Blockout Drunk

The Backlash Against Celebrities is Heating Up

“Give the finger to the rock n roll singer

As he’s dancing upon your paycheck”

— Beck, “Pay No Mind (Snoozer)”

@fiorellaxcbto all the innocent lives lost - may you rest in paradise angels. 🍉✊🏼 • • • • #metgala #metgala2024 #metgalabestoutfits #metgalatheme

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Hollywood may soon have its own day of infamy: May 6. The Met Gala literally took place in Manhattan but it unwittingly became a vista into two different worlds: Hollywood (the out-of-touch celebrities that walked the red carpet) and Rafah (which Israel attacked in spite of a cease-fire deal on the table). The TikTok video above (and many others like it) went viral for the sharp contrast of the two worlds. So viral, a movement was inspired by it: the celebrity blockout.

@blockout2024You can also block news outlets that clickbait and artists on spotify

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Celebrities upcoming and established are participants in the online attention economy. Starving them of attention by blocking them could do some damage. Kim Kardashian, the first target, was someone I, as well as many people in the movement, did not follow.

@nick.celeb.strike#stitch with @PabloArtic Our first mass block assignment is Kim Kardashian! I’m seeking feedback on the demands, so put any ideas in the comments! #fyp

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That’s irrelevant. Not following them means not drinking from their faucet. Blocking them (which I, like many, had no idea you could even do) means turning off their faucet. I have not been to one protest, but I blocked Kim Kardashian on all the platforms. It felt gratifying putting her in the same class as spambots and creeps.

Seems like I wasn’t alone in this. Kim Kardashian lost 3 million followers overnight.

@johahn.co @johahn.co ♬ original sound - Julia LeFrancois 🍉

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Just so we’re clear, even though blocking Kim was easy, I have been a celebrity worshiper for more years and with more gusto than I have been any other kind of worshiper. From another era, of course. The ancients from my time and way before. My last piece was about how the alt-left would need a bumper crop of new celebrities to have any real impact on society, let alone culture.

But May 6 wasn’t only a day of infamy for celebrity culture. It was also the day a spell was broken for me. From my May 6th Note:

This is truly one of the best posts I have read in a while. It goes beyond whether I agree or disagree with its central point (that the pro-Palestine movement does not and will never need celebrity support). Beyond, as in I am struck with a way of thinking that is truly alien and foreign, yet potentially liberating and exciting. I read a previous post from Sara that also hit me between the eyes…I needed days to process it. This new post’s argument…as many of you know, I am obsessed with the ‘60s and I have had a not-so-secret desire to take the best parts and leave behind the worst parts. I am starting to wonder if it might be true that one of the many big mistakes then was the divinity that the counterculture afforded sympathetic celebrities.

One massive difference between the 60s and now is we saw how celebrities lived during COVID. We saw how out of touch laptop class Atlantic staffers were, assuming that the reader was WFH like them.

I truly don’t know what my next piece will be but as for my last piece…fuck it, neoreactionaries. Chase all the clout, coke and crypto. To paraphrase a legendary artist who was never a “celebrity,” we’re evolving over here.

That legendary artist was Bill Hicks. ¹ The writer I was gushing about,

Sara

Sutterlin, writes a great Substack called Realism Confidence. Through two posts, she helped break my obsession with fame. The first one, which I read back in August, on the narcissism inherent in creating art in our current capitalist hellscape, stopped me in my tracks from chasing my own dreams of fame. I finally recognized the extent to how ego driven all my pursuits were. My pursuit to be a poet when I was 21. My pursuit to be a comedian for more than a decade. My focus on making a dent online from 2019 to 2023.

And this Mo? This free Substack that has no paywall so everyone can read it?

I am not looking for fame or recognition through here. That is why I maintain I have had by far the most attention and recognition here. But I’m not here to give inspirational writing tips.² Let’s look at the second post that broke my obsession with fame. From September to this past Monday, I sublimated my own desire for fame by living vicariously through other celebrities, online and in Hollywood. My hope was that any celebrities with online clout who pushed the alt-left or just the countercultural spirit in general would represent me much like many New Yorker underdogs are currently hoping a Knicks victory this year would validate their struggle. But just like the Knicks don’t care, neither do any of the simpatico clout magnets.

From the aforementioned post:

Once content or valor has been carved out, once they’ve been Witnessed, people like AOC or Hasan Piker pack it up and return to their comfortable homes or five-star hotel rooms. Their presence at these protests is a mere moment—co-option— and the media attention they draw to themselves rarely advances the cause. They are parasitic cheerleaders, hypocrites with half-sincere chants and just enough enthusiasm for a half-hour appearance.

Or better yet, the final line that actually broke the spell:

“You don’t need them, and you never did.”

As I said in my May 6 Note embedded above, I wasn’t sure I agreed with that. Then Macklemore dropped his much-lauded protest anthem, “Hind’s Hall.” The alt-left loves it, even some MSM critics seem enamored. As a Macklemore hater, I am unmoved. Perhaps my expectations were too big, perhaps I was hoping a fresh voice would lead the charge, not a has-been with nothing to lose. If this is what an information war is, I truly want an end to all war.

