Post Morbus

Another day, another scam

PRM and the BIG MAD

Mr. Tucker has watched a Youtube channel called Punk Rock MBA periodically for a few years now. I watched a few videos myself but since it really isn’t music I dig, I never subscribed. In September 2024, he announced that he was leaving, posted one last video and then grabbed his toys and went home.

Ok, sure. That’s fair. Shit gets old. He’s onto other things now.

But when Mr. Tucker went to read the comments on the last video, he discovered some very, very, angry people. I guess an interview with the Punk Rock MBA guy dropped, gained traction and pissed a LOT of people off. This is the interview:

The TL;DR of it all is: he was only in it for the money. He was good at marketing, figured out what drew people in to watch, like and subscribe to his channel and when he met his financial goals, he peaced out. Some people were very understandably pissed off.

Although I’ve never been emotionally invested in his content, I can understand why people are. The key here is that our entire cultural communities are based on parasocial relationships. We get attached to communities and invested in like-minded people in a way that we feel some kind of ownership over them. So when they do things we find shocking, we feel angry and betrayed. Social media has ramped the problems with parasocial relationships up to 11.

Thanks to social media, the line that has historically been drawn famous people and the Hoi Polloi has been deep: rarely did you know something about your favourite stars outside of magazines and tv. You never had access to people whose art you enjoyed like you do today online. There was this firewall of gatekeepers who fed us scraps of information via their content. But now everyone creates content and there is no longer that barrier.

Of course, there have always been fans who have gone too far. Keanu Reeves had his house broken into by a fan and John Lennon was murdered by a fan, to name some high profile examples. But these were before the internet had an absolute chokehold on interactions between fans and high profile people. In fact, with the advent of social media it has become a way to GET famous if you manage to get a viral post or two off the ground.

Chappell Roan enters the chat

Chappell Roan is a very interesting test case. She went from playing small gigs and trying to leverage social media to gain traction for her music – like many artists who market their talents. But unlike 99.9% of artists, she had LARGEST leap to fame that I think anyone has ever had in such a short time. This does not mean she appeared out of nowhere – she was opening for Vance Joy 7 years ago and has been trying to get her music out there for a long time. But this chart has made the rounds and it is important to note just how huge she got in less than a year.

I feel like this essay by Eliza McLamb sums up a lot of it (found via Bernstein’s podcast, which is worth the watch: A Bit Fruity). What do you do with a stratospheric rise to fame? How do you manage it psychologically? In this day and age, the retort is always, “But this is what you asked for. It’s the price of fame.” But people are stalking her family at work, they’re stalking her and apparently she has even been sexually assaulted. I think we all need to figure out where the line is and unfortunately because some people are unable to even see that there is a line, the line must be very clear. Even then, as Eliza mentions in the podcast, Chappell Roan asking this of people is, “like trying to hold back the ocean” but she also says that Roan’s coming out and setting this boundary may carve a path for other artists in the future to also set boundaries for their own sanity.

The lines get blurry quickly from “big gay sleepover party” to “this is just my job” when your fanbase grows by millions and millions of people so quickly. Naturally, the parasocial relationship that drew people into her fanbase now feels betrayed when they learn that CR is not their friend and that the big hug they thought they were getting is now just an entertainment machine.

It’s Britney, bitch

We collectively have gone through a huge reckoning with the price of fame, most recently with the Britney Spears conservatorship. But I don’t think we have learned our lesson.

The entire world drove her insane, then we blamed her for what we did for her. The found of TMZ, Harvey Levin famously said, “Britney is gold. She is crack to our readers. Her life is a complete train-wreck, and I thank God for her every day.” This was a very normal thing to say in the Noughties but now it feels just gross, knowing what we know now. Heck, I didn’t even pay attention to her, or to magazines or tv and media in that decade and I still feel gross about being a part of the culture machine that abused her, allowed her children to be taken away by her lying ex-husband, forced birth control on her and then led to her indentured servitude where she was forced to generate money for her abusive family. If you have covid memory loss or live under a rock Wikipedia has a great synopsis of this funhouse of horrors.

