Deinfluencing TikTok During the Cost-of-Living Crisis: Neoliberal Logics of (Over)Consumption Across Popular Media

Abstract

Following the economic recession of 2008, media texts blamed individual consumers and their reckless and wasteful consumption of designer goods and extravagant homes for contributing to the financial crisis. Within the current context of the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis has led to increases in the cost of everyday necessities. At the same time, social media influencers promote excessive consumption of expensive viral products that are often discarded upon purchase. Responding to these socio-cultural events, deinfluencing became a viral trend on TikTok, where users post videos encouraging viewers to purchase certain products rather than other more expensive options. Positioning deinfluencing as an example of cultural responses to financial crises, this article highlights the parallels between deinfluencing and previous discursive articulations that emerged during the 2008 global financial crisis. Deinfluencing reproduces longstanding cultural formations of consumer citizenship while also reacting to the overconsumption promoted by the digital economy.

Introduction: Deinfluencing and the Cost-of-Living Crisis

In early 2023, amidst news reports of a forthcoming economic recession in Canada and the United States, deinfluencing became a popular trend on TikTok, with the hashtag “#deinfluencing” accumulating over 1 billion views by the end of the year. Deinfluencing refers to a practice in which social media influencers advise their viewers to purchase certain products over others (Chokrane 2023). By discouraging viral products like the Dyson Airwrap (a heat-based hair styling product that retails for roughly $599 USD), deinfluencers still disingenuously promote the act of consumption, providing more “budget-friendly” alternatives, such as the Shark FlexStyle (approximately $299 USD) or the Revlon One-Step Hair Dryer ($59 USD). This contradiction was highlighted by Vogue’s characterization of the trend, noting that “deinfluencers are still influencers,” yet “they have carved out a distinctive niche in influencer culture” (Chokrane 2023). There is nothing “distinctive” about deinfluencing, a trend ultimately shaped by the underlying culture of consumption that has intensified due to the relationship between social media influencers, e-commerce structures, and the digital economy (Hund and McGuigan 2019; Manzerolle and Daubs 2021). Rather, I argue the current deinfluencing trend represents a longer history of gendered, discursive responses to economic crisis through popular media (Banet-Weiser 2012; Hund 2023; Moir 2013). Deinfluencing molds platform users into respectable consuming subjects during a period of heightened financial anxiety, promoting an individualized response to the cost-of-living crisis.

The early virality of deinfluencing also coincided with mainstream conversations about the ethics of influencing due to the obscene amount of free goods sent to influencers for review, stemming from an incident where major beauty TikToker Mikayla Nogueira allegedly wore false eyelashes in a sponsored video promoting a new L’Oréal mascara, raising concerns about authenticity (Peiser et al. 2023). Seemingly ordinary individuals who built credibility and trust with their online followings by habitually posting relatable content, influencers leverage their online followings for financial gain, commodifying their “authentic” personas into self-brands (Abidin 2018; Banet-Weiser 2021; Wellman 2024). Broadly defined as a type of emotional labor, authenticity is a mediated performance of intimacy practiced by influencers to build credible, affective relationships with their followers (Duffy and Hund 2015; Wellman et al. 2020). On platforms like TikTok, influencers promote and review products as part of brand deals and sponsorships, often associated with their individual tastes and interests within a specific (predominantly gendered) niche area, such as beauty (Abidin 2020; Duffy 2017). The “ordinariness” of influencers creates the illusion that anyone with a notable social media presence can become a brand ambassador, despite the structural inequities embedded within the industry (Duffy 2017; Glatt 2024). Influencing is inherently about (self) promotion, and when Nogueira’s infamous sponsored post went viral at a time when the rising cost of everyday living necessities dominated public discourse, the pushback became a catalyst for deinfluencing to become a social media trend.

Deinfluencing represents the symbiotic relationship between neoliberal dynamics of consumer society and socioeconomic shifts, particularly within the media and creative industries (Hund 2023). Characterized by market logics of privatization and competition permeating non-economic realms, neoliberal dynamics prioritize entrepreneurial individuality, becoming especially potent during periods of economic recessions and cultural disruptions (Banet-Weiser 2012). A central element of the contemporary digital economy, influencing itself is a product of socioeconomic crisis, with Hund (2023, 7) arguing that “the influencer industry is both a symptom of and a response to the economic precarity and upheaval in social institutions that have characterized the early twenty-first century.” Despite the prevalence of deinfluencing across popular media, the trend has received minimal scholarly attention. Maddox (2023) credits deinfluencing for encouraging users to make more conscious decisions about their spending, while Bainotti (2023) argues that deinfluencing as a phenomenon underscores how the algorithmic structure of TikTok transforms acts of resistance into viral trends.

