There isn’t a day that I open TikTok and find myself with hundreds of mediocre videos (if not directly made with AI) accompanied by some absolute genius creations by the future filmmakers of tomorrow. No matter how hard it is for us to get used to it, there are absolute geniuses on the Internet, and it has democratized the system to enter Hollywood… although some stars still struggle to come to terms with it. And I’m not looking at anyone, Robert Downey Jr.
Iron Influencer
The protagonist of Iron Man and whom we will see as the ultimate villain of Marvel in Avengers: Doomsday has complained, in the podcast Conversations for our Daughters, about influencers, somewhat like the man shaking his fist at a cloud: “When I hear people talk about ‘Oh, the stars of the future are going to be influencers’ I think ‘I don’t know what world you’re living in, but I think that’s nonsense’“.
Downey Jr, in fact, clarified his words shortly after: “Nowadays people can create fame without doing much more than pointing their mobile phone. I don’t see it as something negative, but I do believe that the challenge of individualization is intensifying”. Or in other words: don’t come near my territory, I have a shotgun and I know how to use it.
“Hopefully, most of the youth will say ‘Okay, but this is not my thing. I want to do something, I’m going to do something, I want to build something, I want to educate myself and I want to receive more information, so that whatever I do, it’s not just something like what an influencer does who only seeks to glorify themselves“, says Downey Jr, who also seems tired of endlessly scrolling through Reels and thinking “Okay, but besides the best hamburgers in Madrid, what else is there?”.
The truth is that the actor knows what he’s talking about because he has it in his own home: “My 14-year-old son got into influencers, and the next thing is ‘Hey, if you like how I play this video game, do you want to send me a donation?’ and it becomes a religion. There’s something about today’s influencers, they are like the evangelical snake oil salesmen of the information age“. Nothing, Robert, just feel free to express yourself.
