trust and the power of para-social relationships.

Think about footballers. They are superstars, often the faces of cars, perfumes, insurances, and so on. They have gigantic social media presence. But they aren’t usually content creators. They post content (their team posts content).

Of course, the lines are blurry. You could argue that rapper Ski Aggu is an artist who is also a content creator, and in an endless loop, feeds one career through the other. Sara Arslan made it from lip-syncing on Tiktok to celebrity status with her viral “Take Me Späti” format. Kim Gottwald started as a content creator who wanted to succeed with his own brand and ended up one of the world’s youngest and accomplished ultra-runners.

Who we need depends, ultimately, on the goals of our campaigns and clients. Most clients go by a “if I see it I’ll know it” approach, which is… good enough?, honestly. And sometimes we keep running in circles because we can’t seem to find what we’re looking for.

And just because we like to be on trend here, you may also consider what you’re looking for an “alternatively influential”, as proposed by the newly founded agency figures: “Talent agents are seeking out the internet’s erudite elite, promising marketers access to niche and engaged audiences far from the blast of social media”

Our industry colleagues have identified that there are people who slip through the cracks of our pro-forma definitions: artists, thought leaders and pioneers who may not create for social media but curiously seem to be everywhere you need to be, from red carpets to gallery openings and sometimes in dirty club bathrooms, from London to Barcelona.

Nothing sounds as hot as an entirely new category that doesn’t want to be close to the Instagram influencer stigma. But: this is a case in point for our article about how being offline, performative or not, is becoming a class signifier / status symbol in its own right. The luxury of the “human experience”, and so on.

2. AI vs. PEOPLEPERSON

On New Year’s Eve, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri published a 2,000-word essay arguing that AI would make authentic creators more valuable because in a world of infinite abundance and infinite doubt, the creators who maintain trust and signal authenticity will stand out. His proposed fix: lean into raw, unpolished aesthetics as proof of humanity. According to Rachel Karten, Mosseri is betting on the momentum, not the reaction. “Rawness” is now just part of the prompt. The visual cues he’s demanding from creators are exactly the ones AI will replicate first. Mosseri himself acknowledges platforms will “get worse at identifying AI content over time as AI gets better at imitating reality.” Telling creators to look more human while your platform fills up with synthetic everything is not really a strategy.

And anyway, the real issue isn’t aesthetic. It’s abundance: Generic output, templated formats, content that could have come from anyone. The same collapse that happened to SEO writing and stock photography is arriving for creators who can’t distinguish themselves. Volume without voice or opinion.

How they will distinguish themselves is a question for another time (new camera, technologies, different platforms, other kinds of content and influence,… there are many predictions on the trend market, my bet is on “none of them”, we are not even at peak content yet. The world of true crime podcasts has showed us that this industry will grow on the nurturing ground of remixes, pastiche and dupes another decade at least).

To add more challenging layers, the AI licensing wave is already here. Companies are signing deals with creators for their likeness — face, voice, style, output — trained into models that produce content indefinitely without them. Top-line creators are beginning to sell wholesale too. Think of the Khaby Lame deal (which may or may not be a pump and dump stock scheme, but still - the idea of selling your likeness for an AI clone remains).

Ok, so is that just content, or does it influence? Does an AI Khaby Lame make you consider, believe, or - even! - purchase? Let me repose this question: if Khaby Lame stops making content, is he a believable, influential person?

I think we know the answer. Which means genuine cultural cachet — the kind you can’t prompt-engineer — is about to get more expensive. And that’s not new, but the gap between the two ends of the spectrum may get bigger and scarier.

Premium brands have always known that the right person is more important than having a crowded room. They don’t buy reach unless there’s a twist somewhere.1 They buy proximity to the right cultural nodes and let content follow.

3. Campaigns that don’t work (even yours, sorry)

The brief is usually the problem. I don’t mean the influencer brief - I mean the agency brief, the in-house brief, the brief that describes what the hell the collaboration partner is supposed to relay to their audiences, if anything. Brands like to optimize for follower count because it’s the only number that travels cleanly through a procurement process. But follower count doesn’t tell you whether someone has time, creative bandwidth, or any interest in making a native piece of content for your product.

