Potemkin influencers, or success billed by the hour

In 1787, Grigory Potemkin is said to have erected the facades of prosperous villages along the banks of the Dnieper so that Catherine II, floating past on her barge, might survey a flourishing empire. The story is probably a piece of court slander. It has survived two centuries because it gets one thing right: all you need is a set, a single viewing angle, and a spectator who never steps off the barge.

The barge is now called a feed. The set rents for $34.99 an hour.

A private jet for the price of a tank of gas

In Los Angeles, FD Photo Studio rents out a stage set reproducing the cabin of a business jet. White leather, mahogany paneling, oval windows backlit to simulate the light at altitude. Rates run from $34.99 to $54.99 an hour depending on the slot. The studio makes no secret of it. It makes a selling point of it.

The story broke in September 2020, when a Twitter user noticed that the same seats kept turning up on accounts with nothing whatsoever in common. The space, in Boyle Heights, was then going for $64 an hour for groups of up to nine. Nine people: the set was being shared before it was ever photographed.

What matters is not the scandal but the wording of the listing. The package includes the artificial window lights, the makeup stations, and full use of the stage with no insurance and no permits required. Every administrative friction of the real thing has been stripped away. What remains is the image.

Moscow goes further, with an actual fuselage. Private Jet Studio sells photo sessions inside Gulfstream G650 cabins parked on the ground. In 2017, the press reported two hours for roughly $240, photographer optional, hair and makeup team on site, magazines, catering trays and bottles supplied as props. Chartering the same aircraft in flying condition cost more than ten times that. The plane that never takes off is ten times cheaper than the plane that flies, and photographs exactly the same.

In the United States, the platform Giggster lists this kind of set like any other rental asset. One vendor alone offers 16,000 square feet holding three aircraft, two cockpits, a helicopter, a Boeing 737 cut in half, and thirty thousand props.

An HBO documentary on what goes on behind Instagram supplied the one statistic that measures the market: the set was booked solid, around the clock.

The catalog

The jet is the most spectacular case. It is not the most common one. A complete supply chain for the lifestyle now exists, and a good share of it is French.

It starts with the location, which books like a furnished rental. Cast’Things maintains a catalog of châteaux and manor houses available for shoots, from an eighteen-hectare estate in the Ardèche to a Norman château built in 1878. We Are Scene describes itself, in its own words, as the Airbnb of filming locations, where a château is a few clicks away, and owners no longer even need a middleman: the Château de Janvry, thirty minutes south of Paris, opens its doors by the day.

Something has to be parked out front, and cars rent by the half hour. A twenty to thirty minute session in a Ferrari or a Lamborghini starts at 89 euros, and the rental firms name content creators outright among their clientele. Some skip the euphemisms altogether: Wedrivit explains that the aggressive styling and bright colors guarantee memorable photos and videos, described as essential for social media. One Paris offer goes as low as 199 euros, no deposit, booked by time slot, with a paid add-on for a photo shoot at the Eiffel Tower. The backdrop is an optional extra, priced like a collision damage waiver at an ordinary rental counter.

Once the château has been seen three times, you head down to the water, where the set becomes mobile. Bain de Lumière sells a photo cruise on the Seine: ninety minutes, 550 euros, private boat, skipper, photographer, ten retouched A4 prints delivered in an album. The listing is headed with the promise that the jet set is being democratized. The phrase is the vendor’s. It is also accurate. The point is not to join the jet set. It is to buy the photograph of it. A step up, a crewed yacht starts around 612 euros a day.

That leaves the wrist, the most revealing item of all, because it is handed over in person. L’Horluxerie rents Rolex Submariners, Panerais, Omegas, Cartiers and Audemars Piguet Royal Oaks from seventeen euros a day, against an uncashed deposit of roughly thirty percent of the watch’s value. Others work by monthly subscription. One procedural detail closes the loop: handover takes place in settings chosen for being quiet, discreet and luxurious, most often luxury hotels, over a coffee, the renter leaving with the watch already on his wrist. The staging does not begin at the photograph. It begins at the handover, and it is included in the price.

Nobody is hiding anything

Not one of these companies conceals a thing. They are registered, they invoice, they pay VAT, they publish their rates online, and most of them serve perfectly ordinary advertising and film productions first. The château owner deceives no one. The Los Angeles studio states in plain text that its jet is not a jet.

The lie, then, is not in the offer. It rests on a single omission: the customer does not say what he paid, or for how many minutes. The entire chain is legal, public, documented. Three seconds of silence turn it into a biography.

There is no forger here. There is a props manager, a renter, and a camera angle.

A bestiary of unauditable occupations

One question remains that the set does not answer. What are these people supposed to do for a living, to afford all this?

The list of declared professions is remarkably short, and its shortness is the real information.

