BACK in 2005 the television critic Clive James wrote an essay titled “Save us From Celebrity”. Among those aspects that bothered him was the fact that fame increasingly wasn’t linked very much to actual achievement. There was something in celebrity that was out of control by its very nature. “Our best hope," he wrote, "is that the celebrity culture is already discrediting itself. We should help it on its way downhill.”

Roll on over a decade and the version of celebrity that we have now looks even less like it’s based on any talent than a decade ago – that is if you don’t include the ability to grab attention and create a following as a talent. Far from rolling downhill, celebrity looks even more as if it has an excess of power in our culture. A tweet last week from Kylie Jenner, in which she dismissed Snapchat, saying, “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad” has been linked to a $1 billion-plus drop in Snap, Inc.'s market value.

Of course, much as a celebrity can break a company or product, they can make it. An Instagram post by Cristiano Ronaldo, the world’s biggest male social media influencer, made after Portugal defeated France in the Euro 2016 final was considered to be worth £4.2 million for Nike because of its timing and visibility. The post, an image of himself as the Eiffel Tower, was liked over 1.7 million times.

Meanwhile, Rihanna was declared the biggest style influencer of 2017 according to Lyst’s Year In Fashion report. What did that mean? It meant that she sent sent searches “soaring” for Puma, Off-White, Molly Goddard, Gucci and Raen.

And celebrities don’t just make us buy or not buy things, they influence what charities we give to and what activist causes we support. Think of George Clooney’s Enough Project to end violence in Africa, Emma Watson’s He for She campaign on gender equality, and the many celebrities who expressed support for Kony 2012 to indict war criminal Joseph Kony. Some part of why #MeToo became quite so big was surely down to the quantity of big name celebrities attached to it. In the United States, the country that does celebrity influence bigger than any other, a reality television star became President, following in a starry tradition trail-blazed by Ronald Reagan, and there is speculation now around whether talk show host, Oprah Winfrey, should run in 2020.

We live in the era of the influencer, in which what we buy is ruled by the Kardashians, the Hadids (models, Bella and Gigi), and a number of very high profile sports figures. Although the dark power of celebrity is most potent in the United States, we are beginning to see it creep across the world. People don’t become famous for writing a book, anymore, they become influencers online and then write a book.

So what is the source of celebrity power if it’s not exactly talent? Robert van Krieken, author of Celebrity Society, has described celebrities as embodiments of an “abstract kind of capital: attention”. They are the figures now at the centre of what is being called “attention economics”.

Some celebrities appear to have managed to bypass the cultivation of any other talent and just gone straight for the jugular of followers and attention. Influencers matter now because they are the people who make us buy things. And why do we buy those things? Because vicariously we feel we experience some of their glamour. They’re people we copy. They’re endorsers who prompt us to buy what they buy. And therein lies one of the problems with the state of today’s celebrity - their power to make or break a brand has vastly increased.

Of course some of the celebrities do actually do things. Rihanna is an outstanding singer. And many of the biggest male influencers are talented footballers. Cristiano Ronaldo made a $1 billion lifetime pact with Nike which is easily beginning to be paid back given it’s said that last year his social medial channels were worth £410 million to Nike.

Last year the first ever Instagram rich list was published, and it revealed what the most followed celebrities on the platform can stand to make from a single post. Selena Gomez made £400,000, Kim Kardashian West, £360,000. In fact, thereafter the list seems to be about the Kardashians and a few models, until we hit number 10 and NBA star, Le Bron James. It says a lot about what women are valued for, and what captures attention, that so many of the women in the list are models or reality stars.

Jenner's breaking of Snapchat is a sign of how much social media now revolves around celebrity and small collection of influencers. She was one of the early celebrities to learn how to use Snapchat to her benefit. But here she was posting a tweet which dismissed the platform. Of course, it wasn’t Jenner alone that broke Snapchat. It was its users influenced by the power of celebrity, many of whom, it must be pointed out, probably already felt similar to Jenner about the site. We must remember though, though, that celebrity is nothing if not fickle - Jenner was back on the platform within hours, posting: “Still love you tho snap… you’re my first love”. By last Thursday she was marking the one-month anniversary of her giving birth to her baby Stormi, with two Instagram stories and an identical Snapchat story of images of her baby and body.

Where she made these announcements mattered. After all, where celebrities post, others follow. When Beyonce announced her pregnancy on Instagram that gave the service a boost. Similarly when Kim Kardashian used Snapchat to take a swipe at singer Taylor Swift, she made the platform seem more relevant. People had to go to those sources to see the original texts or images - journalists started to use the sites more as they became sources of celebrity news.

One of the elements that has made celebrity, and the influencer, so powerful today is the platforms themselves. The social media companies have equipped celebrity with the means to endorse products, and also the data which allows them to negotiate with brands. One of the issues, around Snapchat, was that, compared to Instagram, it had held off giving these metrics for some time, making it the bogey of celebrities - because they couldn't parley it into money – for everything is data driven these days.

This power of celebrity has had certain effects. Fast fashion has grown in this culture, since people, on seeing a style item can instantly buy it. According to some studies, 85% of people are influenced by celebrity endorsements when making a buying decision. Boohoo, the online fast fashion store, reported that its profits doubled after paying celebrities to promote its products on Instagram to 16- to 24-year-old fans.

And it hasn’t always been clear when celebrities have been paid by brands for their endorsements. However, the pressure is now on celebrities and influencers in the US to clearly identify when they are promoting products on social media in return for payment. Last year the US consumer regulator, the Federal Trade Commission, sent letters to more than 90 individuals and marketing firms, with warnings. Advocacy group Public Citizen then said Instragram had become "a Wild West of disguised advertising". In 2016 the group called out 113 influencers, including Rihanna and Kim Kardashian for endorsing a product without disclosure.

But not all celebrities are comfortable with their relationship with social media. Even as they continue to rake it in, they voice their concern. One of the biggest influencers on Instagram is pop star Selena Gomez. But, last year, she took a step back from it for a while. Gomez said that looking at other people’s perfectly filtered lives made her feel bad about her own. Instagram was consuming her. “I see a disconnect,” she later said, “from real life connections to people, and that makes me a little worried. I do think social media is an amazing way to stay connected, to learn more things about what’s going on outside your little bubble, but sometimes I think it’s too much information.”

There’s a toxic element to this mix of celebrity and marketing which is driving up the sale of things that we don’t need, or might never otherwise consider getting. This aspect of the phenomenon has only grown since Clive James wrote his seminal essay. But even back then he was describing Celebrity Culture as “the free market run rampant”, advising that we need to make the argument against it. Indeed, there is much in his essay that is still relevant now. For instance, his observation, that there were, then, “millions of young people who, without qualifications for attaining the luxurious life of which they dream, nevertheless believe, and it is the only belief they have, that if they could find their way to the right tree, it would have money growing on it”.

That is still the case – and that 'right tree' now is a social media platform.