When all this came out we were horrified. #FreeBritney indeed. Freed she was from her conservatorship but fans still regularly call authorities to do wellness checks on her. I remember once I was served up a video of her dancing with a knife (her videos are mostly of her dancing!) and people were freaking out – and it was in the ramp up to Halloween! It was clearly meant to be seasonally-themed! But it’s yet another X against parasociality in the age of concern trolling. We get to directly affect her life by calling the cops to do a wellness check instead of TMZ being the intermediary of trauma…oh goody?

Blurred lines

Social media has commodified authenticity and I think for a long time there was sincerity there but it couldn’t stay that way when there was money to be made. Like the optimism in the 90s that the internet would be the great equalizer, I think people believed social media would do that as well. Artists could build fanbases[1], get their art or music out to a worldwide audience and make a viable go at becoming somewhat famous. But when these sites moved from chronological to algorithmic-based feeds, the gloves were off. Not even the drama of the Cambridge Analytica scandal made people angry enough to leave.

But like frogs in the proverbial pot that is set to boil, these platforms demanded more and more. More reels/short videos, a more robust posting schedule, more engagement in the comments and DMs. The algorithm favours divisive posts and so the posts became more divisive. We were constantly feeding the beast and the beast devoured our time and energy but gave us less and less in return. People were complaining about shadow bans and other shady practices. Artists started complaining that they couldn’t do art and also keep up with the intense posting schedules that these platforms demanded of them just so that they would have their content served up to …the people who signed up for, and who actually want to see, their content. It boggles from a human point of view but not from an economic one: these platforms need you to keep churning out more and more content so they can keep eyeballs on their apps and the advertising dollars keep rolling in. So if you aren’t creating content for them, they’re going to throttle what content you do share. So if the authentic folks are throwing in the towel, who is left?

Nature abhors a vacuum

Grifters. Grifters like PRM.

These folks peddle an air of authenticity and meanwhile clean up in the background on topics they just don’t give a flying fuck about. Humans are designed to trust and for a long time the internet sold us this narrative that you could do what you love AND be rewarded for it. So we just trusted that the creators who made videos about the things we loved, ALSO loved those things. We craved community and like-minded people but what we got was clever marketers who are sussing out what the people want and giving it to them.

But should we be mad at PRM? Afterall, we got the entertainment we were promised. He released finely tweaked videos devoid of opinion and substance so that we could imprint whatever feelings or beliefs we wanted to onto them. You have to admire the marketing skill, to be honest.

But conversely, he knew exactly what he was capitalizing on: people feeling a parasocial connection to a creator that they could relate to. An expert who loved the same music as they did and someone who felt comforting to watch. There is a reason that he wasn’t up front about his strategy from the get-go: he knew that people weren’t just looking for videos, they were looking for a community.

It’s fundamentally a pig butchering scam but cast with a wider net and no victims except the attention and time you spent watching the ads on his videos. Oh, and the betrayal some people feel for trusting.

The same need for community that Chappell Roan and PRM leveraged had two completely different outcomes: one flew too close to the sun like Icarus and got burned, and the other little piggy went “wee, wee, wee all the way home.”

Small f famous

Of course, between BIG B Britney and BIG C Chappell & me (not famous at all) is myriad of somewhat famous people who live a life that Eliza McLamb (in her essay linked above) calls, “cross the street famous.” The folks who can mostly go about their daily lives but who have 50K-2M followers on a variety of platforms. They can do their own groceries or go to a restaurant but at a film or music festival they’d probably get swarmed. I feel like these folks are in a more precarious situation in terms of stalkers or fan demands: they can survive on their art, but they can’t really afford a security detail.