Top-line talent is busy. That’s the point of them — they have a career that precedes the partnership. Briefing a working musician or athlete the same way you’d brief a full-time content creator is a category error. The content may be nice and all, but it will need a boost to travel. (Managements of actors and musicians already play defense before we’ve even explained our request: “Our talent is not a content creator, he won’t post in-feed, only productions, you’re not paying for their reach, etc.” They’re right, of course2. We want them for their influence and their recognizability across many audiences.)

All of this to say: the casting decision and the creative brief have to match. If you’re buying cultural legitimacy, build a partnership structure that works around a busy person’s reality. If you’re buying content performance, work with someone for whom content is the entire job. Expecting both from the same person at the same rate is how budgets disappear.

Most brands want both in one person at an entry-level price. That’s not a brief, that’s wishful thinking. You can keep chasing the unicorn, which is a competitive and expensive market, or you can run two tracks in parallel: Creators for performance, frequency, and targeted reach. Influencers for cultural legitimacy, brand halo, and trust.

4. Some data we like to look at

I don’t even know what engagement rate is anymore. Not mathematically speaking (we are women in STEM 💅🏼), just… who cares? At what point do I actually believe that there is purchasing power or real attention behind a comment or a like?3

Before we start casting, we define what we’re actually looking for. The following questions aren’t a formula, but they’re the signals we use to orient ourselves before the search begins.

Who follows them? Do musicians, athletes, recognizable names follow this person unprompted? Do stars show up in their comments without being tagged? Do they collab with artists as peers, not as brand deals? One relevant name in their follower list says more than 50,000 anonymous ones.

Where does their audience live? Below 250k followers, geography is one of the most revealing signals in the data. Are their followers spread evenly across five countries, or concentrated in one market? Someone with 80k followers spread across five countries is a content asset. Someone with 60% of their audience in Berlin and Munich is influential in Germany.

Would their audience still show up if they stopped posting for three months? A creator’s community runs on output. Pause the output, the numbers drop. An influencer’s pull doesn’t expire between posts. If the answer is yes, you’re looking at real influence. Price and brief accordingly.

Does the content feel like the point, or the proof? For creators, content is the product. For influencers, content is evidence of a life people want access to. One is a media channel. The other is a cultural signal. Knowing which you’re buying changes everything about how you brief, what you pay, and what you measure.

Are you casting for reach or endorsement? Reach gets eyes. Endorsement gets trust — the implicit thing that makes people actually consider a product. If your campaign needs endorsement more than performance, stop optimizing for follower count.

Post-Script:

Most artists, talents, and creators would rather be caught dead than call themselves an influencer. The word has become shorthand for tasteless brand shilling — and it’s worth noting that this particular disdain is often gendered. “Influencer” is a term disproportionately applied to women, for whom it is sometimes an aspiration, not an insult.

But language carries weight, and so does what sits beneath it. This is all to say: At peopleperson, we support all women’s rights and wrongs. 💁🏼‍♀️

We are seeing a bifurcation of digital culture, not dissimilar to global politics, torn into extremes. The center has collapsed. You are either watching cinematographic masterclasses on YouTube by Gen Alpha showrunners or 144p human slop improv comedy captured on Ray-Ban glasses. You are either life-maxxing with a brick phone or biohacking your way through an extreme wellness retreat.

We’re entering 2026 by being forced to reckon with this paradigm shift: the way we consume, connect, date, and dissociate, will fundamentally change.

From our vantage point, here’s what we see for the iNte~NEt in 2026, what it means for most brands, plus the KPIs to measure your success (if you dare to even try winning this game).

1. The Trust Collapse: Scrutiny First

GenAI content barged in like a wrecking ball on social feeds in 2025: “AI slop”, “digital twins”, influencers outsourcing themselves to clones, but also embarrassing attempts at GenAI brand campaigns (Coca Cola, Balenciaga, Equinox). This led to the inevitable collapse of trust and the growing fear of, “Is this AI?” Surprise! People hate feeling tricked.

