Get Rich or Lie Trying: A Conversation with Symeon Brown.
MoMS spoke to Symeon Brown about his new book 'Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy' which exposes the fraud, exploitation, bribery, and dishonesty at the core of the influencer model, revealing a broken economy that resembles a pyramid scheme.
This conversation expands upon ideas running through MoMS' first exhibition, Andrew Warhola, which tells a story of the architecture of influence that informs our practices of consumption, relationships to brands, and concepts of celebrity.
Symeon Brown is a reporter and journalist at Channel 4 News and has been hailed as ‘the future of journalism’ and ‘imaginative, original, thoughtful […] a one off’ by Jon Snow. His Guardian long read on the ‘Wolves of Instagram’ was nominated for a 2019 Orwell Prize and shortlisted for a 2018 British Journalism Award. He won a 2018 Medical Journalists’ Association Award for his story on knife crime and the public health crisis facing the major trauma wards in London and was named as one of ’30 to Watch’ in MHP’s Young Journalist Awards. Symeon has written for a range of publications including Vice, Guardian, Huffington Post, CNN, New Statesman and The Voice. His essay on the commodification of culture in East London was published in Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space (ed. Derek Owusu) by Trapeze in 2019.
You can also listen to the talk in podcast form - available on all the usual podcast platforms.