Dystopian Fame
Technology just moved the freak show right to your phone
We live in a strange new world. Every day we see people emboldened by new and creative ways to battle it out in the digital coliseum for space on our feed. The ultimate goal of the content creator is to usurp the algorithm and conquer our screens in pursuit of virality, attention, and hopefully riches. The democratization of communication technologies has given people unprecedented access to launch their own platforms, so where in the 1700s, one might have had to venture into a Freak Show to witness the sheer strangeness of humanity, one can just log onto Instagram or TikTok to see people like the Island Boys or Hasbullah. “Step right up and see the twisted, terrifying, tattooed twins! They’ll do anything to reclaim their 15 minutes of fame, they’ll even make out with each other!” The incentive structures of our economic system as well as our social media landscape have created a beast that influences people to act out in extreme manners. Some of them are simply playing a game of rage-baiting. Some of them are just victims of audience capture, unable to do anything else that may disturb their cash flow and platform. Just ask Nikocado Avocado, the muckbang YouTuber who became morbidly obese after years of intense content creation.
The most successful lot of creators are masters of the algorithm and understand human psychology on a deep, fundamental level. Look at the case of Adam 22 and Lena the Plug. Adam 22 posts pictures from their beautiful destination wedding on Twitter, and simultaneously his wife’s page has a pinned tweet with a trailer of her new porno where she’s getting railed by another dude. The internet erupted, he’s been mocked, ridiculed, shamed, memed, etc. but the video ended up getting tens of millions of views. Now obviously this was all pre-meditated to drive engagement and revenue for their respective content businesses, but at what cost? Is it worth it? These are the questions people are increasingly not asking themselves in favor of increased attention and money. It is truly wild to witness the influence of American capitalism on human behavior in the age of social media. Increasingly as basic needs are met and standards of living rise, I feel that our obsession with status and differentiation is also growing to unprecedented levels, and it seems like people value status and attention as much if not more than money. Consider the freakish reaction to the Subway Sessions girl. Accusations of thin privilege and white privilege because of her apparent success in hijacking the algorithm with mediocre outfits, when in reality it was her mediocrity itself that slingshotted her into the TikTok FYP. The reason she gained so many followers in just a few days is because of the digital rubbernecking we all do when we see something weird. Her outfits are strange and unhinged, but she seems to also know what she’s doing. It’s bait. It’s like looking at a car crash. What’s concerning is that people are envious of a person gaining a meager 30k followers when it wasn’t even for the right reason. This is the reality of our current dystopia. Fame, infamy, it doesn’t matter, many are simply after attention no matter what it costs or how they got it. People place so much value on meaningless social media metrics like follower numbers without fully acknowledging the burdens that come with it. How do you retain the status and keep the growth up? What kind of tactics will you end up resorting to in an effort to maintain the little relevance you seem to have? We’ve brought the circus and the Freak Show right to our mobile phones where people without a discernible skill or talent can broadcast their deranged behavior so I can watch while I’m taking a 45-minute shit at work.
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"The metaphysical mutation that gave rise to materialism and modern science in turn spawned two great trends: rationalism and individualism. Huxley's mistake was in having poorly evaluated the balance of power between these two. Specifically, he underestimated the growth of individualism brought about by an increased consciousness of death. Individualism gives rise to freedom, the sense of self, and the need to distinguish oneself and to be superior to others. A rational society like the one he describes in Brave New World can defuse the struggle. Economic rivalry - a metaphor for mastery over space - has no more reason to exist in a society of plenty, where the economy is strictly regulated. Sexual rivalry -a metaphor for mastery over time through reproduction - has no more reason to exist in a society where the connection between sex and procreation has been broken.
But Huxley forgets about individualism. He doesn't understand that sex, even stripped of its link with reproduction, still exists - not as a pleasure principle, but as a form of narcissistic differentiation. The same is true of the desire for wealth. Why has the Swedish model of social democracy never triumphed over liberalism? Why has it never been applied to sexual satisfaction? Because the metaphysical mutation brought about by modern science leads to individuation, vanity, malice, and desire. Any Philosopher, not just Buddhist or Christian, but any philosopher worthy of the name, knows that, in itself, desire - unlike pleasure - is a source of suffering, pain, and hatred. The utopian solution - from Plato to Huxley by way of Fourier- is to do away with desire and the suffering it causes by satisfying it immediately. The opposite is true of the sex and advertising society we live in, where desire is marshaled and blown up out of all proportion, while satisfaction is maintained in the private sphere. For society to function, for competition to continue, people have to want more and more, until desire fills their lives and finally devours them." - Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
What Michel Houellebecq was getting at here in this passage from The Elementary Particles, is that even in a dystopian society like the one from Brave New World where economic and reproductive needs are eliminated, Aldous Huxley didn’t consider the natural rivalrous behavior intrinsic to humanity. Inherent in this passage is the simple observation that people must feel above others in some way. Hierarchies will persist. And it’s this intrinsic aspect of human nature that’s facilitating an environment that pumps out dystopian content creators consumed with rising above the pack and smashing their way into our algorithms like a bull in a china shop. In Brave New World, the government advocates for increased sexual promiscuity as a means to oppress people; a lack of real connection, love, and strong bonds to others creates full allegiance to the state. Huxley posits that decoupling sex from procreation would eliminate all sexual rivalry, but modern hookup culture, devoid of love or bonds, is equally a narcissistic status game in which people jockey for a position on an attractiveness-based sexual hierarchy as much as it is a pursuit of pleasure. Furthermore, the pursuit of wealth wouldn’t just go away if we lived in a society where all of our basic needs were met. Our appetite is limitless, we’re programmed to be unhappy with the way things are no matter how good it actually is. As more and more of our immediate needs are met and levels of comfort rise, people will be growingly motivated by status differentiators.
In a highly individualistic and capitalistic American society, the obsession with status along with a very human tendency for narcissistic differentiation drives people to behave in unbelievable but largely entertaining ways. And in the digital age where people are incentivized to spend more time entertaining one another, the lengths they’re willing to go to build an audience is concerning. I’m not particularly bothered by people like PinkyDoll, the famous content creator who went viral for her “Ice Cream So Good” NPC interpretation. She’s mostly harmless and it’s genuinely funny. However, this behavior of applying an “any means possible” approach to virality is corrupting people’s souls in a disturbing way. We don’t need any more pranksters or absurd street “interviewers” on our endless TikTok scroll.
Some people, like *cough cough* The Island Boys *cough*, are sick fucks who resort to making out with each other to get back on our feeds… (they’re twin brothers btw). This is the world we live in now. People are willing to do anything and everything to get fame and fortune. We’re seeing this kind of attention-seeking leak into the fashion world too. I’ve touched on this topic in the past along with many other people but runway shows are increasingly focused on being a spectacle. People like Tommy Cash go viral for dressing up like a baby and having his bodyguard push him around in a stroller. Tommy blurs the line between performance art and dystopian fame-seeking pretty well, and I admire his creativity, but not everyone is as creative or funny as he is. Most people in fact don’t have taste and tend to apply this burning car wreck approach to their content, which works! Don’t get me wrong. But it’s just bad for them and bad for society. It seems like a lot of people also want to be famous without anything to show for it. One of the cruelest existences I can imagine is being broke and famous, wandering the world with some semblance of fame but still living paycheck to paycheck and getting the occasional “hey aren’t you that guy on the internet.”
You’re scratching at it.