And this isn’t just about commerce, sales and advertisment. When even The New York Times struggles to verify images of captured Nicolás Maduro, and governments normalize releasing AI-generated imagery, what can we expect?

Gen Z and Alpha are exercising this membrane of doubt by amping up on the scrutiny: over half of Gen Z now checks comment sections before buying, prioritizing peer validation over official brand channels. This skepticism is measurable: luxury brand content on TikTok saw comments surge 113% year-over-year as users sought authentic takes from real people.

peopleperson 🌶️ take: Chasing algorithms and attention-grabbing content short-cuts (especially through AI) won’t cut it anymore. The brands that succeed will have to earn trust through transparency: engaging with their audiences through comments & DMs, revealing their behind the scenes, valuing craftsmanship, and proving they’re not taking cheap shortcuts to reach their audience.

KPI: People screenshot and share your comments section more than your actual post

2. Content: Oscars or Surveillance Footage

The middle ground of visual content is over for brands and creators. We are seeing Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Barbell Effect in action: the polarization between the low-cost/high-volume (budget) and high-quality/luxury (premium) extremes.

On one end, you have creators acting like A24 directors, producing high-value, cinematographic masterclasses that rival Netflix. Instagram’s 2025 Rings Awards validated this trend: more than half the winners use professional cameras and deliver polished, high-production content (or, like winner Adrian Per, teach creators how to film cinematically on socials).

On the other end, you’ll find “anti-AI”, potato-quality, reality-TV-like streaming content. Raw, rough, feels like surveillance footage, and is, until further notice, unmistakably human. Sometimes even purely accidental. Livestreaming still dominates, especially amongst the young: livestream platforms pulled in nearly 30 billion hours of watch time in Q2 2025 alone, with over 40% of Twitch users aged 16-24. There’s a streamer for everything. Netflix is, ironically, trying to become more like YouTube.

Why is this polarization happening? Social platform leaders urge creators to counterfight the content slop-ification by delivering “imperfect,” “rough”, “raw” content. “Imperfection becomes a signal,” notes a lengthy Threads essay from Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram.

peopleperson 🌶️ take: Aesthetics are a red herring. The widespread disgruntlement with GenAI content isn’t about preferring one visual style over another, it’s about audiences craving substance, craft, meaning. Mosseri’s advice about ‘rough aesthetics’ misses the point entirely: AI can replicate rough visuals just as easily as polished ones. What matters is having something to say. Create content with a genuine point of view that resonates with your audience, regardless of style. People don’t spend hours watching streamers because they love lo-fi visuals, they do it because the content feels relatable, real, and human.

KPI: Sean Baker notices your content and asks you to shoot his next feature

3. Lifemaxxing and Misbehaving

We’ve reached a tipping point with bio-hacking and hyper-optimization culture. The promise of control through productivity hacks and wellness protocols clashes with an unpredictable timeline: 84% of Gen Z can’t afford housing, unemployment amongst young people is at an all time high, support for basic education and the arts is being rolled back world over. In a nutshell, the essential building blocks of a stable life are increasingly out of our control: “You can do everything right, and still feel underwater,” to quote Kyla Scanlon.

So, what’s the point of optimization? This is what triggered lifemaxxing: the shift toward spontaneity, impulse, and anti-optimization, mixed with a bit of hedonistic escapism. In 2026, expect this trend to intensify. One thing we’re curious to see kick off: substances previously stigmatized being reframed through a wellness lens. The ketamine market has already grown to $3.4 billion, increasingly marketed as mental health therapy rather than recreation. Vices are also back (thank God!)

peopleperson 🌶️ take: Live a little! We’re ready for this coming year of misbehaviour and neo-hedonism. We’re looking forward to sweaty raves, one-too-many of everything, awkward in-person interactions, passionate protesting in the streets, and the IRL brand activations where you can finally touch that hyped product and realize it’s actually just... plastic. The winning brands will understand what young audiences want and will be able to conjure content that speaks to this hedonistic reality.