Building upon these critiques, this critical analysis of deinfluencing examines the power of predominantly female TikTok users in reproducing gendered neoliberal discourses of acceptable consumption and consumer citizenship that manifest during heightened economic anxiety. It is critical to examine how discourses of consumption are negotiated by deinfluencers on TikTok, since the platform is a space situated within and reflective of neoliberal dynamics. How do influencers participating in the deinfluencing trend negotiate anxieties pertaining to the cost-of-living crisis? In addition to deinfluencing TikTok content, media reporting of deinfluencing by outlets including The Washington Post, The Guardian, CBC News, Vox, CNN, Vogue, Forbes, and Dazed provides insight into how the trend circulates beyond social media to reach larger audiences. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks of consumerist ideology and social citizenship (Althusser 2006; Bauman 2007), the trend is situated within the larger socioeconomic context of consumer culture during periods of economic turmoil, making comparisons to the 2008 financial crisis to highlight how deinfluencing reproduces longstanding social dynamics of class, debt, thrift, and overconsumption that stem from the Protestant ethics underlying consumer society. These perspectives provide the framework for deconstructing deinfluencing as a reactive social media practice, in which economic anxiety is channeled through gendered tropes of the “failed consumer” (Bauman 2007) and the “recessionista” (Negra and Tasker 2014). Providing the illusion of structural critique during a period of increasing socioeconomic inequality, deinfluencing performs a vital role in the social reproduction of consumer capitalism.

Theorizing Deinfluencing: Ideological Frameworks of Consumerism, Consumer Citizenship, and Recessionary Popular Culture

The trend of deinfluencing on TikTok reflects larger theoretical underpinnings of consumerist ideologies, acceptable consumption, and the neoliberal dynamics of consumer citizenship. In addition to monetary accumulation, capitalism relies on non-economic means—ideology—to reproduce its social power (Williamson 1986). For Hall (1985, 64), “ideology becomes internalized,” an argument referencing Althusser’s (2006) concept of interpellation that describes how members of society are transformed into subjects when recruited into ideological frameworks. Individuals are interpellated as consumer subjects first and foremost, and this subject positioning means they actively recognize and reproduce consumer capitalism’s social power. Although predominantly stripped of its religious mandate, contemporary consumer capitalism is both shaped by and reproduces the Protestant ethics embedded within consumption. Protestant ideals of self-control, frugality, and hard work serve as the backdrop of capitalism, morals that are inherently contradictory to consumer culture, which privileges excess and the over-accumulation of commodity goods (Bell 1976). These longstanding contradictions continue to manifest through the deinfluencing trend, which reproduces this capitalistic dissonance.

The intensification of advanced capitalism further transformed consumption into an act signifying social status (Bauman 2007), thereby bestowing deinfluencing with symbolic power as a cultural trend governing politics of belonging and difference within consumer society. Applying Althusser’s ideological foundation, Bauman (2007, 52–53) argues that consumer society “evaluates – rewards and penalizes – its members depending on the promptness and propriety of their response to the interpellation,” which ultimately reshapes consumption into a practice “guiding the distribution of social esteem and stigma.” Analyzing the class disparities that have emerged since the 1970s, Schor (1998) refers to the practice of consuming beyond one’s tax bracket to mediate a higher-class identity as a type of “new consumerism.” Those individuals who can properly consume within the manner deemed customary by neoliberal consumer society are viewed as acceptable and proper social citizens, while those who struggle to do so are symbolically deprived of their social citizenship (Bauman 2005; MacLennan 2019). Critiquing the strategic use of the word “collateral” within post-9/11 geopolitics, Bauman argues that the term does not exclusively apply to the political realm but rather symbolizes the commodification of human life. Consumption, work, and family under advanced capitalism represent a mutually constitutive relationship that produces new collateral causalities, which Bauman argues makes up the “underclass.” Within a society structured by discourses of consumption where one’s social worth and status are marked by their commodity value and ability to consume without collecting debt or entering poverty, the “underclass” for Bauman (2007, 124) are “failed consumers,” the collateral causalities of consumer society.

