"A Warning to the Would-Be Influencer" - PSA's Sunday Sound-Off: September 27th, 2026

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The Sunday Rundown

1. A Warning for the Would-Be Influencer 
2. ICYMI: The Psychedelic Silver Screen, Vol. 1 An interview with Scott Wright, Director of “The Next Chapter”
3. PSA NewsWire Highlights of the Week: September 27th, 2026

A Warning for the Would-Be Influencer 

By Keith Gilmore

The Nature of Influence

Living in the internet era, we are bathed in media reflections of ourselves from the moment our eyes open each morning. Day upon day unrelenting, we gaze into these twisted and beautiful mirrors served on an infinite scroll. So we have chosen.

In this epoch of social media, the truth has become clear: each of us maintains an inalienable role in directing the development of culture. We can transmit whatever we want to the world with a tap, and the world must receive it. No longer affixed to a certain station of social hierarchy—politicians, producers, landowners, etc.—having an outsized role in the directing of culture is more than ever possible.

The aspiring influencer sees this truth, or at minimum intuits it. The promise of wealth, of status, of celebrity—of influence—is the siren song that lures the aspirant to dash on the rocks of that promise’s revelation.

Influencer. It’s one of these bland terms of our moment—like content—that is so vague it can be applied to almost anything, yet so ubiquitous it carries the assumption of import. In the context of social media, an influencer is a person of perceived authority who, having amassed a following, affects other people’s behavior through his or her content, often for compensation. More broadly, however, an influencer can be understood as a person who affects the development of culture. Therefore, to investigate the nature of influence, we must understand how the force that we call culture operates.

Culture is the overlay upon nature that carries our collective knowledge, norms, worldviews, and technologies. In our nascency, we developed symbols and technologies to address the pressures of nature and encode hard-earned knowledge for posterity. This emergent collective enterprise has continued evolving alongside humanity every step of the way. Culture operates both as our student and teacher—its established and lasting patterns perpetually inform our behavior, while our pattern-making and -breaking behaviors continually determine culture. Through this dynamic entanglement with culture, we are engineering what is, in real time, at every moment. This is the nature of influence.

In the scheme of the cultural enterprise, each of us acts as an influencer; being internet-worked in culture, everything we do transmits changes in the cultural field. With the advent of social media, influencing has become a career path.

To become qualified, so to speak, for the career of influencer, one need simply breach some undefined threshold of influence via online follower count (follower being the troublesome term the social media architects have unanimously chosen). There is no assessment for fitness of managing such influence. There’s no guidance on what to do once that influence is amassed. There is no mention of the unwieldy responsibility that’s tethered to that influence by virtue.

The glamours of the influencer career are presented from every filtered and retouched angle. But the demeaning, demanding, self-eroding aspects are woefully under-expressed. What shadow realm lies under the pixel-perfect surface of this path, and what is truly at stake for those who undertake it?

The Burden of the Mantle 

If you become successful as an influencer, here are some dangers that await you.

You will be misunderstood and hated.

The more your name becomes found in people’s mouths, the more it will be uttered with a curse. Familiarity breeds contempt, the adage warns. It is not rational, nor fair. But the larger your extension, the more surface area you present for people’s projections. Prepare for a constant barrage of insults, screeds, and screamings into the void at your expense. A conveyor of shaming campaigns, targeted bullying, and scrutiny of weak points for takedowns will populate your comments section.

You will lose the simplicity of relational trust.

Whiffing your success, clout chasers will try to barnacle-ize you for the meager hope of being glimpsed in your shadow. Even those within your circles may parasitize you if there’s a chance of exploiting your influence for their own. The question of “Does this person want to be my friend, or does he want my influence?” will become a perennial quandary. Potential romantic partners will be filtered through the selfsame maddening lens. Transactional interactions will mushroom. Sycophantic flatterers will flood your DMs. The pressures of your role will blur into your life and entrap you inside of a hall of mirrors.

You will come to know the emptiness of celebrity.

Fame beckons the injured ego. The pain of the shamed or abandoned child sees fame as the ultimate salve. To finally be seen; to at last be adored. Of course, such a hollow thing can never substitute for love. Does anyone wonder whether, from within the hells where Genghis Khan and Hitler reside, their souls are gaining solace from their names still lingering on the lips of the world? Celebrity in itself is without merit, save for the merit of the marketplace, which dictates self-worth by metrics.

You will be responsible for the destruction or salvation of humanity.