KPI: Your brand event gets shut down by noise complaints

4. Camouflage Culture

The coolest thing you can do in 2026 is hide. What started in 2025 will fully crystallize this year as Camouflage Culture becomes the dominant counter-movement. Camouflage Culture describes the growing refusal to be algorithmically legible: it’s encrypted group chats, paywalled newsletters, IYKYK references, niche subreddits, phone-locking pouches at events, and intentional ephemerality. In other words, it’s cultural capital that is defined by the experiences that never become content. It stands in stark opposition to Dashboard Culture, which rewards sensationalism over substance, and is optimized for virality.

Going off the grid becomes the only way to preserve genuine creative space. Camouflage allows ideas to ferment outside the algorithm’s gaze, where real-ness can exist without being immediately monetized or memed.

But we still want the benefits of the internet, even if we don’t want it to perceive us. The risk? Dashboard Culture—loud, grotesque, metric-obsessed—fills the vacuum left behind.

peopleperson 🌶️ take: In 2026, we expect this tension to intensify as more people (read, audiences, consumers) will choose invisibility over integrity-compromising spectacle. This mass withdrawal should serve as a wake-up call: brands must fundamentally rethink their relationship with audiences, abandon extractive engagement tactics and show up in more meaningful ways. Brands that continue optimizing for scale and virality will find themselves on the wrong side of the walls people are building.

KPI: You discover thriving Discord servers about your brand that you weren’t invited to

5. Bring Back Friction

After years of convenience-everything (one-click buying, infinite scroll, auto-play), people are actively seeking out friction as a form of returning to some degree of control and meaning. Gen Z, raised inside the seamless consumer funnel, is leading the rebellion: Vinyl records, film cameras, manual espresso machines, books without Kindle versions, cash-only establishments, flip phones.

Friction creates pause, and reinforces intention, the favorite concept of TikTok oracles everywhere. Brands that add strategic friction (limited drops, no online presence, membership requirements) will be rewarded with loyalty because scarcity and effort signal value in an age of easy access.

peopleperson 🌶️ take: We flew too close to the sun of convenience. The new luxury is making people work for it, not to gatekeep, but as proof you’re not optimizing them into oblivion. The winning brands will be those that respect their audience’s agency enough to slow down, limit access, and trust that effort creates attachment.

KPI: TikToker creates 5-part series on the journey to get your product.

spaces and belong to IRL communities, part reaction to EU’s new regulatory frameworks: we explored how this impacts NGOs, brands and creators alike.

Recently we’ve been witnessing an interesting paradox. On the one hand, as we’ve established, being offline (specifically, off the main social platforms) is undeniably a low key flex.

Yet simultaneously, its counter-logic popped up: subtly broadcasting your location, preferably in real time, preferably on a map, has become the ultimate social currency. The message is clear: “I’m too busy living IRL to be online”— performed, of course, online. It’s performative absence: the map pin becomes proof you have something better to do than scroll.

The contradiction isn’t accidental. What we’re seeing is a sort of gamification of presence itself: your offline coordinates now construct your online persona more powerfully than any caption or carefully curated grid ever could. Location has become identity, and sharing it has become performance.

Tell me where you are, and I will tell you who you are.

Today, the coordinates matter more than the content.

To post, you first have to be there. Concepts like “proximity posting” perfectly describe the coy move of posting from the right place, at the right time, as the new form of status signaling. Forget geotagging or staged shots in locations, think specific visual cues or detail shots that give away where you are. You don’t want to name it, you want to hint at it to a curated audience who will recognize the visual signals (a recycling of IYKYK).

This goes hand in hand with the boom in public space branding (restaurants, bars, cafes, hotels, clubs, gyms, events): the more unique, the better. You recognize the outside seating of La Maison in an IG Story, you instantly place the custom red-rimmed plates from 032c’s SS-26 Collection launch dinner at Mina in Berlin, and you decode someone’s sun-lounging at Hotel Il Pellicano by a glance of the yellow and white striped towels.

A decade ago, we used to say something was instagrammable, a term that feels borderline cringe nowadays. The same impulse, however, applies today, but the object of desire has shifted, and so have the rules of engagement. Where we once curated instagrammable products (you know it) now it’s the location itself that has become the commodity. The past year has even seen a series of brand activations in locally iconic, yet globally relatively unknown, spaces: Highsnobiety’s Bar Basso merch is still haunting us.

