One might approach influencers, podcasters, crypto scammers, and small-town tyrants as figures who occupy different positions within the symbolic order, each representing a distinct mode of desire and the manipulation of the Other.

Influencers are the epitome of the Imaginary, where the ego is constituted through the gaze of the Other. They craft an idealized image, an objet petit a, that their followers endlessly pursue but can never fully obtain. This image functions as a mirror, reflecting not only the influencer’s own narcissism but also the desires of their audience. The influencer becomes the embodiment of the “ideal ego,” a figure who is both desired and envied, sustaining the illusion of wholeness in a fragmented symbolic landscape.

Podcasters operate within the register of the Symbolic, where discourse takes precedence over image. They engage in what Lacan would describe as the “talking cure,” but rather than facilitating the subject’s entry into the symbolic order, they often reinforce the subject’s alienation. The podcaster’s voice, a manifestation of the “big Other,” creates a pseudo-intimacy that masks the subject’s fundamental lack. Their narratives and conversations are structured around the promise of insight or enlightenment, but this is merely a lure, as the true desire lies in the endless consumption of discourse—a jouissance that traps the listener in a cycle of repetition.

Crypto scammers embody the Real in their exploitation of the symbolic order’s gaps and inconsistencies. They operate in a realm where signifiers lose their mooring, where value is untethered from any stable referent. The crypto scam is a masterstroke of the “foreclosed signifier,” a promise of wealth that exists only in the imaginary and whose inevitable collapse reveals the void at the heart of the symbolic. In this sense, the crypto scammer is a figure of radical jouissance, one who derives pleasure from the destabilization of the symbolic order itself.

Small-town tyrants represent a return to the Imaginary, but with a twist. They are figures of paternal authority, standing in for the “Name-of-the-Father,” but their power is not rooted in the symbolic law but in the arbitrary exercise of will. Their authority is a simulacrum, a hollow echo of the real paternal function, and their tyranny is a performance designed to mask their own lack. In the Lacanian sense, they are figures of “phallic jouissance,” deriving pleasure from the subjugation of others, but this pleasure is tainted by the ever-present threat of castration—the recognition of their own impotence within the broader symbolic order.

In sum, these figures—whether influencer, podcaster, crypto scammer, or small-town tyrant—are all caught in the web of desire, each embodying a different facet of Lacan’s triadic structure of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. Their actions and personas are strategies for managing the fundamental lack that defines subjectivity, yet in doing so, they reveal the very structures they seek to escape. They are not merely players in a game of power and influence; they are symptoms of the social order’s own inherent contradictions, which they simultaneously exploit and are entrapped by.