As always, the center-left lib media provides unintentional comic relief that never disappoints (when it comes to laughs anyway). “Saturday Night Live,” a show that was once the sketch show of the revolution, proved its irrelevance once again with a lame opening sketch about the Columbia protests that was all like “white parents respond to genocide like this, black parents respond like this!”

OK, so….fine. These are vapid celebrities. Who cares? Capitalism cares, that’s who. Nothing reinforces the capitalist myth of upward mobility like celebrity. As long as capitalism has been around, celebrities have had an air of divinity about them. Renaissance painters like Duhrer made self-portraits where they looked Christlike. Unlike the merchants, who only moved up in class and status, the cult around Duhrer (as well as Michelangelo and all the other turtles) claimed they were possessed by genius and had the spark of divinity within them. And so it went, from DaVinci to Dostoevsky, to John Lennon.

It’s hard to imagine a future without celebrity divinity. As hard as it is to believe there was a time when politicians had divinity. In our current era, even fascist dictatorships have a few loyalists but they primarily rule over a reluctantly respectful populace. For most of human history, speaking against the King was speaking against God. You risked being ostracized by family and peers, let alone execution. The reason why the Kennedy era was compared to Camelot was that this amount of enthusiasm around a politician even for that time was relatively uncommon. Celebrity politicians in this century were less famous for who they were than what they represented. Obama was the first black president. AOC and Bernie Sanders were symptoms of red fever. Hilary Clinton in 2016 was not a celebrity politician, especially when compared to Donald Trump. But as

Ross Barkan

pointed out when we hung out at Harlem Shake yesterday, Clinton surrounded herself with celebrities, a decision that backfired, making millionaire Donald Trump — who celebrities reviled — appear to be a man of the people.

This isn’t the only example of how celebrities are not always helpful to your cause. In light of the campus protests nationwide, our time has been compared to the ‘60s. One mistake to avoid repeating: treating celebrities like gods. It may seem impossible to imagine, but attachment to celebrities was worse in the ‘60s. Nowadays, there is a parasocial attachment, a sort of familiar intimacy. In more Aquarian times, Clapton and Hendrix were mythical gods. Even Ken Kesey, ringleader of the Merry Pranksters, the original hippies, waited outside a Beatles concert with the Furthur bus hoping to meet them and turn them on.³ Several times on this newsletter I have expressed concern on how the new counterculture will not have its own voice of a generation. Now I say good. Perhaps this will be the first generation that has its own voice. In every following decade, there have been failed attempts to replicate the magic of the ‘60s. All these attempts have been celebrity-driven. Oasis as the new Beatles, Phish as the new Dead, etc. Speaking of the Dead, Jerry Garcia said he played with his back to the audience because the real show was the audience. The Grateful Dead were part of the bumper crop of new counterculture celebrities to answer the personality exhaustion hippies felt with the out-of-touch vaudeville/nightclub-based celebrities of the early ‘60s. Why wait for a new crop this time? Macklemore is a has-been with nothing to lose. Why trust nobody musicians who have never broken through, especially in this attention economy? As Christopher Lasch has pointed out numerous times, our entire culture of narcissism developed in the vacuum of ego ideals that the ‘60s hippies took down. 

As much as our time resembles the ‘60s, there are also strong parallels to the ‘90s. As Ryan Broderick said in today’s Garbage Day, “Fame is changing and a lot of major celebrities are not prepared for where it’s headed (the early 90s basically).” Celebrities that were larger than life in the ‘80s were sent packing in the ‘90s. Today’s anti-influencers are less interested in getting their own bag than they are in poking holes in the bags of the wealthy, which is of course what is driving the blockout. The disillusionment with celebrity divinity and fandom is not contained to the networked intifada, incidentally. Even former Taylor Swift fans are detoxing on Reddit. With religion becoming less and less popular globally, perhaps celebrity worship is the last obstacle to revolutionary consciousness.

from memeindustrialcomplex

OK fine this is all good for revolutionary thought, but what about culture? Can we have a culture without celebrities? Well, we had it before celebrities, no? Yes, playwrights like Sophocles were celebrated, but he was known for his plays, not who he endorsed or any of his other waking thoughts; just his work. All told, it doesn’t seem like today’s culture will come as much from individuals as it will come from what I call meme scenes.

Drew Austin

wrote a while back in Kneeling Bus that Dimes Square is a neighborhood that was memed into existence. Dimes Square is not the only scene like this though. Meme accounts on Instagram like MeetMeAtTransPecos and NolitaDirtbag are about the EDM scene in Bushwick and the hypebeasts in Nolita respectively. As online culture gets balkanized, IRL culture will get fragmented into local scenes. This is all very similar to the indie rock of the ‘00s, where hipsters would introduce each other to bands they never heard of (but pretended to anyway). Moreover, can we say the ‘60s was the ‘60s without all those hidden gems from all those local scenes?

