Is it true love, or is it parasociality? Part two
An honest exploration of a toxic phenomenon thanks to Chappell Roan's provocations. I don't feel like holding back anymore, so I'm not going to.
Artwork: Cogumeli
This is part two of my series exploring parasociality. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading part one first!
It’s undeniable that there’s an ego piece to being on the receiving end of parasociality. This ego boost keeps the person who is being feasted upon glued to the dinner table. Otherwise, why the hell else would anyone wish to be there for years on end? The poisonous flies that Nietzsche discusses in “Flies of the Marketplace” bite and inject their poison little by little. Another insect that could work here would be termites - slowly eroding the structurally sound nature of the tree trunk over time. In the realm of fame we say that the public demands ‘a pound of flesh’ - how many pounds will ultimately be demanded before the person is utterly ruined, and no longer themselves?
From Flies:
They want blood from you in all innocence, their bloodless souls thirst for blood - and therefore they sting in all innocence.
Of course I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a fandom or a following is ‘bloodless’ (it’s a crude and unforgiving take) - but I think the rest is true. If we offer ourselves up: whether we are a musician who happened to get famous outside or (or prior to) social media, or especially if we’re someone who was lifted by hundreds of thousands of digital arms in this social media age - we're told that we just have to brace ourselves for the siphoning, as it’s just part of some kind of fucked up soul contract we sign when our followings climb to certain heights. There are no healthy boundaries grandfathered into this realm - the opposite, in fact.
And truly, people siphon in all innocence. Each audience member, part of a following or fan is an individual, yes? So of course they behave as such. They want their voice to be heard, and often over the din of the crowd. So they’ll do what they can to shout louder, be more provocative - sometimes saying ludicrous, heinous things in order to get noticed.
Of course this isn’t always true. Of course there are droves upon droves of people who only exude kindness. But what they don’t realize is how taxing being responsible to such high levels of praise actually is.
Miki Kim
Something that Matt and Eliza speak about in the podcast episode I linked in part one was that there is a certain ‘claiming’ that audiences seem to do over celebs or public figures in this digital age. They say, “I knew her when she was ______” (fill in the blank here: when she was just a bb queer playing in clubs for 20 people, when she just had 5,000 people following her art, when she was a caterpillar, not yet a butterfly, etc etc). A possessiveness follows - the audience feels to a degree that they own her success and so feel entitled to demand more pounds of flesh. The creator then owes their audience. And because boundaries around public figurehood in the digital age are hazy at best, a lot of the time small-fry creators like yours truly get caught up in the people-pleasing game.
(A game that has zero chance of anyone winning, given that the ‘feed’ of social media is always hungry, aka the realm of hungry ghosts that I discussed in this piece. You’re never going to please a bottomless pit).
I see it all the time. The creator makes the mistake of calling their platform a community, (which I have done) and asks for feedback on a number of things - or even just shares too many personal details (which I have also done). Suddenly the audience feels as if a) they know the creator and b) they are entitled to their time and energy. The thing is, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or Twitter (I refuse to call it X, fuck you Elon Musk) are not communities. They are not democracies. They are not, in fact, someone’s living room. You have not been invited to their house. You are simply there because you’ve decided to follow them. You may fantasize about intimacies with this person, but all you’re ever truly gleaning is what vulnerability they’ve offered their audience, which is a mere sliver of whole personhood at best.
From the perspective of a creator who has experienced parasociality daily for nearly a decade, I can tell you that it’s painful. Before I understood the nature of it I was hurt regularly by thinking that strangers in my audience actually cared about me as a person, but would disappear from my inboxes or unfollow me entirely once they’d drunk their fill of whatever I was offering. As an autist I know I have made errors in social judgement throughout my life - and one of them has been being too naive to realize when people were just trying to get something from me. As I outline in my late diagnosed autism course, autistic folk often mistake their eagerness to be helpful (and someone else’s eagerness to receive that help) for a true bond. In the social media realm, neurospicy folks in particular seem to find meaning and purpose in this helpfulness that stretches deep into public consciousness. An audience is all too willing to absorb this effort. Oftentimes, they - the audience - grow stronger from receiving the bounty we (and other public figures) provide, and we grow weaker from putting out too much too fast for too long.
Parasociality embodies a strange illusion because it is the byproduct of a space that champions illusions: social media. Again, these platforms are not communities - they are more like private dictatorships that people subscribe to. But since we are so starved of real community in this society (especially during the pandemic, and whatever you would describe the current climate to be - apocalyptic-ish?) we glom onto digital spaces to fill that gap. Thus the illusion of community is born. In the absence of the true back-and-forth soul sharing that friends do in real life, we become accustomed to learning an influencer’s deepest trauma through profoundly written photo captions. Thus the illusion of friendship is born.
