The concept of an “influencer” on Instagram is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to wrap my head around. There’s clearly something interesting about watching the lives of these instagrammers through the seven million daily selfies they post, which brings me to the case of Miquela Sousa, a 19-year-old artist living in Los Angeles. Her Instagram profile holds nearly 300 posts and she has more than 560 thousand followers… but here’s the catch: She doesn’t exist. Miquela is a virtual avatar.
It’s likely you’ve come across the term “influencer” in recent months, especially on Twitter and Instagram. From a certain perspective, influencers are just promoters. Some work on their own, others receive support from sponsors. In recent weeks, the word “influencer” was at the center of a conflict between a British media personality named Elle Darby and The White Moose hotel in Ireland (Short version: Darby offered “exposure” in exchange for a five-day stay for herself and her partner. The hotel owner said no.). The term is also undergoing a sort of “evolution” with the appearance of unusual characters like Miquela Sousa.
What’s so unusual about her? If you go by her bio (19 years old, based in Los Angeles, activist for trans rights and the Black Lives Matter movement), there’s nothing strange, but once you see her photos, you realize she’s a virtual avatar. That’s right: Miquela Sousa doesn’t exist. Even so, her first single “Not Mine” reached the Top 10 of the Spotify Viral list in August last year, and she currently has just over 567 thousand Instagram followers. We still don’t know who the mastermind behind Miquela is, but we can say she has already been photographed wearing pieces from Chanel, Moschino, Burberry, Versace, Fendi and Proenza Schouler.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BV3e_MllcdjPersonally, Miquela reminds me a bit of Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2. Of course, she’s not the first virtual avatar with a pronounced commercial profile (Hatsune Miku comes to mind immediately), and she won’t be the last, but her success raises some interesting questions: If influencers can be replaced with digital versions, how important is the flesh-and-blood influencer? What prevents a company from creating its own legion of instagrammers to promote products?