Ideas about public good and social reform—which become heightened during tumultuous periods like the cost-of-living crisis that informs deinfluencing—are increasingly subject to the marketplace and commodified as an expression of consumer citizenship. An ideological subject positioning, consumer citizenship is produced, Coskuner-Balli (2020, 328) argues, through the “governmentality process that merges national myth and political ideology in a particular rendering of moral values towards addressing the economic and political goals of the state.” Historically, citizenship and consumption retain a symbiotic relationship, with numerous non-hegemonic groups utilizing their purchasing power to promote community and advocate on social issues ranging from immigration to civil rights (Cohen 2003). American culture rearticulates this relationship into a patriotic act, a transformation that intensified with the onset of the Cold War and neoliberal policies. The symbolic power of consumer citizenship resides in how this discursive practice reproduces categories of difference, which, for Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee (2012, 5), is “most visibly represented in the ever-growing divides between the rich and poor, moral panics about ‘welfare queens,’ and other state dependents and cultural mythologies celebrating individually minded folks bent on ‘enterprising themselves’ rather than collective action and social justice” (p. 5). Intersecting with dynamics of class and race, difference manifests within deinfluencing through its connection to conspicuous displays of thrift, exhibiting a sense of frugality central to the Protestant ethics of consumer society (Hulme 2019, 441). Crisis consumerism incites trends like deinfluencing as social displays of consumer citizenship, differentiating the productive, thrifty deinfluencer from the binaries of the class hierarchy: overtly ostentatious displays of wealth and the failed consumers of the underclass.

The symbolic power of deinfluencing resides in the trend’s ability to govern acceptable consumption practices to maintain neoliberal consumer society during the current cost-of-living crisis. Economic crises are important moments for understanding how ideological formations are rearticulated to normalize the inherent contradictions embedded within institutional responses (Hall 1979). As an unfixed hegemonic process, neoliberalism requires continuous renewal. Hall (2011, 727–728) argues social institutions rework neoliberalism’s contradictions in response to crisis. Financial collapses, such as the 2007 to 2009 economic recession and the cost-of-living crisis stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and other catalysts, promote neoliberal reactions by social institutions to salvage and re-brand consumerism as an individual, heroic display of citizenship (Banet-Weiser 2012). Media and cultural texts—including deinfluencing on TikTok—enable audiences to make sense and meaning out of periods of economic crisis by reproducing highly gendered discursive formations and normative consumer identities, evident in popular culture responses to the 2008 global financial crisis (Moir 2013; Negra and Tasker 2014). The ensuing economic crisis during the late 2000s and early 2010s inspired media texts promoting narratives about “thriftiness” and “downsizing.” Prior to the financial collapse, early to mid 2000s popular culture was dominated by mediations of upscale, conspicuous consumption. In their analysis of mid-2010s recessionary culture, Negra and Tasker (2014) argue that the archetype of the extravagant female consumer—one who purchases conspicuous goods and services that they cannot afford and accumulates significant debt—became demonized as a cautionary representation of a failed consumer. Highlighting how popular texts addressing themes of class and consumption reveal hegemonic narratives, Negra and Tasker (2014, 1–2) argue that “our economic lives are both shaped by and embedded within popular and representational culture. . .popular culture helps to mobilize emotion and to allocate blame, frequently redirecting resentment and anger at structural problems away from elites and toward class peer groups who are imagined to retain the ‘privileges’ of earlier eras.” Protestant ideas about appropriateness and frugality that have historically grounded North American consumer society become particularly visible during recessionary culture. The female consumer thereby becomes the subject of intense scrutiny within public discourse, similar to deinfluencing’s critique of major influencers like Mikayla Nogueira. These theoretical underpinnings of consumer capitalism, acceptable consumption, and recessionary culture provide the frameworks for analyzing the popularity of deinfluencing in the current socioeconomic landscape.

Deinfluencing to Prevent Failed Consumers: Rearticulating the “Recessionista”

Despite public dismissal as just another TikTok trend, deinfluencing symbolizes the power of influencers in reproducing neoliberal ideas about social citizenship in the current socioeconomic context. Outlining the socioeconomic structure that creates consumption-based hierarchies of belonging or ostracization, Bauman (2007, 125–126) argues that “contemporary society engages its members primarily as consumers; only secondarily, and in part, does it engage them as producers. To meet the standards of normality, to be acknowledged as a fully fledged, right and proper member of society, one needs to respond promptly and efficiently to the temptations of the consumer market; one needs to regularly contribute to the ‘supply-clearing demand,’ whereas in case of economic feedback or stagnation be part of the ‘consumer-led recovery.’” Through both TikTok videos and media coverage, deinfluencing differentiates the symbolic boundaries governing who can participate in the current economic recovery and the appropriate process to do so as consumers, and, increasingly, as producers aiding economic recovery.