I see a lot of these in-between folks bowing out of having an online presence for the most part. They’re still posting shows and events but I feel like if they don’t have to be a part of the social media circus, they won’t be. There used to be more personal twitter accounts, tumblr blogs and Instagram accounts that had behind-the-scene content that fans loved. But a lot of it has dried up in recent years and I think that is because some fans are so unhinged that it feels invasive. Parasociality has made the comments get weirder and weirder and I don’t blame folks for retreating from posting as fans (and haters) believe that they should be able to barf up the most horrible takes for the world to see.

A great example in that category of famous-but-can-probably-still-do-groceries I would put a band like Motionless in White[2]. A pretty solid following, a bunch of albums, tons of years of grinding/touring & they’ve built a pretty loyal fan base. A band in that category of folks who are big in their own genre but unheard of by most people on the outside.

This (shaky, poor quality but yet excellent) interview highlights that when you are small f famous, you still reach a point where you get all of the craziness of fame but without the benefits of big F fame. Of course, I will point out that Chappell Roan is a petite woman and Chris Motionless is a very tall man but this nutter called HIS MOM. She found their drummer’s phone number and even when confronted did NOT STOP. I have no idea how or if this situation was resolved but the absolute audacity and realization that you are dealing with someone who may not even have the capacity to understand is a mindfuck, too: what do you do with someone who doesn’t even comprehend that their behaviour is scary AF? It’s a funny story that makes for great interview fodder but there is darkness, too:

Look, I want to say for the record that I couldn’t really tell you what most of the musicians I enjoy look like out in the world, and I don’t follow them on social media. This is not some edgy flex, I am certainly not cooler than thou (and may I remind you that I trip over my own feet with alarming regularity?) I just don’t know them & I probably don’t want to. While I love music (what kind of psycho does not?) I have just learned that the phrase “never meet your idols” is just sound advice[3]. I would rather not care to learn that people whose music/movies/books I relate to are just unpleasant people, generally, let alone discover that they are absolute monsters[4].

I know people think CR is a monster for boosting her career via social media, encouraging parasociality and then turning around and telling people to stop talking to her. But it is absolutely not the same. She has 6M people following her on instagram alone. That means that if she spent 1 minute with each of them, it would take her 4166 days or 11.41 years to greet fans. Who has that kind of time?

Where do we go now? Oh, where do we go? (Sweet child o’ mine)

Clearly, boundaries are in order. But there are no clear boundaries when in the west we’ve watched Princess Diana get run off the road & killed in a car accident while being chased by Paparazzi. The laws are also still in flux in terms of rights to privacy. (But some scholars are arguing for better definitions)

In the CR debate, many people agreed with her in principal but disagreed that she shouldn’t expect people to not recognize her in public and talk to her. Like most things in the past 20 years, the internet has made things incredibly murky and having a social media presence where you’ve leveraged people’s connection to you, it seems very difficult to walk it back now that you’ve achieved superstardom. I think in CR’s case she had probably slogged it out in the trenches for a long time believing she may only reach small f famous so she was vastly unprepared for the Fame Slingshot ride to launch her straight into the stratosphere. It’s clear in her video that she is exhausted and angry that her life & her family to come under siege by rabid fans and unfortunately, the normal fans get swept up into the fray as well. I think that is where the disconnect is: normal people feel they shouldn’t be punished for the behaviours of a few bonkers folks but unfortunately: #yesallfans.

We have come to expect 24-7 entertainment for free, or for very little (being served up ads). We feel incredibly entitled to having everything from videos, music and art on demand when we want it (and we want it now!). So it’s not surprising that people feel entitled to creep into the DMs of, or demand hugs from, their favourite artists. It’s the culture we’ve created. It’s the kind of culture where clever marketers like PRM win, and art loses.

Since I have already simped for capitalism by having a blog marginally related to personal finance, I don’t think it will shock anyone to see that I think the only solution to this issue is: make people pay up.

