I think a better characterization would be "status is not necessarily reciprocal"; the person evaluated for status does not need to be aware of the evaluators,

I think a better characterization would be "status is not necessarily reciprocal"; the person evaluated for status does not need to be aware of the evaluators, as long as they can leverage the evaluated status itself. I think this is exactly the property that allows for prosthetic status. But it also makes it much more game-able than the real, just-in-time, participatory status. In the case of a lord, the carrier of status is actually the title than the person who happens to be the lord at that time. Lordship is the technology that attempts to scale the status across time and across a higher number of people. The problem of giving what is ultimately dead-matter so much power is that anyone who can capture it can also use it, regardless of legitimacy. This is a perennial problem woven into literature and philosophy for centuries. The high-follower-count as a status technology is just a newer, planet scale version of this game, but it is not the ultimate status carrier either. The ultimate status is held by the tech company that can give the follower count its meaning. It is the immediate entity that can convince us to divorce status from its original, participatory meaning and to respond to its reduced form that is the number. It is the almost transparent medium where numbers and attention flow through, all of which it can ultimately can turn into money.