(This level of coded signaling still sits within subcultural or elite circles. The average user remains literal. The shift we describe starts at the cultural top and filters down, mirroring earlier ‘instagrammable’ aesthetics that began aspirationally. The mechanics of clout are still class-coded — participation in this aesthetic economy requires disposable income, travel freedom, and cultural literacy. For most audiences, the fantasy remains aspirational, not participatory.)

The map becomes the stage

Influencers are slowly turning Google Maps into a social platform, building followings through reviews, photos, and hyper-curated recommendations that surface in “Popular with Local Guides” and “Top Reviews.” Monetization follows the usual playbook: brand partnerships, local business deals, targeted ads, but many are also outright selling city-specific or activity-based map lists.

The demand for culturally-literate curation is undeniable. The old guard is feeling it: TripAdvisor and Yelp are dying slow deaths while new platforms rush in. Everywhere is Queer maps safe spaces for LGBTQ+ folk across the globe. Places functions as Raya’s review engine. Corner, a new social mapping app that feels like Google Maps, Yelp, Pinterest, and Instagram all in one, has already hit 50,000 downloads.

None of this is surprising when 77% of Gen Z discover restaurants on social media, according to a Vox Media and Eater survey earlier this year. The map becomes taste, access, and identity alongside GPS coordinates.

But it’s not just about location reviews: Gen Zers allegedly love to check in on their friends whereabouts, whether via Apple’s Find My app, Life360 or Snap Map. Last year videos tagged #findmyfriends on TikTok were viewed 38.6 million times.

Location-based social networks are, in fact, not new. As early as digital maps became a thing, tech bros scrambled to find ways to integrate them within social apps: the initiative proved its appeal in 2022 with Snapchat’s sister app Zenly which amassed 40 million active users. Zenly closed down, and was assimilated into Snapchat’s Snap Map, which recently announced the milestone of serving 400 million monthly active users. The new guard is also taking over here: Clyx, which pulls event and location data to help users find IRL gatherings and connects them with compatible strangers, just raised $14M to combat what its Gen Z founder calls “the planning tax” of modern friendship.

So what draws young people to the seemingly invasive practice of tracking their friends on a digital map? Most likely the trinity of modern anxieties: the desire for constant connection, the feeling of safety through surveillance, and the dopamine hit of instant information. These psychological hooks transform geography into intimacy. The third space of our times? Could be.

Now Instagram is gradually rolling out its new location-sharing function across all geographies, with the manifesto that it will “make it easier for friends to coordinate and link up for hangouts” and let users “explore location-based content.” Meta surely took notice of the fact that young consumers are gravitating towards in-person micro-communities and IRL experiences and wasn’t about to let that trend happen off-platform.**

**Of course, there’s also the small matter of hyper-granular geo targeted data, the kind advertisers adore. If the product is free… well, you know the rest. As with every platform pivot, altruism meets data extraction. Hyper-granular geo-targeting remains the real commercial prize.

So will the feed collapse into the map? And how can brands perform within this new paradigm?

Analog culture: Putting the brand on the (digital) map

The question for brands, creators, and agencies is no longer: How do we perform online? It should be: Where do we need to be, and what do we need to do, physically, so that we can exist online?

For creators, it means no longer creating content for the sake of content. Become the community leader, the host, the chat group initiator, the guide you trust. Focus on growing and nurturing micro-communities off the main social platforms and organize IRL gatherings. Gen Z “internet decoder” Ochuko Akpovbovbo’s calls her group chats her second algorithm. King Princess activates her album release party not with a livestream or in a mainstream venue, but by flying to Berlin to host at queer bar Stueck. Miranda July thinks her Substack IRL group meetings are “collective survival.” Then look for brands that are interested in building an IRL rapport through community trips, invite-only gatherings, etc.