A common practice among deinfluencers is to disclose their (former) status as (almost) failed consumers due to debilitating credit card debt. Mistakenly viewed within public discourse as a contemporary concern, American society has long depended upon debt and other credit and loaning practices to make means; debt, for Lears (2006), is “as American as cherry pie.” Credit was initially socially villainized during the early development of consumer society, since as Calder (1999, 24) argues, “thrift had long been deemed a core value of American citizenship.” To naturalize this transition, Protestant ethics of “discipline, hard work, budgeting, and saving” became intertwined alongside consumption, with consumer credit acting as a disciplinary practice (Calder 1999, 31–33). The number of Canadians and Americans now living with credit card debt continues to rise, due to many young adults beginning their careers carrying significant student loans in addition to rising household costs (Dubey 2024; Jay 2023). Intergenerational wealth mobility (including inheritance and financial assistance on down payments) plays a key role in aiding younger demographics with lower incomes to attain high-cost necessities like housing, leading to consumer purchases being made on credit cards during a period of rising inflation (Filby 2024; Onstad 2024). Having become normalized as a core element of the contemporary socioeconomic landscape, cultural practices and trends like deinfluencing play a vital role in shaping popular reactions to debt (McClanahan 2017).

However, this reality becomes stigmatized through deinfluencing content, where debt becomes articulated as an individualized issue arising from overconsumption rather than the result of systematic structural inequities. In revealing their previous financial predicaments, many deinfluencers highlighted the embarrassment they personally felt in accumulating over $10,000 in credit card debt, building rapport with their followers to legitimize their deinfluencing contributions. One user expressed they felt “haunted” when thinking of how they inappropriately consumed. Others shared their stories as cautionary tales to prevent others from delving into what Bauman (2007, 125) refers to as the “temptations of the consumer market.” Another user preached to their followers to “practice discipline” in their consumption patterns “to help you save money.” Together this rhetoric interpellates users into their identity as consumer subjects, reminding users of the social power embedded within consumption, where debt represents undisciplined choices, and by extension, a loss of social citizenship. Those who do not exercise restraint in their purchasing decisions and succumb to consuming viral products promoted by influencers are symbolically stripped of their social citizenship for not contributing to the economic recovery in an appropriate manner.

To circumvent the stigmatizing identity of a failed consumer, deinfluencers personify the “recessionista,” a major trope characterizing mid-2010s recessionary culture (Negra and Tasker 2014; Singer 2010, 4). Entering the popular culture vernacular in 2008, the “recessionista” became a common label employed by bloggers and fashion and entertainment media, referring to primarily female consumers weary of spending money on clothing due to growing economic uncertainty. Unlike the extravagant female consumer, the “recessionista” signified positive connotations, characterizing someone willing to devote labor and capital to learn how to consume in an appropriate, frugal, thrifty, and measured manner. The “recessionista” was an identity embraced by early fashion bloggers, who often shared advice online concerning how to make economically sensible but chic purchases. In her analysis of the trope’s popularity, Nathanson (2014, 136–139) cites the example of Calla, an everyday fashion blogger featured in a TJ Maxx advertising campaign, to demonstrate how recessionary culture reshapes shopping into an individualized entrepreneurial activity. The advertisement portrays Calla navigating TJ Maxx amidst her other everyday activities as an “ordinary” fashion blogger. For Nathanson (2014, 137), Calla’s TJ Maxx advertisement demonstrates how within the context of recessionary culture, “shopping may represent a pleasurable activity, but it also requires some work in the context of anxieties about consumer spending. This commercial presents Calla, and the ‘real girls,’ she represents, as knowledgeable, efficient and economical consumers who navigate consumer and virtual environments.” The labor of “recessionistas” like Calla is obscured through the practice of shopping as an affective yet productive experience and justified by exhibiting Protestant ideals of restraint and frugality, constructing an archetype that continues to manifest through the deinfluencing trend.

