Mikayla Nogueira has had an eventful year in the time since I last blogged about her and appears to have gone more “mainstream” as far as influencers can really go; I think this is largely due to humiliation practice and/or ritual but as we know this is programming that is endlessly useful for the ruling class, and her class – or her stratum or cohort with all its brainless trappings of “new money” – has grown to bask in this perverse masochism and enjoy it themselves. It helps that her mantra of “everythin’ is content” has also been widely adopted by impressionable minors and their dopey, absent caretakers and guardians – “parents” – who have left them to be raised by screens and therefore awful people such as her. Nogueira continues to prove that she is the ur-influencer or perhaps more accurately the template for influencing, particularly in the covid to post-covid times. Though individuals had similar trajectories in years past, she rose to infamy during the plandemic when masses more of people started to see their little dark electronic rectangles and their reflections in them as their true BFFs that continues on as a program today.

The limits to Nogueira’s reach as an individual influencer and people’s growing dissatisfaction with the genre she helped spur and create are being felt in 2026 like I hoped they would last year, but it’s still taking too long for my taste and really any hope we have of surviving as a people under the boot of empire in the core with any sense of democratic oversight and correction. Regardless, I still have faith this is an order that will fall. No, not through “multipolarity” or “declining empire”, but as necessity for expansion and total control they seek while we figure out how to resist and find ways to claw back; as a reminder, resistance to the covid order did happen, is still important, and this changed and adjusted the course the ruling class is still set on. Yes, much of it is still a shit show, obviously, but even in the infancy of 2026, I have felt that shift more acutely than during lulls in the program circa 2022-23. There is no going back. Things will further deteriorate and worsen, and we have to seriously look at the way in which we will have to unplug in a certain manner of speaking and what organization actually looks like outside of the thoroughly discredited DSA offshoot social media faux left, and that’s not to mention recognize what all we have lost since 2020.

Decent lefty complaints I commonly see online are about apathy toward antiwar/antiimperialist organizing. All apologies, but they, we, need to admit to our failures here, and much of that lies in understanding what has unfolded through the covid program. Everyone else is not failing what Left exists here; it is the other way around and that’s it when you claim you are the vanguard of the fight for self-determination and breaking the chains keeping us down, or at least trying to move toward that. It’s frankly disgusting that there are so many who claim to care about mass movement in the core toward Palestinian liberation and destroying the yoke of oppression from Cuba and throughout the Americas who in 2026 continue to ignore the level of dispossession covid imposed by force through lockdowns and all the mandates. Unfortunately, the workers who were harmed most in the core are further blamed by these supposed liberation seeking leftists — they are simultaneously ignorant and fully to blame for the ongoing wars against West Asian nations and peoples. This is illogical and bound to fail us into early graves if we are not evaporated into liquid dead biological material like scores of Palestinians already have been.

What does this have to do with one rough talking and equally roughly, prematurely aged Mikayla Nogueira? She is the face of “you will own nothing and be happy”, most notably the layer concerned with trapping people into debt through the markets of consumer products that hang on and must at this stage in efforts to perfect digital enslavement. Online influencers promote a level of consumerism and placation that younger generations recognize which is a form of class consciousness that needs to be expanded on and further developed. They do not believe that Nogueira and others have followings that are organically made up of millions of people; Nogueira alone boasts upwards of 20 million, but her engagement and true movement of product she advertises says otherwise. Regardless, she “founded” her alleged own cosmetics brand last year, “POV”, which is white labeled “landfill core” crap her limited audience is meant to subscribe to (preferably through micro payments as Nogueira’s bosses would have it).

She is yet another example of a ruling class darling “failing upwards”, admittedly in a newer, reinvented guise, but even this is as thin as the Temu paper mansions influencers have supposedly independently purchased with money only their paymasters actually make/print. POV was introduced as a five step (!) “skin prep” line that one is then expected to plaster over with makeup filled with god knows what. The next time you visit a drug or big box store on your regular provisions trip, take a good look at the cosmetics and skin care aisles. Skin prep is the latest and greatest! Thanks MikaylaJMakeup! What a contribution. And it is no different from the stuff her “TikTok shop” offers for at least $20 more per useless, uninspired, and unnecessary item.

Nogueira was the standard set forth once people were forced inside, jailed and surveilled in their own domiciles, and directed to “socialize” in only one direction. Influencer, aka “digital talent”, management firms continue to stress the importance of “creating relationships” (often referred to as parasocial). I don’t know if she ever had an organic audience who cared about her, but she was given a lot of eyeballs for being relatable, somehow, and not deemed “conventionally attractive” as she mastered her “artistry”. She was short and fat and pretty unfortunate looking but allegedly taught people to conceal their acne flawlessly. I don’t think her makeup has ever been that great, and as far as anyone knows, her only client has been herself. As she has developed as a digital product/brand, she has filtered herself to the point she is not recognizable between her online and “real life” versions of herself, of what is left of personhood in 2026. That is another part of the program.

