The Digital French Revolution

And taking the battle offline.

One influencer has, very much accidentally, kicked off something that would’ve been hard to imagine even a week ago. During the Met Gala, Hayley Bayley, who has 10 million followers on TikTok for reasons I neither know nor particularly wish to know, made a little video. In it she was wearing a dress and doing a look very clearly inspired by Marie Antoinette, and the words “let them eat cake” can be heard as the camera slowly zooms out. It was nothing complicated, just a simple and straightforward callback to the infamous phrase as she stood outside an event embodying the lifestyle of the rich and famous. Tickets to the Gala are $75,000, and this year it happened to take place at the exact moment Israel invaded Rafah.

Now something fascinating and potentially incredible is happening over on TikTok, and it’s spilling out into other corners of the internet. Millions of people, and I say that with no exaggeration, are blocking the accounts of big celebrities, particularly those who haven’t spoken up about Palestine – which is the majority of these public figures. Thousands and thousands of short videos are being made every day about who to block, and people are celebrating seeing celebrities losing hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. And the “block list” is growing daily, with people adding more influencers who have chosen to remain silent about the genocide in Gaza. The list is also growing to include the multitude of brands that celebrities own, from makeup to clothing to alcohol. Most important, a number of the TikToks being created discuss the why, why folks ought to cut off celebrities who refuse to use their large platforms to advocate for good.

I find the explanatory videos to be the most powerful part of this, thus far, more powerful than the mass disengagement with celebrity social media accounts. The viral “block party” feel of people sharing the lists of celebrities they’ll no longer engage with, and no longer permit to profit off their attention, is the engine driving this little digital revolution, but the why is where the real transformative power is, to me. There are multiple reasons to block influencers and celebs, as countless people are explaining. The biggest reason is that we’ve seen more clearly than ever in recent months both how these people drive culture, and what culture they drive us towards. Specifically, they push us in the direction of a vulgar consumerism, always encouraging their followers to spend more, buy more, get tickets, get a new outfit, buy the latest product and so on and so forth. TikTok has made this especially obvious as it pushes the “TikTok Shop” more and more, with an increasing number of videos having links at the bottom of the page encouraging viewers to click and immediately purchase whatever item they’re seeing in a video. Naturally, this has encouraged influencers to hawk products in more of their videos, for which they make a commission off each purchase.

And all of this is harmful in and of itself, but what has been made doubly clear since October is that it’s all done instead of using their platforms to advocate for good. The consumerism is bad enough, but seeing how it simultaneously functions as a distraction, in this case from a genocide, but more broadly from society’s ills, has made people furious. The juxtaposition of the Met Gala and the bombing of Rafah ripped this aggressive contradiction wide open.

And all of the above is still just the tip of the iceberg. The various ways celebrities monetize our attention is only one piece of the role they play in shaping society and culture. Most notable, perhaps, and an issue that multiple TikTok commentators are honing in on, is that influencers help set our goals, help establish what is desirable, especially for younger people. What was once “Keeping up with the Joneses” is now “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” Where people once wanted a white picket fence and a golden retriever we’ve now been conditioned to pursue a yacht, two mansions, and more money than God. Of course not everyone has sought this lottery-ticket style dream, where no matter how hard we work only a few people will ever actually have access to the opulence that celebrities and their reality TV and social media profiles have conditioned a generation to expect. But a lot of those who have opted out of this new American Dream were people who tuned out of celebrity culture to begin with. People who grew up in the culture of celebrity and are now confronted with its immense harm are suddenly seeing how they’ve both seen misled and distracted, taught a culture of consumerism and distracted from what really matters in this life.

Photo by Onur Binay on Unsplash

What’s so significant here is that the millions of people who didn’t opt out, who breathed the cultural air of celebrity that’s been pumped into our screens, are now participating in this miniature digital revolution. Taylor Swift fans are making videos about blocking her. People who love Ariana Grande or Timothy Chalamet or Zendaya are explaining why they’re choosing this moment to opt out. At the top of nearly everyone’s list of reasons is the way these celebrities have responded (or failed to respond) to the defining issue of this moment – Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Silence on this topic is a deal-breaker for countless people. And when that silence is combined with reveling in the opulence that comes with their status, when it’s combined with spending more money on a party in one night than most people make in a year, it becomes a straw heavy enough to break a camel’s back.

As has been said in various ways over the past seven months, we’re not just pushing to Free Palestine — the movement to Free Palestine is also forcing us to free ourselves. As we see students interrogate why their universities invest in the military-industrial complex, as we see people question why the United States spends a trillion dollars on war every year but doesn’t provide healthcare for its residents, and now as we see people question the culture of celebrity and consumerism we too are getting free. The harder we work to stop the genocide in Gaza the harder we work towards our own liberation. And everything we’re doing is still just the beginning. People are moving from influencers and celebrities to their brands and businesses. People are examining why Taylor Swift and Jay-Z and Rihanna and Kim Kardashian are billionaires; they’re examining how our attention has been turned into not only social capital but financial capital. They’re questioning how influencers are rewarded for their silence on genocide. And now I’m starting to see more videos expanding this miniature revolution to Amazon, Walmart, and other companies. For now it remains mostly about blocking and other digital ways to cost celebrities and corporations money, but this wave is primed to grow and expand. Countless people have felt a deep exhaustion and anger for some time, and now Gaza has cracked the world open, and dammed-up rage at the status quo is spilled over in all directions.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Now our job is to focus our rage, focus our energy. Blocking influencers could be the beginning of a powerful shift in our culture, away from worshiping people who don’t know we exist and the consumerism they sell us, and toward an ethos of community and caring for humanity and for this planet. But the next step requires taking the battle offline. Big celebrities aren’t just important forces in society because of their massive audiences on various platforms. They’ve established companies, they’ve used their followings to build businesses and fortunes, they’ve both become important players and instruments in the world of capitalist exploitation. So we need to build our power out in the world too. We need to organize with our co-workers and neighbors, because what we might lack in terms of power, currently, we can make up for in numbers and coordination.

Viral trends can feel powerful, they can be powerful, but they always fade. What the ruling class does whenever any sweeping mass movement rises up, particularly one that isn’t very organized and relies on the spontaneous energy of the masses, is wait us out. They patiently wait for our energy to die down, and it usually works. Anyone who has spent much time online knows that trends don’t last. So we need long-term organizations. We need to make the fight for a better world part of our daily lives, part of the way we see the world and move through it. That’s one of the beautiful things about having or forming a union at your job. The place we spend 40 hours a week also becomes a site of struggle, a place where we try to build the better society we need. And we can choose to carry the effort to build a better world into our community and to integrate it into our daily lives in countless other ways. We can carry the energy we’re seeing right now into student encampments, Palestine organizing, and long-term work towards building a more just, post-capitalist society.

So if you’re on this trend, this block party, this great cultural moment, think about how you can build the movement rather than just living in this fleeting instant. We’ve had countless moments of uprising in this country, some of them immensely powerful. But again and again the establishment waits us out, or responds with mass violence, and we lack the power to outlast them or overcome their repression. Gaza has spurred us to do more, to find new ways to protest and fight this genocide, but we can’t dodge the reality that more must be done. We can and will do more, we can and will turn this moment into a movement, and we can and will divest from death and celebrity and exploitation. It’s time to build something better, more compassionate, more conducive to life itself. We each have a role to play, what is yours to be? 

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