We Need More Influencers.
How "Accidental Influencers" Will Replace Internet Search
We need more influencers.
I often say that “everything is brand” and this applies more and more in the online era. Every little piece of content you share contributes and shapes your brand and your perception in the eyes of others.
The next big sources of information won’t be companies, or search engines, or even the internet as we know it.
It will be influencers, that is, popular individuals who filter signal from noise, serving as the new media. Everyone says we have too many influencers. I think we don’t have enough — just the wrong kind.
The age of attention inflation
There was a time when searching for something online meant being glad if you found a single thoughtful blog post. Some people don’t remember that era.
Today, you’ll always find something. In fact, you’ll find a lot on, and you can do a mind exercise and think of a prompt that wouldn’t give you tons of results, of course without being a total nonsense. It’s not that easy. We face thousands of near-duplicate answers, SEO-optimized pages tuned for clicks, and increasingly, text written by machines for other machines.
We’ve entered the era of AI-for-AI content — models scraping, summarizing, and regurgitating each other’s outputs. The cost of attention has exploded, but density of information hasn’t.
Search has been optimized for clicks, not clarity. The invisible economy beneath the web rewards immediate reactions and amount of content around key words. Whoever pays or games the algorithm rises to the top — not necessarily the one with the best idea.
The same dynamic now seeps into human distribution. Some influencers chase virality the way SEO writers chased keywords — quick dopamine hits, surface-level authority. But influence built on speed fades as fast as it spikes.
The alternative is slower: earning trust through consistent discernment. Trust is becoming a kind of informational currency — not traded in views or reach, but in credibility accumulated over time.
Why “influencer” became a slur
The term influencer carries a negative charge. It evokes the image of someone whose livelihood depends on constant promotion — polished, performative, and often hollow. Overexposure diluted the word’s meaning; the few who treated it tastelessly defined it for everyone else.
But dismissing influence altogether misses the point. Influence itself is not the problem; incentives are.
Humans have always followed trusted curators — writers, critics, editors, thinkers — long before the internet monetized that role.
The influencer simply inherited the social function of the critic, but stripped of institutional legitimacy. What people reject is not influence; it’s the feeling of being marketed to.
The rise of the “accidental influencer”
When I need to understand something, I don’t go to Google. I go to voices I trust — like Lenny’s newsletter, Swyx’s essays — or I DM specific people whose judgment I value.
Over time I started noticing this from the opposite end too — from the point of view of someone who wants to reach a lot of people. When launching a product update, first, I’d reach out to the obvious influencers for marketing — the ones who do this often, who send you rate cards and polished portfolio.
But gradually I began targeting a different group — people who grew their followings as a byproduct of something else. In my case, those are engineers, founders, or researchers. They don’t sell posts; they just share what they genuinely like. By their “promotions” being rare, it creates the value and trust.
A quieter, more credible form of influence is emerging — among people who never set out to have it. You might call these “accidental influencers”. People whose work, experience and brand itself becomes the real assets.
The “accidental influencers” in my field are engineers, founders, researchers, designers, educators. They share ideas publicly, test products, and talk about what works.
Indeed, both of the “systems” — SEO and optimizing virality of influencers — operate on the same primitive reward loops: optimizing for clicks, time spent, and other engagement metrics.
The difference is that algorithmic SEO sells visibility, while human influence sells trust. And trust can’t be faked for long; the market corrects itself. The audience, unlike the algorithm, decides who’s reliable.
There are examples of “accidental influencers” going to such extreme they become the mainstream go-to source in a given area. In US, podcasts are more trusted source of news compared to other sources for 30% of Republican-leaning people. And podcasts usually mean just an individual human behind the mic.
And there’s a natural equilibrium built into this system. Every trusted individual has a finite trust budget. By this I mean that promoting too often or in ways that feel engineered for virality will evaporate your credibility. As a human, you can even get “cancelled”.
That’s how the system of accidental influencers regulates itself.
Conclusion: The return of human filters
Information is multiplying faster than understanding, and the web’s knowledge density is collapsing.
Before the internet, people learned from small circles — colleagues, mentors, friends. Globalization widened those circles until they blurred. Now we might be shrinking them again, choosing a few voices in specific fields who we actually trust.
The figures we will follow in the future will be individuals or niche groups. They write, share, and explain as a byproduct.
In the era of the dead internet — where content outnumbers creators, trust becomes the real filter and value, and the “last humans standing” are gaining the trust.
I am interested in sources of light to illuminate my sculptures, either internally or externally.
I appreciate your insights. I am just getting started with AI (77 yrs old). I have reservations seeking guidance from technology directed information. At times it is expedient. Yet talking with my neighbor is more reassuring and usually more helpful.