Influencers all the way down...

I watch a lot of cooking videos. Skill-focused ones mostly — knife technique, sauce work, the kind of thing where you actually learn something. But the genre has mutated.

Some of the chefs I follow have drifted into entertainment territory — stunts, collabs, increasingly elaborate production. Which, fine. Audiences reward what they reward. But it’s produced a specific phenomenon I’ve been watching with a mix of amusement and mild existential concern.

First came the crossover: different creators mashing up their channels to share audiences. Then came the reaction video — a chef on one side of a split screen watching someone’s chaotic home cooking attempt and responding in real time. Fine. That’s a format.

But now we have reactions to reactions. Someone reacting to someone reacting to a cooking video. The original cooking has become almost incidental — it’s just the substrate for a layer of commentary on top of commentary, all the way down.

It’s turtles all the way down, and at the bottom is a plate of pasta someone made in 2019.

I’m not sure what this says about where attention goes on the internet. Probably nothing good. But I’ll watch the next one anyway.