(Or in some cases, hate-watching, or jealousy-watching, someone else’s life and projecting all kinds of assumptions about them - which also happens en masse). This is when the reality of someone’s profile being a private dictatorship gets thrown into question, and the mob tells that person that they must bend over lest they be cancelled.
talks a lot about cancel culture in her work.In
’s piece on parasociality, he says: “When we imagine what being loved would be like, we think of ourselves having tons of fans and a huge platform, because we’ve never seen small networks of people just caring for one another, including the people they disliked. Human beings are so disposable that we long only to become a valuable product.”You see, there just isn’t a two-way mirror here. It’s one sided. But since these creators are not in fact full people to us - they’re only images or videos living inside of our phones - it is easy to feel that we know them, own them, possess them - and this is also why it is so damn easy to dehumanize them and kick them while they’re down.
In the podcast episode I keep mentioning, Matt and Eliza speak on this. They talk about how fans will love on them so hard - but then if they do or say something that folks considered to be a misstep, then absolute vitriol ensues. Night and day.
Quoting Devon again: “Whenever someone like that tells me that they are ‘disappointed’ in me, my first reaction is to think, Good. You never should have expected so much from a person you don’t know. I feel glad they are living in reality, now, rather than projecting their own perspective onto an outline of me on the wall.”
Even the idea of someone being disappointed in a creator they follow online is parasocial. In my estimation, you can only be disappointed in someone you personally know. Like, IRL. But we’re supposed to take it very seriously - as if the individuals who are scolding us for acting outside of the narrow scope they’ve placed us in are, in fact, our friends, sitting in our living rooms across from us wagging their fingers. Tsk, tsk.
It has become my firm belief that parasociality, and the pressures to impress the faceless, poisonous flies, directly contributes to the creator’s nervousness surrounding online performance. Of course, wanting our art to sell is natural - we need to eat, after all. But in these digital social realms it doesn’t end there. It’s obvious that - as mentioned - the people-pleasing effort becomes a cornerstone. We see that certain posts have gone viral and have reaped the social, egoic and monetary rewards of this plight. All our pleasure-seeking brains wish to do is rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. People telling us that they love us gives us fuel to embark on faster and more efficient creations so that we may feed the hungry mouths. We don’t necessarily stop and think that being told “I love you” or “you’ve saved my life” by perfect strangers is super fucking weird and distorted - and that maybe they really mean it and you’re some kind of algorithmic obelisk of infatuation in their mind’s eye.
The point is, the nearly endless stream of I love you provokes an ever-increasing awareness of onus and responsibility to the online audience. Onus to produce more, talk more, be a more of a loudspeaker, be more of an activist. The recent swell of cancellations surrounding those who were silent about the Palestinian genocide (and, according to the mob, meant they were ‘complicit’) was a prime example of this. Having an online public platform now means being completely beholden to the needs, feelings and whims of one’s audience. It means proving oneself over and over to the flies. All because they ‘love’ you.
Decolonizing my mind from this phenomenon has proven to be rather excruciating, to be honest. My feelings about it can be easily summed up by this quote from a fellow artist:
I know that what once was a concert of deafening, raucous, riotous screams from the void can become quiet. If I dull down my internalized pressures to perform digitally and ‘catch the algorithm wave’ then the endless chorus of opinions - both lovely and vitriolic - will become a whimper over time. In this sense, I reap what I sew. But by virtue of having a six figure audience, there will always be an element of bracing myself for what horrid or downright deranged comment may be awaiting me from someone who claims to care about my well-being. There will always be people who, in all of their innocence, are siphoning my energies - unless I go out of my way to protect them.
And it seems to me very much like a great many of us are now going out of our way - veering all the way into torching our brands, dying our hair, changing our names, fleeing the country, making a refuge at the bottom of the sea, moving to Antarctica to live with the penguins - in order to protect those energies. And good! Good. It’s about time.
I for one hope this particular digital age goes the way of the dodo, and fast. In the podcast, Eliza quotes from a book (I need to read it!) called The Death Of The Artist by William Deresiewicz. He says about being an artist in today’s world: “The good news is you can do it all yourself. The bad news is, you have to.” He’s talking about marketing oneself - becoming the brand - doing the song and dance - being a public persona. I don’t think artists really want all of this. I mean, for fuck’s sake, most of us are super neuro-freaky and can’t even imagine having the executive functioning to accomplish it all with a semblance of sanity. Yes, we want recognition for our talents. Some of us may even want some measure of fame. But never before in the history of artists have we had to wear so many hats at once and fulfill so many roles - especially in the sense of interfacing with our audience day in, day out. Artists need cocoons and caves and dens and seaside retreats. We burn out if we have to be ‘on’ all the time - anyone would.
And if our audience truly loved us, they would encourage us to lay the fuck down and rest, not be their forever muse while we wither and become weakened with the poison of their constant demands.
Flee, my friend, into your solitude!
Until next time, love and wolves.
D xx
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P.P.S. In case you missed the big announcement, I landed a publishing deal for my decks and they will be available exclusively through Tarot Stack in the coming months. More details forthcoming <3
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This Aquarius-Plutonian Age can’t get here fast efuckingnough. We honestly need the throttling reset.
I felt every word and am so appreciative of you putting this two parter together. Brava! Thank you 🖤