Culture

The Extras Are Tired

People are getting more sick of influencers, even as the job becomes more important.

First published in The Atlantic on July 31, 2026.

by Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic

August 6, 2026 | reading time: 5 Min.

Less than a decade ago, when I was working on technology stories, my colleagues and I ran into an issue that I’m pretty sure had not occurred to the people who founded this magazine in 1857: how to style the word influencer, which was an occupation and cultural force, but one just emerging. We weren’t sure that all of our readers would know what one was, and we also didn’t know how exactly we would define the word ourselves. I spent the fall of 2018 sending a lot of emails about whether we needed to encase the word in scare quotes.