Selling a company built from nothing. Never a buyer’s name, never a figure, never a date. And yet it is the single easiest claim to check: the companies register is public, a share transfer leaves a record, Pappers and Infogreffe answer in thirty seconds. Nobody checks. That is precisely why the line has been running on a loop for ten years.

The growth specialist. A vocabulary technical enough to intimidate, vague enough to commit to nothing. Revenue gets announced. Margin never does, and neither do the accounts.

Crypto and trading. The only line of work on earth where gains are demonstrated by screenshot, on an interface any browser can rewrite in three clicks. I have set out elsewhere why coding a crypto trading bot doesn’t pay, and why, beyond bitcoin, most of the sector amounts to a sophisticated scam.

AI-generated work. The newest layer, and the most telling: the marginal cost of manufacturing the proof is zero. A thousand portfolios overnight, and it now takes more skill to inspect a result than to produce one, as the gap between genuine and fake generative SVG makes clear.

The free PDF of invaluable advice. It is not a gift, it is a tollgate. The product being sold is not the document. It is the email address of whoever downloads it.

The common denominator is the heart of the matter. The baker produces bread, the carpenter a roof frame, the developer a code repository, the surgeon an operating record. These artifacts exist independently of the person claiming them: any third party can go and inspect them, without permission and without the author’s cooperation. The Potemkin influencer produces nothing of the kind. He produces an assertion propped up by a rented set. The difference is not one of degree. It is one of nature.

The choice of occupation is therefore not an accident of biography. It is a selection criterion. You declare yourself only in the trades no one can audit.

Cross-endorsement

Buying followers and comments is the crudest version of the trick, documented for a decade, and analytically dull. The interesting phenomenon sits one level up.

Among the photoless private profiles padding the counters are real, active accounts that genuinely comment, and that belong to Potemkin influencers themselves. The fake audience contains real members, and those real members are in exactly the position of the person they are applauding.

The mechanism is mechanical. A comments on B’s posts, B comments on A’s. A invites B onto his podcast, B returns the invitation. Each legitimizes the other before his own audience, at zero cost, with no verification ever taking place. Even the set is pooled: the Dubai villa costs eight times less when eight of you rent it, for a retreat whose only finished product is the group photo.

This is a system of mutually endorsed notes with nothing behind them. Each guarantees the other’s signature, no one brings real capital, and the whole arrangement holds for as long as nobody demands settlement in cash. A credit bubble, denominated in reputation.

It fails the way every bubble fails. When one link is publicly challenged, the others cannot defend him without exposing their own balance sheet. Hence the sudden silence, the quiet unfollow, the joint videos taken down. A reciprocal guarantee collapses, by construction, at the same moment as the debtor.

Gullibility is not the real problem

The comfortable conclusion would be that the public is naive. It would also be wrong.

A great many viewers know perfectly well that the Lamborghini is rented. They know it the way everyone knows reality television is scripted, and they watch anyway, because the set is part of the pleasure. Denouncing gullibility therefore misses the target: it treats as dupes an audience that is, to varying degrees, complicit.

That complicity is what locks in the impunity. The set is not the product being sold; it is the decorum around it. What is actually bought is the 1,200-euro course, cousin to the ones France’s CPF scheme funded at an open counter, the method, the closed club. Between the image projected and the contract signed there is no legal connection whatsoever, only an inference the buyer draws for himself. The seller promised nothing. He merely posed in front of something.

The modern con has outsourced the lie to its victim. It does not lie, it lets you conclude. No consumer protection statute reaches a mere pose.

A society where success rents by the hour

This is not a social question. It is an economic one.

A society produces signs of wealth in inverse proportion to the wealth it produces. When the last thriving industry is the staging of success, it is worth asking what success has become. The occupations that leave an inspectable trace, a machine, a building, a blast furnace, are the ones we stopped honoring and then stopped practicing. The ones that prosper are those whose output cannot be audited.

The Potemkin influencer is not a moral anomaly in an otherwise healthy system. With a studio at fifty dollars an hour, he is applying a method his institutional elders practice on a different budget: the startup that reports monthly active users rather than accounts, the investment plan announced three times before the first euro is disbursed, like the 700-million-euro patch Europe applauded, the summit that counts letters of intent and lets the press report them as signed contracts. Vanity metrics and announcements with no money behind them are a set rented by the hour. It holds until the day reality catches up with the storytelling, and on that day, nobody had stepped off the barge either.

He is the coherent product of an economy that has learned to prefer the signal to the thing, the valuation to the production, the announcement to the deliverable. Exactly the same movement as a country where China builds machines while France sells shares.

Potemkin, after all, was not deceiving the peasants. He was deceiving power. And power, delighted with the spectacle, never stepped off the barge.