Whether they're fictional, "real", or "fake" is a meaningless distinction in this age, Baudrillard explained this to us a few decades ago. All the virtual influ

Whether they're fictional, "real", or "fake" is a meaningless distinction in this age, Baudrillard explained this to us a few decades ago. All the virtual influencer stuff is happening at a solely symbolic level, there's no 'real' underneath. You can have a meme and satire of a thing that never really existed, or maybe it did, or maybe the fake thing existed before the real thing, and so on. It's been the condition of modern communiciation for a while and in that sense it now happening openly and people creating jobs around virtual influencers really just makes sense.