Regardless of her “body type” she could be “shamed” (unfairly insulted) for including her profile and facial shape, she is an awful person, so these unfortunate aspects are only amplified. She has admitted to being “a catfish”, so many critics have started to see these imperfections as fair game, especially as she misleads minors she does in fact target and promotes body dysmorphia as desirable in having an “influencer career”. It is arguable that maybe she wasn’t always terrible before she was transformed into the ruling class butt baby abomination she is now and of course no one starts out that way. However, through written evidence uncovered by snarky snarking internet sleuths, MikaylaJMakeup has long held a lofty view of herself with a disdain toward others, even her own blood relation, based on shitty ambitious americanist jingoism and bigotry. Projects like her are certainly studied well before they “go viral”, so she was ripe for plucking to my mind.

Further, for all her “relatability”, she is a type of “beauty influencer” who represents a certain taste the ruling class has for “their women” which is nothing actually approaching beauty. (See also the monstrosity that is Lauren Sanchez, arguably the top of the ruling class faux-beauty food chain, ie hatred for women and revanchist, raw misogyny, and what they would have the women of the world aspire to.) Nogueira lies as easily as she breathes; she is vain and selfish; she is in fact ugly; she pathetically tries to align herself with visions of beauty she will never achieve through cosmetic procedures and surgeries that have aged her 20 years beyond the 28 she has spent on earth and cursed the rest of us with; she is otherwise physically ruining herself in pursuit of the former; she has no sense of style or taste; she exploits every aspect of her life for profit seeking including the people who tolerate her; and last but not least, she provides nothing of substance or anything resembling “content” a regular person in their right mind would want to consume.

She is also, unsurprisingly, wholly unoriginal. Nogueira’s heroine is one Jaclyn Hill, the 2010s beauty influencer 1.0 who clings to relevancy by way of Amazon affiliate link commissions the last I checked. If you can bear some AI-sounding narration at times and general YouTube creator schmaltziness, this video documenting Hill’s rise and fall provides in part the shocking transformation of her countenance — the gradual plasticization and mortification of herself that is her money maker. Nogueira has copied her attempts, her “raw” and supposedly relatable life dramas that she cycles through only to sell more product and keep as many eyeballs on her as possible, whether it is positive or negative attention. They also share a predilection for damaged men with substance abuse issues; Hill’s first husband was driven to fatal overdose left nearly penniless which her notoriety and craziness certainly didn’t help with, and Nogueira used her now estranged husband’s battles with sobriety and relapse for content regularly as if she owned him (one Cody Hawken). Her wedding did indeed go off as if it was a brand deal replete with influencer guests she was barely acquainted with on her rise to influencer-dom. The apparent 18 month contract was fulfilled, the ink is not yet dry on the divaws papahs, and the next beau is being used as marketing in her latest “collab” fragrance release. The cycle continues.

In addition to their drain on society, these influencers are clearly dangers to the people in their immediate orbit. I think that in some of the pseudo-analysis of what parasocial relationships are, the fact that everything is not perfectly staged gets lost. In other words, not everyone involved is “in on it” and human sacrifices are completely normal and expected, required even. Comparatively, we can look at the stage that actors, celebrities, politicians, and other traditional ruling class representatives inhabit and imagine similarly in part to cope with our own situations and that we are simply observers or spectators. With the encroachment of this carefully managed and curated flock of influencers replacing what was once only in the realm of Hollywood and cosmopolitan venues in exclusive (hyper-exploited) locations all over the world, we are being sold a bill of goods that this is somehow more democratic and representative of The People. There are fewer degrees of separation, and having spent lent away from microblogging and reflecting on being forced to think in one bourgeois framed topic to the next, disconnecting from that could mean life or death as conditions further deteriorate.

Next time, I want to look more carefully at the debt traps and schemes Nogueira and company represent. They affect generations who are now without any consciousness of life without digital imprisonment and surveillance. They make individual lives shorter and more miserable and work to ensure a tighter grip with indentured servitude being an ideal over slavery for “the rest”. The dead internet theory with its pitfalls and incompleteness in description of these mechanisms plays into it all as it is viewed by people with nascent class consciousness who need better guidance and not a new set of [anti-influencer] influencers as the netscape shifts and time runs short.