Global Heartthrob or Geopolitical Tool? Inside Noah Centineo’s Worldwide Reign of Soft-Power Romance
Noah Centineo and the Soft-Power Romance Industrial Complex
A field report from the Department of Global Heartthrobs and Geopolitical Fluff
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the 13th arrondissement’s last surviving DVD store, a gaggle of Korean exchange students is reenacting that locker-kiss scene from “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” Their TikTok hashtag (#CentineoInSeoul) has already been viewed 9.4 million times, which is roughly the population of Switzerland. If you think this is merely a teenage pastime, allow me to disillusion you gently: Noah Centineo—actor, ex-Disney Channel benchwarmer, and walking ASMR voice box—is now a transnational strategic asset, more reliable than most IMF forecasts and only slightly less leveraged.
Consider the evidence. When Netflix dropped “TATBILB” in 2018, the Turkish government briefly debated banning the film for promoting “premarital correspondence,” a phrase that sounds like a Cold War euphemism for espionage. In Lagos, street vendors sell bootleg Blu-rays labeled “Noah – Pure Romance, No Nollywood.” Meanwhile, in Warsaw, a conservative Catholic youth group uses Centineo’s face on pro-chastity posters, apparently unaware that his on-screen kissing has launched a thousand spin-cycle fantasies across three continents. Soft power, like soft-serve ice cream, melts fastest in unexpected climates.
The economics are equally surreal. A 2022 UNESCO white paper (yes, UNESCO now studies teen idols; budget cuts make strange bedfellows) estimates that Centineo-adjacent memes, GIFs, and reaction videos contribute $0.74 annually to global GDP per capita. That’s not a typo. While economists in Frankfurt debate negative-yield bonds, teenagers in Jakarta are minting micro-economies off Noah’s left eyebrow. If this strikes you as dystopian, congratulations—you’re still capable of moral outrage. Cherish it; it’s a dwindling resource.
Of course, every empire needs its frontier. Centineo’s latest project, a real-life spy series for Amazon where he plays a CIA hacker who looks like he’s eternally en route to Coachella, is being filmed in four languages across five countries. Ukrainian boom operators, Moroccan extras, Colombian stunt drivers—all exchanging WhatsApp voice notes that begin, “So, apparently Noah is actually nice?” This is globalization at its most surreal: a supply chain of abs and affability.
The darker subplot involves data. Netflix’s recommendation algorithm has learned that a viewer in rural Peru who binges “Narcos: Mexico” will, with 87% certainty, click anything featuring Centineo next. The platform calls this “emotional palate cleansing”; anthropologists call it “cultural insulin shock.” Either way, the result is a planetary feedback loop in which geopolitical trauma is soothed by symmetrical cheekbones. Bread and circuses, but make it gluten-free and streaming.
Europe, ever the reluctant hegemon, has responded with characteristic bureaucratic panic. The EU Parliament’s Committee on Cultural Sovereignty—yes, that’s real, and yes, they meet in Brussels—recently proposed a tariff on “algorithmically amplified foreign heartthrobs.” The draft text specifically cites Centineo, alongside Timothée Chalamet and one stray K-pop idol. Lobbyists for the Motion Picture Association countered that regulating cheekbones would violate WTO rules. Somewhere in Geneva, a trade lawyer is billing €900 an hour to draft the phrase “non-tariff aesthetic barriers.”
Meanwhile, climate change continues, democracy backslides, and micro-plastics colonize our bloodstreams—but at least we have Noah, the human weighted blanket. His latest Instagram post (shirtless, holding a reusable water bottle, captioned “hydrate or diedrate”) garnered 3.2 million likes in the first hour, temporarily crashing a server farm in Singapore. That’s the same nation currently rationing water due to drought. Irony, like plastic, is forever.
Which brings us to the inevitable question: Is Noah Centineo a symptom or a cure? The answer is yes. He is both the fever dream of late capitalism and its most effective palliative, a one-man International Monetary Fund of serotonin. If civilization collapses tomorrow, the last thing flickering on a cracked iPhone screen will be his dimpled smile promising that love, like bandwidth, is unlimited.
And honestly? We could do worse. Historically, we have.