I know it seems crass to reduce a fanbase to a monetary transaction, but I think it is the only fair way to manage. There are not enough hours in the day to answer every DM, meet every fan, and take every selfie with fans outside the venue. I am seeing more and more bands do fan meet-and-greets (and those usually come with other perks as well) or panels/talks at festivals and I’m not mad about it. I think KISS started it, ComicCons popularized it, and many bands are now doing it as well[5]. It always amazes me when people criticize these sorts of events for being a money grab but I ask these people: do you work for free? Yeah, probably not. A tour is work. I guarantee you when you are at work dreaming of all of the other things you could be doing, bands are also doing that except they don’t get to go home to their families after. I have many friends who love their jobs & even some who get amazing perks like travel and fine dining but even they wouldn’t do it for free.

”You are not allowed to yell at me about this unless you pay me. That is the new rule.”

What a delight it was to open BlueSky tonight and see this amazing exchange. I, myself, have used the line, “I don’t take homework assignments from strangers” whenever some Tech Bro wanted to have a Bad Faith argument on social media but I think this is way more effective.

Many more creators are putting their content either on Nebula, or in Patreon (and others) because of the penchant for trolls to do the most unhinged things from swatting to en masse reporting of videos, triggering demonetization. It hasn’t solved 100% of the issue – Contrapoints had to repost a video to their Patreon after a mass effort took down her unlisted GamerGate video. Fill your boots, I guess. She got it back up AND she has your $5. Win/win in the end, I suppose.

Caveat emptor

I don’t have a solution for “bad” actors like PRM, however. Trying to police authenticity online is trying to get grampa to stop talking to scammers on his landline. Grifters aren’t playing by the same rules. But if we go into it thinking that every creator is like a boy band: a fictional creation of a clever PR person, it should be ok. The Sex Pistols were, in fact, a clever creation and we still consider them a cultural touchstone…and who doesn’t love the Spice Girls?

We don’t get angry with journalists who write articles about things they don’t care about and I don’t think we need to make creators our entire personality, either. I mean sure, it is much easier to create something if you care about the topic but it isn’t a requirement. I think we have also blurred the lines between artist and creator. Nothing on PRM’s channel could actually be considered art. But people inferred art and inferred community where there was none. I actually feel sorry for people who are just trying to get a foothold in art or in even creating informative channels because the future isn’t looking very authentic. In a post-truth world, we should probably all assume that everything could just be an elaborate ruse.

Fundamentally, people are angry with PRM because they’re angry with themselves for getting sucked in. I think – especially after the last week – it’s time for us to realize that the only winners in the game of parasocial relationships are tech companies. Everything feels like it’s circling the drain and I wish I had a solution for artists and creators to get their stuff out there without all of us hopping onto the hamster wheel of selling our personal information and pulling down on the endless scrolling slot machine.

So Usenet or Blogrolls, anyone?

[1]Not just art, there have been a lot of people made famous by social media and Tim Ferriss talks about almost being kidnapped when he was still low on the famous totem pole. He wrote 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous in response to his experiences.

[2]So some background here: Metal isn’t a genre I know ANYTHING about. It’s Mr. Tucker’s thing and he enjoys different styles of the genre (why are there so many!?). I grew up with the Punk/Goth/Industrial kids and the Eldest was born in 2008 so I missed all of the fun metalmusic stuff that came out of that era. But I came across Shonalika’s video on how Goth is White which led to Gender, Power and Heavy Metal…and now all I’ve been listening to is In This Moment and Motionless in White for a month now. Kinda a genre made for refugees of those scenes, tbqh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[3]I read Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction. Way to retroactively ruin your own childhood!

[4]As I write this, Neil Gaiman is currently being exposed for being an absolute shitbag and quite frankly I am grateful to have never really resonated with his work as a teen. Gen X friends are positively beside themselves this week.

[5]I am not going to touch the state of the music industry here with its 360 contracts, nor will I address how promoters are offering VIP packages sans-band-meet.

(I honestly wish I remembered the HTML for footnotes but I don’t. I am having a hard enough time remembering that HTML writes “centre” the American way & it’s my #1 code mistake)