For brands, it means designing activations that are not just photogenic, but anchoring: places, trips, events that give followers a reason to post. Performance media, third-party cookies, retargeting: these won’t fly in analog culture. Focus on brand dinners in culturally relevant spaces (Burberry x hip Norman’s Cafe), surprising brand collabs (Prada x Red Bull sponsoring the world’s biggest skate ramp event), invite-only gatherings, and valuable merch.

The strategic sweet spot lies in anchoring digital content to real coordinates, i.e. hybrid campaigns that use place as proof, not just as stage. If we’re right, by late 2026 the success metric won’t be follower count or views, but the density of your map: how many real-world points of contact your community can trace back to you.

For audiences, it means trading the infinite For You page for the reassurance of a pin: “This is where it happened, this is where I belong.” It’s the antidote to algorithm drift, the proof of embodied experience in a culture where it’s hard to escape simulation.

Still, this ‘embodied belonging’ assumes access — financial, physical, and geographic. The next frontier will be making analog culture inclusive beyond the big-city, high-income early adopters driving the narrative today.

In Other “Permanently Online” News…

• Coffee & croissant raves are the place to be, according to Axios and, well, Peggy Gou. “In case you missed it, merch is still available this week,” Peggy reminds her followers, a nod to the importance of event merch. (Please make seedy, sweaty, dark raves great again?)

• Reminder to creators to quit never stop making weird things IRL from polymath Robin Sloan: “It’s wild that you can make money online, but when it comes to content and writing or art, the online money math is just absolutely punishing. You could be an aspiring YouTuber and post some really cool creative videos that get 100,000 views, and you’d be saying, “Well, that’s not going to cut it, right?”(...) The point is that offline math is so much more appealing and sustainable.”
  

• Taking digital brands into physical, public spaces, even just through OOH ads, demands a higher level of accountability compared to just running ads online. Case in point: the visceral backlash to Friend AI, a wearable “companion” whose posters blanketed NYC subways earlier this month. People revolted (for good reason) because analog culture is human, reactionary, political, and, also, unforgiving.

Signals & Sources

Everywhere Is Queer: A Business Spotlight on the LGBTQ+ App — (Them, 2024)

Instagram takes on Snapchat with new Instagram Map — (TechCrunch, 2025)

From sauna socials to run clubs: Are community event leaders the new influencers? — (Vogue Business, 2024)

Brain Rot Summer, Coldplaygate and the end of monoculture — (Business Insider, 2025)

Status posting: The new social media trend of summer 2025 — (Town & Country, 2025)

We’re losing ancient online recipes — (The Digital Native, 2025)

The Gen Z algorithm — (Mozilla Sidebar, 2025)

Future Generations Restaurant Dining Survey Research — (Eater, 2025)

Snap Map reaches new milestone of 400M monthly active users — (TechCrunch, 2025)

Analog Cultures Marketing Mix — (The Sociology of Business, 2025)

One answer is emerging across platforms and subcultures: people are not logging off — they’re closing ranks. Specialized online and offline communities are becoming the preferred mode of connection and expression.

Instead of broadcasting to the widest possible audience, the people who actually shape culture are limiting access to their content and interactions. They’re creating smaller, more intentional environments — sharing only with those they trust, often behind encryption or platform features designed for privacy and intimacy.

• Group chats instead of feeds.

• Close Friends instead of public Stories.

• Encrypted threads instead of timelines.

This fits well with a quiet counterculture that seems to be emerging online: oversharing is out, curation is in. Less of the pompous and grotesque display of “platform wealth” (think Trump and Musk and Kanye West). People now archive personal posts and scale back their online presence, favoring smaller invite-only spaces for authenticity.

Being “chronically offline” is becoming a high-status symbol—a post-luxury marker of exclusivity, and in clear opposition to the obscene power-grabs of the aforementioned world leaders.

A renewed fear of visibility

Of course, Teens have always understood what is now becoming a more widespread phenomenom. Snapchat’s disappearing messages weren’t just a feature, they were an instinct: vanish before the adults could screenshot you. Be somewhere the parents can’t see. Mystery isn’t just power, it’s protection.

The downside of authenticity is the loss of reach, sure. But as the word changes, community-building and a consensus of values are becoming more important than the stubborn desire to be viral.