Wait Mo, didn’t you say the alt-left would fall into the trap of the socialists in the ‘30s that focused too much on politics, not culture, and as a result Hollywood filled the void with escapist fantasy and radio with escapist sitcoms?

I did. But there was something I did not take into account at the time: mass culture was as centralized as possible. All movies came from Hollywood and commercial radio networks ran the same non-local messages to affiliates throughout the land. Media is too fragmented now and, yes, there are still evil suits behind the curtain, but the people have way more of a say into what messages are spread on mass media than they did in the ‘30s. It is tempting to call it the people’s media. Twitch streamers are allowed more access at campus protests than traditional journalists are. If journalists, who have access to experts and their knowledge, are not trustworthy, why would vapid celebrities be more immune to scrutiny?

Twenty years ago, the frivolity of pop stars was never in question. In 2014, this very light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek nature was used to justify poptimism as a less weighty alternative to serious, less rhythmic indie rock. As poptimism inflated pop stars’ egos, turns out some, like Beyonce, did want to matter more and got involved in heavier topics. This attempt alone was enough to garner hosannas, which indirectly led to our current situation of expecting narcissistic celebrities to join the movement. As I’ve said before, if those who are extremely online are out of touch with reality, Hollywood stars are in another dimension altogether.

Bro, talk all you want. You and I both know the celebrities that go along with the narrative will be the ones that people hear and talk about while all these Gaza goons won’t even be recognized by Wal-Mart greeters.

Maybe. This could backfire though. As I said a while back, most people who work in Hollywood put up with terrible labor conditions because they are hoping to one day work on their passion project regarding a cause they are passionate about. Feminism, class, whatever. In case you read it and skipped the final paragraph:

If they displace people, then they will have created a whole population with a philosophy, but without jobs. And that, now that, is volatile,unstable and dangerous.

In our current context, this could mean that, as more Gen Z kids don’t get signed to record labels or movie studios for their views (or if they get fired), they will have their own ideas without employment to distract them. The entertainment industry eventually brought the longhairs to the table because they feared the alternative. It would be in the industry’s best interest to do so this time as well.

This isn’t to say that many wouldn’t continue to ignore the industry even if they did capitulate. Sara Sutterlin’s Instagram story yesterday echoed what several others on TikTok said about how even those celebrities who change their mind are only doing it to pacify the noise.

Or, as

Joshua P. Hill

says on my new favorite Substack New Means:

Masses of people are no longer just willing to have shiny objects waved in front of us to distract from atrocities beyond measure. Masses of people will no longer ogle at the distractions – we are determined to look past them and build a world of substance rather than attempt to enjoy the empty, shallow air we’ve been told to tolerate. We’re seeing this truth manifest all around us in a crucial moment, and those who are deeply invested in a better, fairer society that values life know that this is just the beginning. We’re just getting started. 

I should just shrug my shoulders and say who knows what’s coming next. But this Substack does not run on a quest for fame or respect. It runs on nagging feelings that I can’t placate and I have the nagging feeling I may have been wrong about something else. When

Rachel Haywire

had me as a guest on her online salon a few months back, she asked me if I believed that an underground subculture can still exist. I said no, meaning what’s going on now is too big to contain in a subculture; it has to go in the mainstream water supply. Now, I see it differently.

From Thomas Frank’s indispensable Conquest of Cool:

[B]y almost every account, the counterculture, as a mass movement distinct from the bohemias that preceded it, was triggered at least as much by developments in mass culture (particularly the arrival of The Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots. Its heroes were rock stars and rebel celebrities, millionaire performers and employees of the culture industry; its greatest moments occurred on television, on the radio, at rock concerts, and in movies.

This is a very different vantage point from the current one. Media skepticism has never been this high. This means several things. The first thing I already mentioned: celebrities that change their mind and join the movement will scan as opportunistic after having waited this long. Up-and-coming young artists will read as kids that only care about their social stats. On the off-chance that, say, an undeniable new musician makes an incredible song about the zeitgeist; if that artist gets a lot of good press and signs with a major label…this might be the first time in I don’t know how long that the term “sell out” truly becomes relevant again. In that sense, our current moment may resemble the alt era of the ‘90s and ‘00s. Artists that get too big will lose their fanbase. It will go beyond artistic integrity. They will be seen as compromised; working for the enemy. Scabs crossing the picket line.

I see changes in my own personal life. Anything hyped by critics does not interest me. I will only watch a show or movie if personal friends like it or, say, it gets some Substacks praise. I noticed it happening earlier this year with two things: the critical hype for Dune 2 and the relatively mixed reviews for Civil War. Dune 2 being a critically acclaimed blockbuster can only mean that somewhere along the way there is clumsy messaging that the neoliberal District 1 Regime approves of. As opposed to Civil War, which some are calling “irresponsible,” much like another good movie, Joker.

This skepticism is coming from a 48-year old man. Imagine the skepticism of a young student who clearly sees the Regime’s club-footed attempts at mass media messaging. They have seen enough atrocities.

1. The clip here jumps to the bit the paraphrased line came from. Enjoy!

2. Certainly not for free.

3. He didn’t, but eventually they heard of LSD.