By Marco Shalma

I went to the inauguration block party out of curiosity, not out of support or opposition. I wanted to see the temperature. What I saw wasn’t a movement. It was a migration. There was something off about that block party. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, unsettling way. A thing you feel before you can fully explain it.

And then it clicked.

I recognized dozens of faces. Not politicians. Not organizers. Influencers. Food influencers. Culture influencers. Lifestyle influencers. People who built large followings telling New Yorkers where to eat, what to drink, what was “worth it,” and what to skip. People who spent the last decade monetizing attention.

They were all there. Posting. Amplifying. Performing alignment. That was the moment the pattern became impossible to ignore. The food influencer era didn’t end. It relocated.

For years, influencers told us they were celebrating restaurants. Supporting small businesses. Elevating culture. In reality, most of them were running arbitrage on attention. Free meals for reach. Access for optics. Content for clout. When that ecosystem started collapsing, they didn’t disappear. They pivoted.

Now they’re doing the same thing to politics. This is not about who they support. That’s the trap. This is about how they operate. Influencers are not informed actors. They are distribution machines. Their skill is amplification, not understanding. They move volume, not nuance. In food, that mostly resulted in overrated meals, inflated lines, and burned operators. Annoying. Expensive. Fixable.

In politics, the cost is higher.

Food influencing trained a generation of people to confuse visibility with value. Loud with good. Popular with right. Viral with true. That logic never belonged in the restaurant industry, and it definitely doesn’t belong anywhere near civic life.

I know how this works because I’ve been on the receiving end. We’ve been approached. Asked to amplify. Asked to lend legitimacy through food and culture channels. We declined. Not because of ideology. Because food and culture are not props. They’re infrastructure. When you cheapen them, you hollow out trust.

That’s the part influencers never understand. Trust is slow. Attention is fast. They optimize for the fast thing every time.

During the peak influencer years, restaurants were turned into content farms. A new opening didn’t matter unless it photographed well. A dish didn’t matter unless it popped on camera. A place could be packed for three months and dead by month four. The influencer moved on. The operator ate the loss. That behavior was structural.

Influencers are incentivized to move on quickly. Depth kills reach. Accountability kills momentum. Staying with something after the hype dies offers no upside. Now take that exact behavior and apply it to local politics.

A rally becomes a photo op. A candidate becomes an aesthetic. A slogan becomes a caption. Complexity disappears. Consequences don’t trend. The influencer gets their content and leaves the rest behind. The most dangerous part is that it feels civic. It looks engaged. It reads as progress. But it’s empty calories.

Food influencers never had to live with the consequences of the restaurants they hyped and abandoned. Political influencers won’t live with the consequences of the policies they amplify either.

The same people who spent years flattening neighborhoods into “top ten lists” are now flattening political realities into shareable frames. They don’t know zoning law. They don’t understand municipal budgets. They haven’t run payroll. They haven’t dealt with inspections, permits, compliance, or enforcement. But they know how to post.

And posting feels like participation.

New York is especially vulnerable to this because it already confuses culture with credibility. We reward volume. We mistake confidence for competence. We assume that because someone has an audience, they’ve earned authority.

That assumption has already cost the food industry dearly.

Neighborhoods were turned into backdrops. Restaurants were reduced to content stages. Operators were pushed to chase trends instead of serving their communities. The result was burnout, closures, distrust, and a public that no longer believes recommendations. Now the same playbook is being deployed somewhere it shouldn’t be.

I’m not saying influencers shouldn’t have opinions. I’m saying they shouldn’t be treated as guides. There’s a difference. Most influencers didn’t build their platforms by being right. They built them by being early. Early to trends. Early to moments. Early to narratives that traveled well. Accuracy was optional. Accountability was nonexistent.

That model breaks down fast when you apply it to governance.

Local politics is boring on purpose. It’s slow. It’s technical. It’s full of tradeoffs. It requires institutional memory. Influencers thrive in environments that reward certainty and punish hesitation. Politics demands the opposite. When influencers flood political spaces, the incentive shifts. Substance loses to spectacle. Policy loses to posture. The loudest message wins the frame, not the most workable one.

You can already see it happening. Complex issues reduced to slogans. Hard questions avoided because they don’t test well. Anyone asking for nuance labeled as obstruction.

They call it progress. I call it branding.

Food culture taught us what happens when branding replaces craft. We ended up with overpriced mediocrity defended by vibes. Now we’re watching the same logic attempt to rewrite civic life.

I don’t believe most of these influencers are acting in bad faith. That’s almost worse. They genuinely think amplification equals contribution. That posting equals participation. That alignment equals understanding. It doesn’t.

Being loud about something you don’t fully understand doesn’t make you engaged. It makes you useful to people who do understand and need distribution. That’s the part everyone keeps skipping. Influencers don’t set agendas. They carry them. They are attractive to political movements precisely because they don’t ask hard questions. They’re easy to onboard. Easy to brief. Easy to mobilize.

The food world learned this the hard way. We watched creators take checks from brands they didn’t believe in. Promote places they never returned to. Defend bad meals because access mattered more than honesty.

Now imagine that behavior scaled into politics - That’s not a left problem or a right problem. That’s an attention economy problem.

New York cannot afford another layer of unaccountable amplification pretending to be leadership. The city already struggles with policy made far away from consequences. Adding influencer logic to the mix makes that worse, not better.

Food influencers are especially dangerous here because they already occupy trust lanes. They speak in the language of neighborhoods. Culture. Community. Care. That language carries weight. When it’s misused, it does real damage.

We should have learned this lesson already. The influencer era didn’t elevate food culture. It extracted from it. It burned goodwill. It shortened lifespans. It rewarded spectacle over substance. Now that era is hunting for its next revenue stream. Politics is the new restaurant. That should worry everyone, regardless of where they stand.

If you care about this city, you should be suspicious of anyone whose primary skill is attention extraction telling you what progress looks like. You should be cautious of movements that rely more on reach than rigor. You should question why the same people who flattened food culture are suddenly positioned as civic guides.

New York doesn’t need more amplification. It needs more friction. More questioning. More people willing to say they don’t know yet. The influencer playbook has no patience for that. We can survive bad meals. We can’t afford bad governance wrapped in good lighting.

The food influencer era is over. The question is whether we let it quietly rebrand itself as civic leadership, or whether we finally draw a line and say no.

Not here. Not like this.