The landscape painter knows the difference between weather and climate. Weather is what crosses your canvas in an afternoon. Climate is what changes what you can paint at all. The painters of the early nineteenth century, working in the English midlands, lived through the slow conversion of common land into private mill. They painted, often without realising it, the last of a country that was about to be reorganised around the spinning frame. The conversion took eighty years. It was, when it happened, climate rather than weather.

The Manhattan Institute's Allison Schrager has, this week, given us a short and disturbing essay called "The Influencer Economy Has Crossed the Line". It is not, on its surface, a landscape essay. It is an economic essay, written in the dry empirical voice the Institute prefers. But read it twice and what you find is a landscape — a slow rearrangement of where people work, why they work there, what they call work, and what they expect from work — that is approaching the dimensions of a climate change.

The figure that arrested me, on first reading, is the share of young adult women in the United States who now report that "social media influencer" is their preferred occupation. The figure is not yet a majority. It is no longer a fringe. Schrager's argument is that the influencer economy has crossed a particular threshold. It has stopped being a marginal supplementary income source available to a few thousand telegenic outliers, and has begun to function as a structural employer of attention, time, and aspiration, across a substantial fraction of the young female workforce.

I sat with this for some time before I understood what it reminded me of. It reminds me of the slow draining of a particular kind of provincial Australian landscape in the second half of the twentieth century. The young left for the city, certainly. But the young did not leave for the city for the city's own sake. They left for what the city promised, which was a vocation. The country, no longer offering the vocation, became a place to be from rather than a place to be. The houses remained. The towns remained. The vocation had left, and once a vocation has left a landscape, the landscape itself begins to change in ways the eye does not notice for a generation.

What the influencer economy is, in Schrager's account, is a parallel evacuation. It is not the young leaving the small town for the city. It is the young leaving every actual workplace for the parasocial workplace, in which the worker is alone with the camera, the audience is imagined and inconstant, and the income is the small precarious yield of a thousand small parasocial relationships none of which resemble friendship. The painter's eye finds the picture immediately recognisable. It is the picture of a population that has been disconnected from a shared physical landscape, and reconnected to a distributed and synthetic one, in which the work is performance and the performance is the work.

Schrager is too disciplined an economist to pronounce on the cultural consequences. She catalogues the economic ones. The decline in the participation of young women in conventional entry-level employment. The collapse in the entry-level pipeline for the professions. The rising volatility of consumer demand as the parasocial relationships do the work that advertising agencies once did. The slow but observable redistribution of small-business revenue away from established firms toward what she calls "the influencer-adjacent attention vendor".

The Australian reader will recognise the climate, because the Australian young have been migrating to the same parasocial landscape at roughly the same pace. We have not yet asked, with Schrager's seriousness, what the consequences are for the country we are leaving behind. The country we are leaving behind is the country in which the apprentice trades, the entry-level office, the small-town professional firm, used to anchor a young person's first years of working life. Those anchors are weakening. The Manhattan Institute paper is one of the first economic essays to put a number on the weakening.

A painter does not, of course, change the climate by painting it. The painter does, however, remember it. The Schrager paper performs the same office. It records, for a future country, what this one was changing into. The country may, when it is ready, decide whether to like the change. The honest precondition of deciding is the noticing. The noticing is what the Schrager paper is for.