The representation of the “recessionista” central to recessionary culture is currently rearticulated as the deinfluencer on TikTok, with the underlying connotations and symbolism embedded within the archetype remaining just as powerful. The main criticism of deinfluencing as a cultural phenomenon is that the trend does not discourage consumption but rather provides less expensive alternatives. Some deinfluencers encourage users to build a capsule wardrobe by browsing thrift stores to find “timeless” high-quality pieces (a laborious process in itself; Li 2023). One influencer in particular encouraged TikTok viewers to “engage in good quality pieces that will survive through trend cycles. . .your wallet will thank you and you’ll look more elegant and cool.” Other TikTok deinfluencing videos condemn users for purchasing “trendy” seasonal clothing like athleisure wear from high-end brands like lululemon and Alo Yoga, instead suggesting that they search for considerably cheaper alternatives from options like Old Navy. Consumption is not condoned and instead is expressed through respectable discourses of acceptability and frugality, reproducing the symbolism and motifs of the “recessionista.” Furthermore, the rhetoric and discourses employed by TikTok deinfluencers embodying the “recessionista” demonize major platform influencers just as excessive female consumers were previously villainized by mid-2000s popular culture. Rarely do deinfluencers identify as influencers on TikTok; this deliberate act of nondisclosure lengthens the symbolic boundaries distinguishing the two figures. Other deinfluencers draw upon their informal experiences as consumers (often justifying their credibility with rhetoric that they have been “deinfluencing since before it had a fancy word”), which they then legitimize through their identities as acceptable consumers assisting others to achieve a similar social standing. This specific articulation of expertise positions major influencers like Mikayla Nogueira (whose livelihood is dependent upon promoting the mindless consumption of viral products) as careless icons of excess that cannot be trusted in a volatile socioeconomic and environmental landscape.

Their material and immaterial labor as consumers—composed of the effort involved in consumption and, in some cases, the relational vulnerability in revealing financial predicaments that possibly could have turned them into “collateral causalities of consumption” (Bauman 2007)—is promoted by deinfluencers as the expertise legitimizing their authenticity on TikTok. Authenticity, like hegemony or self-branding in the attention economy, is a “process, not a state of being,” that needs to be continuously “maintained, renewed, and revised” (Hall 2011, 727). When the ideological framework governing influencer culture—neoliberal consumer capitalism—is subject to crisis, the consuming self is renegotiated, leading to new articulations of authenticity. The authenticity of the deinfluencer resides in their difference. Although they may have almost become causalities of consumer capitalism, they are not members of Bauman’s underclass, and the deinfluencer reclaims their social status and ideological subject positioning by adhering to the politics of acceptability and frugality governing consumer capitalism. Within deinfluencing, it is this subtle articulation of difference that legitimizes the deinfluencer’s authenticity, leveraged in service of crisis consumption and economic recovery.

Such consumption-based expertise and authenticity circulated by deinfluencers reproduces longstanding gendered ideological formations of women’s social responsibilities as consumers. Negra (2008, 5) argues that “popular culture insistently asserts that if women can productively manage home, time, work, and their commodity choices, they will be rewarded with a more authentic, intact, and achieved self.” Yet deinfluencing—and the influencer industry more broadly—represents how gendered, productive consumerism is moving away from the traditional emphasis on the household to supporting the entrepreneurial self-brand of the neoliberal deinfluencer, evident by the amount of beauty content dominating the trend. Traditionally, women were advised by popular media—including advertisements, radio and television programs, and magazines—to take on the managerial role as consumers for their household, especially in the context of emerging domestic technologies (Duffy and Packer 2022; Spigel 1992; Strasser 1982). Analyzing the gendered dimensions of housework and consumption within the private sphere, Strasser (1982, 247) cites household engineer Christine Frederick’s position that “every woman running the business of housemaking must train herself to become an efficient ‘purchasing agent’ for her particular firm or family.” Popular media thereby interpellated women into consumer culture as productive agents socially reproducing domesticity at the forefront of capitalism. The correlation between gender, consumption, and domesticity also makes women socially responsible for bearing “the burden of economic crisis” (Waight 2019, 536); this “burden” underlies the structural redevelopment of the media and entertainment landscape to create the influencer industry stemming from the 2008 global financial crisis (Hund 2023), and, more currently, through deinfluencing. Hegemonic rhetoric of efficiency manifests in the contemporary moment with deinfluencing, since deinfluencers have learned to resourcefully manage their consumption habits, not for their family, but in support of their individualized, acceptable consumer identity. Deinfluencers thereby train their followers to also became efficient consuming selves—or, to reframe Frederick’s term for contemporary digital economy, self-interested purchasing experts.

