In the old days, the cool kids might sit on the steps by the gymnasium, and the nerdy Stranger Things-style kids in the AV room.

Cue stereotypes about stealing lunch money, being thrown into a locker, and all that jazz.

Nowadays, much of the flexing takes place online, and if you’re rocking a blue tick you’ve got bragging rights.

If you want to sit with the cool kids in Los Angeles, you’ll need 20 000 Instagram followers, or a verified account.

Seriously – here’s CBS:

In a town that that’s filled with selfie-friendly murals and that even has a museum dedicated to the narcissist in all of us, this one is on a whole other level of social media effrontery, at least for the Insta-laypersons.

VICE writer Justin Caffier posted a photo of himself in front of “a new security-guarded mural in LA that only allows influencers and verifieds to take pics in front of it.”

Here are the pictures from his tweet:

And the kicker:

It’s the modern-day version of the scene from Forrest Gump, when that kid goes ‘you can’t sit here’.

Also, was Jenny a bad person for taking advantage of Forrest’s reduced mental faculties? We digress.

Justin followed it up with this tweet:

This is probably my favourite bit – the account that runs the installation isn’t exactly killing it on Twitter or Instagram:

Perhaps it’s a meta-joke, in which case I applaud them for taking the piss, although you can bet some peeps are rocking up in the hopes of snapping a cool-kid selfie.

UPDATE: It is a meta-joke, and well-thought-out PR push for a new TV show:

Jack Wagner, one of the producers behind Like & Subscribe, told me that “the show itself is about influencers. The mural and all of the reactions are a very accurate and real-life preview of how ridiculous the show is”…

But as real influencers with six-digit follower counts hit me up for the mural address so they can get “ironic” snaps with it—and as I notice my own follower count climbing higher due my role as patient zero— I wonder how much good trenchant satire can do. Maybe this is just who we actually are.

These are the times in which we now live.

[sources:cbs]