This instinct is bleeding into culture at large for good reasons. The global right-wing shift is tangible. ICE raids in the U.S., surveillance of pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Germany: suddenly, our open online platforms seem vulnerable in a very real-world sense.

So the people who have always driven cultural momentum — queer communities, activists, diasporas — are moving further underground, not just spiritually (by segmenting their audiences further and further), but also practically:

• Private meme accounts and backup accounts

• Paywalled newsletters, Telegram communities and Discord chats

• Real-world events and activations

And meanwhile, the surface web is collapsing under its own weight: thanks to feeds stuffed with AI slop, brand noise, and algorithmic filler, the “public internet” feels like a Kandinsky exploded in a third-rate mall food court. That’s not where culture happens in the future. Everything is haha meme entertainment, but where do people socialize, form connections and bond? Public platforms are inherently limited in meaningful interaction as audiences scale — reinforcing the human preference for smaller, richer spaces.

We may be staring into a future of scene-led influence – not influencer-led scenes. The Culture - in its most pragmatic meaning of social practice - hasn’t stopped, it’s just gone somewhere you might not be able to see it.

And you only get in if you’re invited.

The public feed is dead.
Will new EU regulations accelerate the shift?

The EU’s new regulatory frameworks — the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising Regulation (TTPA) — are changing the rules of digital visibility. While well-intentioned, these laws demand that platforms identify and report political content, even when it’s creator-led, informal, or grassroots.

For marginalized or activist voices, this raises a real risk: that political expression, especially around polarizing issues like Palestine or trans rights, may be flagged, throttled, or de-platformed under the guise of compliance.

The unintended effect? More people retreating into closed systems to protect their speech — pushing culture further underground, behind encryption, away from algorithmic gatekeepers, and into smaller, trust-based spaces.

What this means for brands & creators

For brands, this could be a hard pivot: you can’t buy yourself into mass-culture anymore (if you ever could, that is). Reach will inherently be out, or even considered gauche. Other people know about this? It must be bad. The luxury of exclusive content will cement itself in the same way that rare commodities usually do.

To matter, you have to earn entry. That might mean showing up at the ceramics collective instead of sponsoring the hashtag. Partnering with an Ultra Running squad before they trend. Supporting a local scene before you think about monetizing it. Often, a fraction of your marketing budget can power a small community for a whole year.

For digital marketing tactics at scale, we propose identifying locally active thought- and community-leaders instead of only working with influencers who have not diversified their platform. Let them teach you how to reach their communities - even if they’re small. Especially when they’re small.

However: community leaders might not always have clout. Don’t become the brand that cannibalizes their own customer base. Be mindful of the shift, but be careful of unintended consequences (we crashed out when we read about the brides who hit up brands to sponsor their bachelorette parties)

For NGOs, charities, and politically affiliated initiatives, the implications are especially stark. In response to the EU’s new Transparency in Political Advertising Regulation (TTPA), platforms like Google and Meta have announced they will no longer allow paid ads related to political or social causes.

For many organizations, this effectively erases one of the few remaining scalable tools for public visibility. The result: these brands will need to rely more heavily on networks, not media buys. They’ll have to build communities of supporters willing to carry the message themselves — not through ads, but through trust, alignment, and organic reach.

And for creators, the playbook changes too. The future isn’t about building the biggest audience, it’s about building the right room: the room where your work isn’t stolen, flattened, or turned into content mulch. The room where you set the terms, and the culture leaks outward on your timeline, not the other way around.

A room that people and brands potentially pay for to access.

Signals & Sources

• “The Next Wave of Brand Connection Is About Rooms, Not Reach,” Forbes, 2024

• “Jimmy Butler Teams Up with WhatsApp and OffBall to Launch ‘The Chat’,” The Future Party, 2024

• Social Media Marketing Trends 2025, Kurio x The Network One, 2025 (PDF)

• “Instagram Close Friends Marketing: How Brands Are Using It,” Sked Social, 2024

• “Telegram Stats: 2025 Growth and Usage,” Thunderbit, 2025

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