The focus on the self by deinfluencers reflects larger racialized esthetics of wellness culture popular on TikTok. Analyzing the popularity of the “That Girl” trope on TikTok, Sweeney-Romero (2022, 109) argues that wellness culture privileges female users who are “young, white or white-passing, thin, able-bodied, cisgender.” Sweeney-Romero’s analysis of wellness culture correlates to deinfluencing, where similar displays of white femininity are normalized by beauty content. Beauty advice—often by predominantly white, young, and visibly slim users—is one of the most dominant niche areas of deinfluencing content, where rhetoric of “just because it didn’t work for me, doesn’t mean it won’t work for you” underscores the labor of training oneself to be an acceptable consuming subject, always verging on the edges of efficient or wasteful consumption. The influencer industry has long depended upon practices of self-commodification and visibility in a digital creative economy prioritizing entrepreneurial subjectivity (Duffy and Hund 2015; Tran 2024). Deinfluencing symbolizes the neoliberal power of the influencer industry to rearticulate hegemonic consumption practices, where gendered, racialized productive consumerism continues to shift further away from the family household to centering the entrepreneurial self-brand of the deinfluencer.

The prominence of fashion, beauty, and lifestyle-based deinfluencing content is also emphasized by media reporting, reproducing the circulatory reach of deinfluencing as a contemporary rearticulation of the “recessionista.” Dazed rhetorically questioned whether deinfluencing “is just a symptom of our economically turbulent times,” supported by industry polling that consumers feel significantly impacted by the cost-of-living crisis (Shadijanova 2023). Highlighting TikToker Alyssa Kromelis (who achieved platform virality for her deinfluencing videos) describing the trend as “recession-core influencing,” HuffPost places her comments within the symbolic boundaries of acceptability: “When the price of eggs has increased by nearly 60% over the last 12 months, most of your followers aren’t looking to buy $30 lipgloss, the content has to fit with the times” (Wong 2023). CNN (Karimi 2023) quoted deinfluencers acknowledging the temptation of consumer culture, providing strategies for distinguishing between aspirational purchases and living costs like rent and groceries. Together with deinfluencing content on TikTok (including those videos where users reveal their financial predicaments), these texts reproduce discourses of acceptability, providing templates for audiences on how to effectively respond to the cost-of-living crisis while still maintaining their identity as consumers, and, by extension, their social citizenship, to avoid becoming “collateral” damage in a consumer society now governed by reputation (Bauman 2007).

Unlike other commentaries that failed to contextualize these motifs and characterizations, Bustle connected deinfluencing to the larger recessionary culture that precedes the trend. Evoking the arguments underlying previous analyses of recessionary culture (Negra and Tasker 2014), Bustle argued: “What’s happening now is a confluence of economic downtown, widespread layoffs, and a backlash to opulence. Predictably in a time of economic uncertainty, people are warning each other of products that don’t live up to their hype. Is it coincidence that the prominence of bloggers in 2009 was right after the recession of 2008? I think not. De-influencing is simply a dressed-up version of an honest blogger review from back in the day. The only difference now is that regular people have the TikTok algorithm to bolster reach” (Licht 2023). Bustle’s framing of deinfluencing acknowledges what is new about this manifestation of a recessionary motif—TikTok’s algorithm, transforming a representation with a complex socioeconomic history into a viral trend (Bainotti 2023). Numerous content creators bolstered their metrics by posting deinfluencing content, many receiving mainstream media attention for their newfound identity as deinfluencers (Karimi 2023). While deinfluencing’s cultural power is testament to the impact of the previous economic crisis that enabled the structural foundations for developing the influencer industry (Hund 2023), deinfluencers renegotiate the labor required to produce the “recessionista” archetype.

