Max Beauroyre

The very word follower conveys a sense of degraded personhood. The user’s existence is celebrated not for its independence, but as subordinated to the influencer. In the hierarchy of social media, the influencer is the queen bee, everyone else is the (appropriately named) drone bee or worker bee.

But in Mintz’s case, this is real behavior from real students. They have voluntarily abandoned their individual opinions and embraced the hive mind.

And the hive mind is available to all of them via Chat GPT.