“We would do things like host parties, and get no money, but free alcohol to have our name on the flyer,” Abascal remembers. “We were young and didn’t care. It was really a bizarre moment. We were essentially doing nothing. There was no music, there was no product, no regular event, no media content that we were creating. It wasn’t a podcast or a blog or anything. It was just friends partying and creating fake hype about their regular lives. Hence, clout.”
Now Yung Klout Gang has been replaced: The even younger Clout Gang, a group of YouTubers including FaZe Banks, Alissa Violet, RiceGum, Carrington Durham, and Sommer Ray, announced their affiliation with one another by tweeting out “#cloutgang” at the exact same time in August 2017. They’re even more famous, with individual followings in the millions, and they’re a much better business proposition, formed at a time when nobody influences for free. They live in a mansion, sell their own merch, run ads for major brands (and purported scams), and have estimated net worths in the millions.
Greg Selkoe, the president of the esports team FaZe Clan, with which Clout Gang is affiliated, studied cultural anthropology as an undergraduate and then got a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Cultural shifts, he says, are what get him out of bed in the morning. His definition of clout pre-internet is “the ability to influence, and to do things that others can’t do because of your reputation, money, or power.” Today it’s more simple: Clout is the ability to “get your message across and have it resonate,” and it can be measured in dollars.
“We embody the modern definition of clout,” he says, referring to FaZe Clan. “We have a number of members who have more followers than Tom Brady.” And while NFL fans might remember being high-school football stars while they sit in the bleachers, FaZe Clan fans can all see themselves ascending from their bedrooms one day to game with the best. “That’s why it works.”
When I texted my teenage sister for a definition of clout, she offered the synonyms hype, attention, and fame. Then she clarified: “usually short term.”
Social capital isn’t permanent or indestructible, but it is persistent—certainly not something that typically vanishes within hours and has to be built back up with a fresh stunt or a daily request.
“There was a temporal element to the way we thought about” Klout, Fernandez said. “Your score refreshed every day. People would always check their Klout scores on their birthdays, when their friends were posting on their Facebook walls or whatever.”
In 2019, he argued, “the world needs something like Klout more than ever.” Dynamic, possibly dangerous personalities accrue influence so quickly in today’s algorithms that an objective tool for measuring their impact is more or less essential for preserving democracy. That said, dozens of companies will help brands figure out how influential a person with a large Instagram following or YouTube subscriber base actually is, each using a different proprietary stew of metrics and boasting the truest sense of what’s “real.” Klout was just an ugly prototype with a bad name.
Every time the commercial internet tilts toward capitalist dystopia, there is, of course, still a fistful of reasons to feel okay. In “GOING TO THE CLOUT HOUSE | HE CAME OUT!,” a moving five-minute video made by a lesser-known teenage vlogger and his young sister (they both have spitty orthodontia and encyclopedic knowledge of more famous YouTube personalities), a member of the YouTube group Clout Gang briefly comes out of an enormous house in Los Angeles to accept a Postmates order, sending the video’s host into hysterics. He and his sister yell in shock, trying to explain the momentousness of the moment to some other random teenagers standing nearby (who do not care), then loiter in the presence of clout for several more minutes, pretending to shoot hoops in the Clout Gang’s basketball hoop, without a basketball, and wondering which other members are home. The sister, accepting a dare to walk into the garage, one-ups her brother to his delight by flossing for several seconds in front of it. “Oh no! Nooo!” he yell-laughs into the camera. They have so much fun! Arguably, more fun than they would have had if they actually had clout themselves—a lack that doesn’t seem to particularly bother them. It certainly doesn’t interfere with their day.
Clout is a winking approximation of a key Marxist concept. When kids who believe themselves to be on top of the world use the term, they tip their hand, exposing their deep-seated knowledge of how temporary it all is, and how zero-sum.
Eulogizing Bourdieu in 2002, the American sociologist Craig Calhoun obliquely apologized for this country’s resistance to many of Bourdieu’s most significant ideas—we do not like to believe in “class”—and complimented his critique of neoliberalism and of “the American model” of it in particular. As an intellectual born into poverty, able to change the course of his life only because of state-funded institutions and a society that prioritized the arts, society itself among them, Bourdieu was repulsed by America’s obsession with a weak, poorly funded state; its devotion to “the spirit of capitalism” and individualism; and its neo-Darwinism, crudely masked with its ethos of self-help and work ethic.
Bourdieu was a rugby player, and often used the game as a metaphor. “When [he] spoke of playing, he spoke of putting oneself on the line,” Calhoun wrote. “Social life is like this, Bourdieu suggested, except that the stakes are bigger. Not just is it always a struggle; it requires constant improvisation.”
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Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at
The Atlantic, where she covers technology.
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