One YouTuber named Patricia Bright, who has more than 2.8 million subscribers, has written a book titled Heart & Hustle, which promises “to show you how to hustle like I do”. Some influencers even offer teaching on how you can emulate their success. Often we do not even think of the most successful influencers as digital workers, since they market themselves as relationship gurus, financial experts and activists. Once you have figured out how to get people’s attention, you can monetise yourself as both product and salesman. It is in this climate that “influencing” seems a viable career, providing a potentially luxury lifestyle with a low entry threshold. And this was before Covid-19 struck and making money from home became the only game in town. As wages dropped and employment opportunities fell, our consumer spending got higher and personal debt rocketed. Graduate schemes disappeared before my eyes and the next decade did not live up to the promises made in the one before. We all know what happened next: the global economy crashed. In 2008, I was an economics undergraduate learning about how boom and bust had been banished. Since I left university, the economic promise made to middle-class millennials has turned to dust. Social media introduced a profit motive into our social lives, with a profound impact on the way we behave. Ten years ago, this pseudo-profession hardly existed, and now the highest-earning influencer, Kylie Jenner, can earn up to $1.2m from a single post on Instagram. Influencers with thousands or even millions of social media followers can convert their following into an income by making their feeds a living billboard or a peep show you pay to subscribe to. Today, that attention is increasingly in the hands of a new type of hustler. Over the past century, political parties and brands have spent vast sums of money on trying to get our attention and influence our decisions. Young adults and teenagers have been under more and more pressure to be successful, with fewer means to do so. In recent decades, aspiration has been heavily wrapped up not in what we aim to do, achieve or create, but in what we can afford to buy. The problem, certainly in my neighbourhood, was that it was aspiration itself, rather than the absence of it, that drove young men to desperate measures. When there were outbreaks of violence in urban communities like mine, the government blamed a lack of drive, and in 2007, it launched the Reach mentoring scheme, with the focus on “raising the aspirations and achievement among black boys and young black men, enabling them to achieve their potential”. “Aspiration” had become the political buzzword. It is unsurprising that the hustler was an inspiration to a student body of underdogs.Īt the time we started school, the prime minister, Tony Blair, was announcing his plan to create a knowledge-based economy, and his ambition to get 50% of young people through university. In the year I completed my GCSEs, 75% of my fellow students failed to get the five A*-C grades necessary to go on to further education. My school had a high intake of students poor enough to qualify for free school meals, but even the poor kids wore luxury streetwear. New-Era baseball caps felt like part of our school uniform. My friends and I wore American hip-hop streetwear: baggy Akademiks jeans, Fubu tops and Timberland boots. A Jamaican-born mother had died after her home was raided by police officers, a policeman was killed in the ensuing revolt, and the tension between the residents and the authorities has festered ever since.īy 2003, much of the area could have slipped with ease into the background of a rap video in Queens. My whole life, this corner of the city has been notorious for the anti-police riots that broke out in the 1980s. I grew up in Tottenham, north London, a multiracial area between the city and the Hertfordshire suburbs with a character defined by its then underperforming football club and its Caribbean, Ghanaian and Turkish Cypriot communities.
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