Agency of Influence

Content warning: quick mentions of suicide and depression

Spoilers: The Girl Who Was Plugged In, James Tiptree, Jr., 1973

In December 2022, Channel 4 in the UK reported on the very bad factory conditions of Shein (pronounced shee-in), a fast-fashion clothing company. Given that during Shein’s July Fourth holiday sale a plain t-shirt was on sale for $2.06, it’s difficult to imagine how the manufacturing process could possibly be safe for the workers or the environment.

But Shein says its operations are transparent and within the laws of the countries where it operates. To prove it, the company flew six influencers who have accounts on TikTok and Instagram to their “innovation center” in Guangzhou, China, to see for themselves. Videos posted by the women showed a clean facility with worktables draped with cut and partially sewn fabric, and staffed by smiling women in aprons. There were also videos of the luxury-level air travel, expensive hotel rooms, and elaborate dinners. The influencers made a point of saying they were not paid to post any content, and Shein made a point of saying it did not pay the women for content. But everyone agrees that the influencers did not pay for their travel, accommodations, or meals during the trip.

When the half dozen influencers posted their photos and videos of their Shein travel experience, backlash was fast and fierce. Their followers—and internet denizens who just love a good pile-on—berated the women for swallowing Shein’s line without being critical. Some of the women said they’d done their research and believed Shein to be transparent, then later posted again saying they did not do enough research and that this was a learning experience. One of the women was a designer for the company, not merely an influencer, and she noted that being flown to a company’s HQ and seeing the manufacturing facility was not at all unusual in her line of work. She left her videos up, and she received maddeningly typical death threats in the comments in addition to the usual social media insults.

Leaving aside the cultural horror show that is any social media comment section, the wider ethical question is one of agency and knowledge. What kind of agency can an influencer exert? What can she realistically know? When a company repeatedly publishes reports of its transparency, what kind of responsibility does an influencer—who is not a journalist or part of an oversight agency—have for finding the truth? In this case, the Channel 4 report had already been published, and a quick online search for “Shein factory conditions” turns up that report as well as others from the BBC, CNN, and Business Insider. So information was readily available without investigative training or an organizational budget.

The question of an influencer’s agency and knowledge was taken up in a sci-fi novella by James Tiptree, Jr., in The Girl Who Was Plugged In, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novella nearly fifty years ago, in 1974. In the story, a disabled seventeen-year-old girl named P. Burke is “rescued” from a suicide attempt by a company called GTX. She is plugged in, as the title says, so that she can operate a separate being, one created in a lab to be what we’d now call an influencer, from a clamshell in a lab “500 feet underground near what used to be Carbondale, Pa.” The company offers to introduce this girl from nowhere to her favorite boy band, Breath. The tradeoff is that she will never be able to see anyone again. She will be legally dead. P. Burke’s response: “Show me the fire I walk through.”