This reminds me significantly of Ze Frank's The Show back around 2007. I remember at the time thinking that he had tapped into something absolutely powerful, a persona feeding off of a highly engaged viewership. It felt like being a part of a special club and more of a participant than a viewer. The earth sandwich was a good example of that with someone putting together an antipode web tool and a follower's race to complete the first sandwich. I'm not sure what his specific inspirations were, but he definitely got a several year head start on what became an absolutely enormous social phenomenon.

In the future, we'll probably have "Her" style chatbots that are trained on a given influencer's persona so these parasocial relationships can be cultivated and monetized at scale.