Information Guerrilla Warfare and the Influencer

Why Influencers are the Biggest Threat to the Mainstream Institution

“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions...The terror of society, which is the basis of our morals, the terror of God which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us. And yet...” 

Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray

It is a very simple and straightforward argument to make that mainstream media is the cause for nearly all the problems in modern society. It is the jury and the judge in the court of public opinion, it is the writer and announcer of the “morals” people must follow to “be a good person”, it is the arbiter of the status quo and the painter of the Overton window. Mainstream media does not merely report public opinion, it creates it. 

Considering the all-encompassing and ineluctable control that mainstream media and its institutions hold on society, the greatest threat to this system comes from an unlikely source: the internet influencer. The reason organisations such as instagram, twitter and YouTube are under such severe pressure to censor their users, is to attempt to diminish the power of the influencer. This tells us that the modern influencer is doing something very important: he is engaged in information guerrilla warfare. 

Guerrilla warfare is a war strategy where one side, usually the side with inferior resources, fights the opponent in small groups. They leverage the element of surprise and of knowing the locals and the landscape better than the opponent. Despite the opponent’s superior resources and organisation, their lack of centralisation works to their advantage because the opponent cannot attack one central base to win; for each attacker they may succeed in defeating, a hundred more lurk in the bushes. This creates a war of attrition whereby the wealthier opponent expends all his resources and eventually gives up. This was one of the major reasons America lost the Vietnam War, and one of the major reasons both Napoleon and Hitler were unsuccessful in capturing Russia. Today, it will be the most powerful form of resistance that the ordinary man can offer to the mainstream institution, that wishes to suffocate his voice.

The Course of Empire: Destruction, by Thomas Cole

The influencer as an individual can be bought, like anyone else, but there are so many of them, that it is impossible to buy them all. The influencer is not beholden to any of the mainstream institutions that suckle at the teat of mainstream media. Rather, he makes an income directly from his audience. He therefore has a vested interest to serve his audience rather than rapacious interlocutors whose primary loyalties lie with pharmaceutical companies, communist millionaires who hate western civilization and BlackRock. Robert Kennedy Jr.’s book “The Real Anthony Fauci” describes this effect in great detail.

The influencer is a loose canon and yet today he has has more influence than institutions like the New York Times and the Economist. This is because it is human nature to trust human beings over faceless corporations, that face no consequences for deceiving or harming their audience. The influencer is small enough that he is beholden to consequences from his audience, and independent enough that he has the greatest power of all: freedom from the hegemony of the mainstream institution. 

In this essay I show exactly how the influencer has undermined mainstream institutions, how he will continue to do so, and what he must do to ensure his victory in a war where the triggers are information and the spoils go to the one who can influence human nature the best.