Recently, an Instagram carousel by a long-lost acquaintance who was beach- and boat-hopping with a glittery squad of people I didn’t recognize crossed my feed. I figured they were moneyed Millennials with regular jobs—until I discovered that several of them had followings in the high five figures, and one had more than 3 million. As it turns out, they were neither civilians nor stars. They were “Who”s: a category of low-tier celebrities, including influencers, reality stars, and podcasters—and commonly all three at once—whose names prompt you to ask: “Who?”
The binary between “Who”s and “Them”s—the latter being A-listers your parents might recognize, such as Beyoncé and Tom Cruise—was invented by Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber. Their podcast, Who? Weekly, bills itself as a show that covers “everything you need to know about celebrities you don’t.” After a decade on the beat, the pair have distilled their insights into a new book, I Want to Be Famous: When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity, which offers a comprehensive theory of how the internet and social media transformed everyone into someone—and therefore, no one.
That theory has surprising implications for the labor market at large. As social-media platforms have made it seem easy to monetize attention, professionals in industries where fame has not historically been a credential have come to face growing pressure to create and optimize their online brand. Personal branding, once almost exclusively the concern of genuine celebrities and more recently a job for social-media influencers, is now something a junior accounting executive is encouraged to think about. Sophie Bishop, a professor in media and communication at the University of Leeds, in England, calls this structural shift “influencer creep”—a phenomenon that has caused more swaths of the economy to function like the attention-hungry world that Who? Weekly dissects. No matter how staunchly we may wish to resist the fusion of work and life, we are what we do, and our job is to be a “Who.”
Who? Weekly was launched in 2016 as a lighthearted but often trenchant analysis of fame at a time when social media was beginning to democratize the concept. Finger and Weber were both young entertainment journalists; as they write in I Want to Be Famous, they wanted a venue in which to grumble about celebrities turning away from traditional media and toward social platforms, where they could exercise more image control. Finger and Weber’s real innovation, however, was the system of Whos and Thems. Whos are thirsty for the attention that Thems already have and will shamelessly do or plug anything to get it. “By the end of the 2010s,” the authors write, “it seemed like every reality star, aspiring actor or musician, and TikTok influencer was supplementing their creative income with a post promoting a vibrator, supplement, gambling service, or alcoholic beverage.”
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But as I Want to Be Famous reveals, social-media culture has changed so much that even Thems can no longer resist shilling for brands online. When Jennifer Aniston joined Instagram, in 2019, her first post was a selfie with her Friends co-stars. “It was a charming (if brief) glimpse into the personal life of one of our most private celebrities,” Finger and Weber write: “The purity of her feed was short-lived, however. Today, you can see ads for SkinnyPop popcorn among those intimate photos with friends because now everyone is free to sell stuff in this brave new world, without the fear of selling out.”
Last month, another Them joined Instagram: the Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence, who in a video warned fans to be nice, or she’d quit. A couple of weeks later, Lawrence posted a carousel with grainy photos that were, in part, normal-person coded: There she was, eating a corn dog and riding the Tower of Terror. Except she was also at a Dior fashion show in Paris—right, she’s a movie star. “Thank you @dior and @jonathan.anderson for the most beautiful show ever,” she wrote in the caption. Maybe Lawrence joined the platform for the same reasons we all did: to make internet friends jealous with vacation pics. Or maybe her long-running role as a brand ambassador for Dior now requires her to broker attention online. We can’t know why anyone posts anything: for love or money, connection or commerce. But last week, Lawrence shared low-res, behind-the-scenes snapshots of her hairstyles in various movies, and updated her Instagram bio with a link to her new hair-care brand.
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Who? Weekly chronicles the rise of online attention and the decline of offline mystique. A 2024 post on the Harvard Business School blog offers an example. Branding yourself as a “financial analyst with high emotional intelligence who loves to ski,” the author argues, can help you find opportunities “that align with your authentic self.” The post also suggests that a job seeker might “promote your value” by using “a mix of paid, owned, and earned media.” What this means is that, to really get your mug in front of hiring managers and corporate recruiters, you should pay to amplify material that communicates your professional viability.
Some Gen Z job seekers are using Instagram and TikTok to pitch themselves to potential employers. A 2025 survey found that 46 percent of Gen Z respondents had landed a job or an internship through TikTok. And LinkedIn, once a straitlaced professional networking site, now also functions something like Instagram for the corporate class. The idea is that becoming a platform personality through personal posts or videos will juice the algorithm and thus woo recruiters. The rise of the LinkedInfluencer is emblematic of the act of self-promotion becoming more front-facing: As Brooke Erin Duffy, a communication professor at Cornell University, asked in a June interview with The New York Times, “What does it mean for the rest of us who are living, working and spending our time in these sites where everything we see has this ethos of self promotion?”
Companies including Starbucks and IBM have launched so-called employee-creator programs, initiatives that offers everyday workers rewards for serving as in-house posters. “We’re giving them a way to become influencers,” a July press release by Gap Inc. boasted about one such initiative. But the imperative to build followers stretches across corporate tiers. Jon Gray, the president and chief operating officer of Blackstone—one of the largest commercial landlords in the world—has gone viral on LinkedIn with relatably goofy videos of himself running; the platform’s editor in chief and vice president of content, Dan Roth, recently bragged that Gray has “become a creator.” How odd to feel sympathy for a billionaire: Somehow, he too is furiously—literally—running on the content hamster wheel.
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Finger and Weber point out that, until recently, a professional working for a major corporation could count on a fairly linear career path. The same wasn’t true for someone like a reality star, who needed to rely on media access to sustain their fame and find new opportunities; they might start a lifestyle brand, for instance, in service of becoming what the authors call a “working Who.” Plenty of jobs don’t appear to be succumbing to this shift, at least not yet; your Instagram algorithm might surface the odd plumbing influencer, but your leaky faucet is unlikely to get fixed under the flattering glare of a ring light. Influencer culture has gone only so far in reshaping the labor market in its image, but as the corporate world adopts its practices, there is a growing incentive for you to become your own kind of “working Who”—and, in turn, to help reinforce the idea that people are products.