Social Media Influencers, TikTok, and Deinfluencing (Over) Consumption

Deinfluencing as a genre is critiquing the culture of excessive consumerism that has only intensified with the transformation of social media platforms into hubs for consumer spending. Platforms like Instagram and now TikTok increasingly naturalize the association between market exchanges and cultural practices by introducing features encouraging users to shop from a user’s profile or post. The seamless ability to purchase an extensive variety of products through the ease of a digital platform or mobile device constitutes what Hund and McGuigan (2019, 18–19) refer to as “shoppable life,” which they define as affordances and structural decisions that make it exceptionally easy to purchase goods promoted on social media. Manzerolle and Daubs (2021, 1280) refer to this process as “transactional affordances,” which they outline as “new tech-enhanced capabilities that facilitate the exchange of money, typically through the purchase of a good or service.” The normalization of platform features promoting in-app shopping that underlays the deinfluencing trend depends upon the symbolic power and immaterial labor of influencers, characterizing what Duffy and Pooley (2019) term as “idols of promotion.” Updating Leo Lowenthal’s analysis of celebrity—focusing on how socioeconomic shifts impacting the media industry transform celebrities from symbols of production (such as politicians and business personas) to those of consumption (like athletes and actors)—Duffy and Pooley (2019, 33–34) argue that increasing employment precarity combined with self-branding through social media as a dominant form of entrepreneurial labor has transformed public personalities into promotional personas. Although users have become accustomed to being inundated with promotional advertisements when browsing online, influencers further naturalize this experience through the trust, intimacy, and authentic connections they build with their followers. The labor of influencers plays an important role in this promotional practice, with Manzerolle and Daubs (2021, 1292) arguing that “by capitalizing on interpersonal relationships and converting individual interests into consumable products, these apps demonstrate a prevalence of transactional affordances that merges frictionless consumption, the attention economy, and the circulation of culture, trends and products via mobile-based social media applications.” Social media users became accustomed to commercial transactions when browsing on Instagram, normalizing consumption habits long promoted by influencers on Instagram that have only intensified with TikTok and served as a catalyst to the deinfluencing trend.

The notion of a “shoppable life” (Hund and McGuigan 2019) and transactional affordances (Manzerolle and Daubs 2021) provide the socioeconomic, technological, and cultural contexts intensifying the mindless culture of consumption promoted by influencers that ignited deinfluencing into a viral trend. Many deinfluencers focused on how easy it was to become susceptible to viral products and trends promoted by social media influencers, purchasing products like Stanley tumblers—a brand of reusable insulated water bottles ranging in price between $30 to $55 USD—to “keep up” (embodying Schor’s new consumerism) and combat feelings of insecurity. Viral products, most commonly cosmetics and fashion accessories, are a dominant source of criticism by deinfluencers, especially those promoted by major influencers like Nogueira; many deinfluencers make a strong correlation between viral products, sponsored posts, and overconsumption, connotating the concept of a “shoppable life.” TikTok Shop—the platform’s e-commerce feature enabling users to sell and purchase products—is frequently condemned in deinfluencing videos, but in strategic ways such as being displayed or captioned in “algospeak,” the deliberate misspelling of certain words to thwart TikTok’s content moderation procedures (Steen et al. 2023). Referring to TikTok Shop in “algospeak” is especially popular amongst deinfluencers, who primarily occupy the lower end of the categorization hierarchy with smaller followings, since they are more vulnerable to the platform’s algorithm and dependent upon reaching viewers through TikTok’s “For You” page (Bhandari and Bimo 2022).

Overconsumption is the most dominant concept associated with deinfluencing by TikTok users as a viral phenomenon across popular media. Numerous TikTok influencers begin their deinfluencing videos by renouncing the overconsumption promoted by the platform (and, by extension, major influencers), while media commentary connects this major pattern to discourses of sustainability. Deinfluencing is therefore related to other more broad social media trends shaped by austerity measures negotiating ideas about (over)consumption, thrift, and class, such as decluttering videos (Zappavigna 2019). Take, for example, the 2019 release of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, the Netflix reality television program depicting the organizing consultant and founder of the KonMari method, helping individuals simplify their lives by reducing clutter. The program’s Western mainstream popularity signified a cultural fascination with waste, decluttering, and minimalism that only intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic (Sandlin and Wallin 2022, 96–97). Decluttering videos, a popular genre where content creators sort through and discard household items like clothing, décor, and appliances (items that frequently go “viral” on TikTok), underscore the excessive culture of consumption normalized by the e-commerce structure of social media platforms. In her analysis of decluttering influencers, Li (2023, 798–804) highlights how the complex labor performed by these creators obscures the class-based politics embedded within the genre, in which predominantly non-hegemonic workers—such as retail and sanitation staff—are physically tasked with managing discarded waste. Combined with the everyday use of personal protective equipment outside of traditional medical settings during the pandemic, the popularity of decluttering to achieve an aspirational, minimalist esthetic has resulted in a drastic increase in the environmental impact of discarded waste (Sandlin and Wallin 2022, 99). Decluttering, like deinfluencing, cannot exist without the act of consumption, and it is this element of financial privilege that differentiates platform users engaging in these trends of conspicuous thrift from the non-hegemonic subjects who depend upon second-hand marketplaces for their economic survival.

