Our Social Media Maven on Why TikTok Celebrity is Already Wearing Thin
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“When disaster strikes, and all hope is gone, read the Wag. You’ll be right as rain.”—Ernest H. Shackleton
Youth, everybody knows, is wasted on the young. It’s also a ruthlessly exploited commodity. That’s been true at least since ancient Greece, but modern Los Angeles has perfected the strip-mining of innocence on an industrial scale.
Take Collab houses—those McMansions where would-be influencers cohabitate and crank out content to boost their profiles. They’ve been around for at least a decade, but proliferated during the pandemic. In January, that trend spawned a Netflix reality series, Hype House, about the most storied of these places.
Reality TV is a codger’s narrative form, and Hype launched in 2019, so it’s likely not the red hot center of the video-sharing universe. (When a youth culture phenomenon has been exhaustively covered by the New York Times, it’s over.) Collab houses may have peaked, but they speak to the eternal hustle for fame—on TikTok and everywhere else.
This isn’t a condemnation of social media. It’s an indictment of human beings, who keep devising ever more ingenious ways to exploit one another. Great artists and art may eventually blossom on new platforms. But we’re going to chew through a lot of promising lives to get there.
August 13, 2024