This brings us to the heart of the matter. The wider influence one commands, the greater stakes that command entails. When you are posting a Facetuned picture to 5 followers, that deception may amount to very little disturbance. When your audience is 50,000, your doctored picture of perfection may be what tips the fraught twelve-year-old girl to self-harm. And this is simply one posting of one picture. It has become a bleak axiom of our time that depression, anxiety, and self-harm have sharply increased in the youth with the growth of social media. When you have the power to dictate or reinforce trends, every deception, rude comment, or rushed mistake becomes dire when untold impressionable children are watching.

So, for those who would station yourselves as influencer, it must be asked—Are you certain that is a mantle you want to appropriate? Are you prepared to be responsible for the directing of culture—the many-headed many-armed beast which bays in defiance of its would-be masters? Are you certain that it is a responsibility you want to take upon your already wearied-of-time-and-trauma shoulders—to exalt yourself as a guide for where humanity should dare to trespass? It’s challenging enough to live as a determinant of one’s own course. Do you wish to bear the burden of determining the course of all that exists?

It is not some prize to be exalted as one who influences. It is a path that carries grave responsibility. We are the world; what we do happens. The sense of abstraction between our actions and the state of the world is an illusion. If I am unkind, manipulative, or vitriolic for engagement, I enforce an unkind, manipulative, vitriolic world.

If we truly want to influence everything for the better, let us first recognize the reality that we are the ones who need to do it.

The Call to Integrity 

We cannot help but influence culture through our every action. And we can’t help but be pulled by culture’s influence. To create the type of culture we want, we must live the way we want our culture to be. Because cultural structures carry their own momentum, if we generate a healthy culture, it will continue teaching us to be healthy.

In the late 19th century, Nietzsche wrote on this matter in his aphorism titled “Who is most influential”: “When a human being resists his whole age and stops it at the gate to demand an accounting, this must have influence. Whether that is what he desires is immaterial; that he can do it is what matters.”¹ It is beyond time we recognize that we have the power to stop the sickness of our age at the gate. We can stop enforcing cultural modes that promote outrage or prey on insecurities for dubious reward. We do not need one more contrived avatar parroting poisonous cultural trends for online engagement.

The gifting of love and inspiration, the driving of tolerance and esteem, the creation of intrinsically meaningful creative projects, regardless of how and to what extent they’re received—these are the tokens of influence our world needs.

We’re snapping together a puzzle of eight billion human pieces. That would-be image of harmonious entanglement will never be completed in the absence of your offering. So please, wield your influence. If you desire, accrue an audience. And I implore you, do so with integrity. Give your whole heart to influencing all that exists for the betterment of all.

¹ —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Walter Kaufmann translation, p. 198

ICYMI: The Psychedelic Silver Screen, Vol. 1

An interview with Scott Wright, Director of “The Next Chapter”

“Aging, Ceremony, and the Limits of Documentary Form”

Produced in Partnership by Psychedelic State(s) of America and The Chronicles of Kykeon

In the inaugural episode of The Psychedelic Silver Screen, host Jim Tate interviews filmmaker Scott Wright about his new documentary, The Next Chapter. The film focuses on adults over 55 who are turning to psilocybin-assisted therapy to heal from decades of unresolved trauma, grief, and anxiety. Wright, who had his own life-changing psilocybin experience at age 68, explains how he purposefully avoided the psychedelic visual clichés of swirling fractals, choosing instead to focus on the raw emotional vulnerability of his subjects. A fascinating point raised in the interview is the generational paradox of the baby boomers: a group that grew up with little stigma around psychedelics, but a massive taboo against seeking mental health therapy, leading to a lifetime of suppressed trauma that psilocybin is now helping to unlock.

PSA NewsWire Highlights of the Week

September 27th, 2026

PSA NewsWire Highlights of the Week

Weekly dispatches from across the psychedelic landscape.

📜 Law & Policy

A PSA Original

DEA Renews Push to Ban Five Psychedelic Compounds Despite FDA Research Progress

By Jack Gorsline

💰 Business

Ibogaine Supplier Files FDA Citizen Petition

🎨 Culture

From our friends at DoubleBlind

What Cosmic Diplomacy Taught Us About Science at the World Ayahuasca Forum

By Glauber Loures de Assis, Raine Piyãko Ashaninka, Adana Omágua Kambeba, Jairo Lima, and Cristiane De Bortoli

💊 Science & Research

From our friends at Marijuana Moment

Federal Watchdog Agency Says Drug Scheduling Process Has ‘Gaps’ As DEA’s Marijuana Review Continues

By Tom Angell