Anti-engagement
In response to algorithmic saturation, a new generation of creators is moving away from total transparency in order to cultivate mystery and cult-like dynamics.
Tuesday evening on Earth. I’m currently at Monocle Café in Paris. And it’s sunny.
The platform Patreon has partnered with the new social network Perfectly Imperfect to release a joint list of “Rising Stars”: content creators and connected humans who are reinventing the logics of influence and community.
Running beneath this initiative is the emergence of a new kind of influencer, one who cultivates mystery rather than total transparency. To endure, it is no longer about pleasing the feed, but about distributing one’s reputation through cult-like dynamics and using gatekeeping to generate intrigue, encouraging audiences to seek out a person rather than simply follow them.
Gatekeeping as a driver of intrigue, and therefore of search
Some creators have grasped this intuitively: platforms like Meta now treat them as raw material in service of their own feeds. In December 2025, TechCrunch noted that follower counts have never mattered less; the algorithm no longer rewards profiles, but instead evaluates each piece of content across thousands of criteria before distributing it to highly specific audiences. So how can creators reclaim control over their community and generate a form of audience retention?
Part of the answer lies in a subtle objective: creating a presence mysterious enough to prompt audiences to actively search for information about you, thus becoming a desirable and meaningful figure. In its latest What’s Next report, TikTok reminds us that one in four users begins searching within 30 seconds of opening the app. You have to exist within that behaviour. Paradoxically, being “searchable” has become the most effective way to be suggested by platforms. Mystery generates a cognitive debt the user feels compelled to repay by digging deeper.
To build this mythos, some influencers are beginning to apply rules of anti-engagement on social media: erratic posting rhythms, refusal to use dominant formats, aesthetics reminiscent of the 2010s, or the deliberate absence of daily-life documentation. In short, breaking the classic rules of social media engagement.
Sotce (pronounced “sought-see”) is a fascinating example. After one of her videos went viral on TikTok in 2021, filmed from a Buddhist monastery in India, she managed to rally a community of tens of thousands of subscribers on Patreon, monetising access to a spiritual and introspective method. A cult? A simple commodification of our desire for answers? Perhaps. Still, her distinctive tone, her protection of anonymity (only her first name is known), and a narrative style close to free or automatic writing reveal something of the future of influence. By locking down her identity and creating carefully controlled access points to her universe, she generates a powerful fascination, particularly among young women. They send her thousands of secrets via DM, much as one once consulted the Pythia. Sotce reads them and uses them as fuel for her influence system, in a candid and straightforward way that ultimately surpasses the usual pseudo-authenticity.
Along the same lines, we are seeing the rise of collectives and creators who never show their faces: so-called faceless influencers. This is the paradox of visibility: the less they show, the more people zoom in on details (a pair of shoes, a book in the background). This “microscopic” attention is infinitely more intense than the “macroscopic” attention of a user scrolling through 500 videos a day.
Gatekeeping also functions as a form of defence against AI. As it becomes easier for machines to copy abstract memetic genres and exaggerate them (cottagecore comes to mind), adding barriers and chaos starts to resemble a trap for artificial intelligences, forced to give up when faced with closed doors.
Distributed influence: aura rather than engagement
The advantage of becoming an aura, of offering a worldview, is the ability to break free from the constraints of reality and counteract social media fatigue. These new influencers are not followed for what they wear or consume, but for their architectures of thought. They do not expose a daily life; they circulate a presence. While lifestyle influencers perform a desirable, immediately legible reality, these new digital philosophers offer a way of being in the world. They provide a lens through which to understand what surrounds us, and certainly do not embody someone we would want to resemble.
Around them form paracommunities, bound not by identification with a lifestyle, but by resonance with ideas and deep aspirations. Their abstract images and elliptical texts require time to interpret. What one seeks there is not inspiration, but a form of digital vivacity.
Influence thus becomes far more distributed: by subscribing to a worldview, each member can absorb it, talk about it, and actively bring it to life. Every follower becomes both sponge and actor, allowing the influence to partially free itself from platforms by existing independently of them. The influencer becomes a centre of interest, an object of exploration, while imposing their own temporality.
In 2020, Aaron Z. Lewis published an important text explaining how our relationship to time online is distorted and reinvented. Because time is fragmented, the influencer becomes a “curator of chronology.” They do not live in the present of the news cycle or the trending topic, but instead draw from the past to create an atemporal aesthetic.
Thanks to the “perfect memory” of digital media, internet subcultures are able to create their own visions of past, present, and future (…) With nearly all of recorded history at their fingertips, they can cherry-pick interesting scraps of information from the archives and construct new grand narratives with unprecedented ease. And so, digital media has enabled a wave of “deepwater drilling” for obscure texts and long-forgotten histories.
— Aaron Z. Lewis
In an era where everyone can be seen, measured, and analysed, influence no longer lies in exposure, but in resistance to exposure. What captures attention is no longer what is shown, but what escapes, especially in the interstices. Influence is no longer built through the accumulation of content, but through the ability to open shadow zones dense enough to be explored. To become a quest. It is no longer the algorithm that leads the dance, but absence itself. A beautiful challenge.
To go further:
Stat of the week: +40%
According to internal TikTok data, the number of searches performed on the platform has increased by 40%.
Amazing links
I suggest meeting yourself (pretend this is a newsletter by sotce )
TikTok Next Trends 2026 (TikTok)
Enjoy! My second book is out in French. If you're interested and want to know more: just send me an email! If you speak French, I’ll progressively curate all press clippings / interviews / conferences around it on this page.
Feel free to share this newsletter, like, comment, or keep sending me emails: these notifications are a joy.
My previous book “Alive In Social Media” is still available on Amazon.
The gatekeeping-as-defense-against-AI angle is brilliant. When everyone's hyper-legible to algos, the only way to maintain human distinctiveness is through intentional opacity. What Sotce is doing with the Oracle model feels almost pre-internet in its mystique, but it works precisely because its so illegibile to platform logic. Had a friend try this appraoch on IG last year and their engagement tanked at first, but the people who stayed became way more invested.