Deinfluencing borrows discursively from decluttering videos, negotiating ideas about waste and overconsumption more specifically within the influencer industry. Deinfluencing TikTok content discourages overconsumption as a form of individualized financial advice, but the trend also signifies the practices of waste and disposal that consumer society is dependent upon for growth and renewal (Bauman 2007, 38). Bauman (2007, 36) placed this cyclical practice within a “nowist” mentality that has only strengthened with the influencer industry, arguing: “Yes, it is true that in the ‘nowist’ life of the denizens of the consumerist era, the motive to hurry is partly the urge to acquire and collect. But the most pressing need that makes haste truly imperative is nevertheless the necessity to discard and replace.” The “shoppable life” promoted by influencers and TikTok’s transactional affordances incites the longing to purchase (expedited by fast-fashion e-commerce sites like Shein), whereas the deinfluencer now serves a critical role in this process by governing how to resourcefully replenish the very goods that have been disposed. The “rubbish tip” is the primary method for deinfluencers to reconcile their dissatisfaction as acceptable consuming users, since for Bauman (2007, 21), “the society of consumers is unthinkable without a thinking waste-disposal industry.” Although the vast majority of deinfluencing videos consist of creators sharing what they did not like about (oftentimes expensive) products, it is unclear if or how these products were disposed, making the viewer presume they were either donated or discarded as trash. Deinfluencers disposing unwanted goods only to replace them with other alternatives is differentiated as an authentic display of resourcefulness, obscuring the class dynamics embedded within the trend.

For those deinfluencers suggesting less costly alternatives, such as beauty products from e.l.f cosmetics and Rare Beauty rather than more expensive brands like Charlotte Tilbury, no acknowledgment is made of the environmental impact embedded within these purchases despite popular media correlating deinfluencing with an increased public awareness concerning sustainable shopping practices. For Bauman (2007, 38), the beauty and medical cosmetic industries are pertinent examples of consumer society’s dependence on waste, since they are businesses promoting the removal of all bodily markers to maintain hegemonic ideals of youth and beauty. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that deinfluencing is dominated by beauty content, where waste performs multiple symbolic articulations of identity, femininity, youthfulness, and thriftiness integral to consumer society. Rare Beauty and e.l.f cosmetics, brands frequently promoted by deinfluencers, gained popularity through their social media marketing strategies, often employing influencers and leveraging viral memetic trends (Moir 2023). Yet the virality of these products promoted by influencers and deinfluencers alike obscures the environmental impact of the digital economy in the production and distribution of these products, long before they are discarded as waste in deinfluencing videos.

Conclusion: Rebranding the Cost-of-Living Crisis Through Deinfluencing

Deinfluencing on TikTok interpellates users as consuming subjects promoting an individualized response to the cost-of-living crisis, encouraging platform users to become proper consuming citizens by exercising restraint through their purchasing decisions. For Bauman (2007, 48), the symbolic power of consumer society resides in its ability to “absorb all and any dissent it inevitably, in common with other types of society, breeds—and then to recycle it as a major resource of its own reproduction, reinvigoration and expansion.” Within a digital economy inciting influencers to promote overconsumption through transactional affordances (Manzerolle and Daubs 2021), deinfluencing symbolically rearticulates economic anxiety to differentiate specific forms of acceptable consumerism during the cost-of-living crisis. Deinfluencing thereby is as a “taken-for-granted popular culture form” that provides insight into “everyday recessionary culture” characterizing the current moment of socioeconomic turmoil (Negra and Tasker 2014: 3). Analyzing how deinfluencing circulates across popular media, both on TikTok journalistic framing, illuminates Bauman’s argument that consumer society reproduces representations and motifs when capitalism is most susceptible to critique. Refinery29 (Koster 2023) best illustrates this dynamic, arguing that deinfluencing is “not about mindful consumption. It’s not about sustainability. It’s simply influencing rebranded for the recession era.” Deinfluencing ultimately reproduces consumer subjectivities that places accountability on the individual to differentiate themselves by exhibiting the knowledge to know how to consume in a responsible manner. Critiques of overconsumption through the ease of platform e-commerce features and ideals of sustainability mediated by deinfluencing obscures the significance of the trend—that lower-end social media influencers, aspiring to achieve platform virality on TikTok, are now laboring as producers in economic recovery efforts.