The Mob Rules: Celebrity Culture and Criminal Justice In a Milieu of Callousness
A guest essay.
The following essay was written by Jason Myles, who I’m sure many of you are already familiar with. I recently had a wide-ranging chat with him for Unaligned and it was fun…but also super honest and raw. Check it out after you read his essay.
Speaking of which, I’m having Jason on again this week to answer your questions and explore some of the themes he writes about in his piece. So, if you’re a paid subscriber, please comment and THANK YOU for your support. I’m going through some family/health stuff and I know I haven’t been as engaged as I should be. That won’t be a permanent issue.
Jason is the host of the This is Revolution podcast. You can support his work here.
I’d tell you to follow him on Twitter, but he doesn’t do social media.
Greetings, citizens
We are living in the age
In which the pursuit of all values
Other than money, success, fame, glamour
Has either been discredited or destroyed.
- Felix Da House Cat (2003)
Fame is an intoxicant, and Hollywood is the land of celebrity inebriation. Seeing those bold letters atop that mountain, you can’t help being either awed or repulsed by what it stands for.
There was a time before moving pictures when one had to be a great adventurer and discover new lands, create fascinating works of literature or possess an operatic voice that could captivate crowds to be revered. Stars were born with the advent of film. They’d captivate the heart of the nation by merely winning the genetic lottery.
Much like the iconic sign that sits atop Mount Lee in the Santa Monica mountains, celebrities sequester themselves in the hills and in gated communities, building a chasm between themselves and the public that adores them. Or at least that’s how it used to work. Social media has changed all that, creating a new kind of celebrity who never turns the camera off. Their fans can ignore the divide and enjoy viewing their favorite person performing mundane tasks, or participating in viral “challenges” to make them seem more relatable. Other YouTube figures become celebrities by critiquing celebrating culture.
My friend Bertrand Cooper writes for the Atlantic and the New York Times. Despite his lofty career achievements, he grew up in similar circumstances as myself, if not worse. There was drug addiction in his family, and he did time in foster care. We were recently having a discussion about ideas around toughness as a character building mechanism and the folly of the attention given to celebrity culture. The consensus is that celebrity life translates to the ultimate privilege, and the children of celebrities often reap the benefits of said privilege. From legacy admission to elite universities, to massive advantages in the entertainment industry, they can have it all.
North West embodies the new-media version of this. She’s an 11-year-old TikTok influencer who has “18.8 million followers” and “could earn up to $30,134.75 per video,” according to Viralyft.
For those unfamiliar, North West, is the tween daughter of Kanye West, one of the most talked about rappers in history. Her mother is professional influencer Kim Kardashian, a woman who was able to convert her sex tape scandal into a decades-long career. West is the spawn of parents who might be the most recognizable, famous, beloved and despised in the world.
Celebrity culture is nothing new and fawning over the offspring of such figures is equally familiar. But this time around, there is also a culture of celebrity contempt that can be amplified by social media pile-ons. Its infectious nature has a captivating grasp that tends to devolve in a callous binary understanding of people as either “good and bad.” Some mistake this behavior as class conscientiousness. But it’s a problem when communities are formed through collective contempt, especially when it’s misunderstood as moral.
This is the downside of engaging in celebrity culture. It can warp one’s worldview into the simplistic binary of “right-and-wrong” thinking that can make people justify behavior that goes beyond merely critiquing public figures. But in reality, larger and truly systemic issues in society can’t fit into that same binary.
The police murder of George Floyd led to a rallying cry for the imprisonment of the cops that took a man’s life so brazenly that it was carried out on a live stream. While there were some calls for abolition or defunding law enforcement, most people just viewed the incident as bad people behaving badly. They didn’t necessarily consider the broader issue of how law enforcement functions or who it works for.
That same simplistic binary is playing out now with the roles reversed. The media’s critical coverage has shifted away from cops behaving badly to ordinary people behaving badly. As videos of individuals stealing from large chain stores go viral online, some of the same people who protested for the incarnation of rogue law enforcement are calling for the incarceration of the thieves seen on camera as they run out of stores with their arms filled with merchandise.
If there was any good will that was manufactured during the protests of the “George Floyd Summer” of 2020, the simplistic binary belief of good and bad people undid it. Now we’re seeing a return to late 80s and 1990s style tough-on-crime prison policy. This mob mentality of callousness has degraded long fought efforts to reverse the harm of brutal carceral policy. The punitive milieu that gave us bipartisan support of tough-on-crime legislation ignores complexity and takes everything at face value. For them, bad people need to be punished and cast away regardless of the devastation it causes to the lives of many poor and working class people. It’s just their pathology, right? This thinking doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a learned pattern of acceptable behavior. We pick up on who it’s okay to hate, and who it's okay to revere.
Now, I understand how some can have contempt for a child of privilege like North West. A few posts on TikTok net her more dough than what an average American working a full-time job earns in an entire year. That’s $61k-$183k a year for a middle class income in Los Angeles. Or, at least it was in 2022.
Just by pumping out a few TikToks a month, North effortlessly adds to her already massive family fortune. The fortune on both sides of her family. Her parents are divorced billionaires! North doesn’t have to concern herself with talent if she wishes to achieve the very heights of stardom. All she’ll need to do is turn on a camera phone and invite people into her privileged life. If she manages to be slightly less peculiar than Jaden Smith she’ll build her legion of fans, in additions to the detractors she inherited from her parents’ star-studded lives. And unlike the celebrity children before her, West’s family has made a fortune letting people peek into the mendacity of their daily lives. While social media may seem like a ubiquitous activity all young people passively participate in, the West/Kardashian fortune is built on it.
There is a certain amount of humility that must be publicly exhibited for common people and celebrity tastemakers to validate that a particular celebrity is indeed one of the good ones. But considering North West’s pedigree, why would she have to pay fealty to any of the old societal norms? Wasn’t Paris Hilton a rebellious brat too?
The line separating “infamous” and “famous” is anorexic and over the last 20 years obnoxious celebrities have been happily operating on both sides to the chagrin and praise of their fandoms and detractors. Miley Cyrus comes to mind as one who has fallen in and out of favor with the public, having been involved in both scandal and subsequent comebacks. So have Nicole Richie, Tori Spelling and…well, the list is too long to name them all. We celebrate their success and relish in their failures.
One thing North West has grown up seeing in real time is how any pain suffered by her family, regardless of the tragedy, is still just fodder for content creators to mock and cash in on. I’m sure that can create a social disconnect from the world at large when your everyday life is a spectacle. It’s probably even worse when the people in charge of your upbringing are the ringleaders of the circus.
Once again, the performative self abnegation the celebrity must exhibit in public settings will never be enough to obfuscate the long shadow of public contempt North’s family has cast upon her. When I was talking to Bertrand about her, another mutual friend told him that they hoped the young West got bullied in school. He didn’t responded with a hateful jab, and instead reminded us of the burden that type of vitriol and callousness carries. “I hope she meets someone that is genuinely kind to her,” he said, adding “so she understands that not all people are horrible human beings”.
The absence of class awareness just translates into hating the haves. For some, hating the haves is misunderstood as engagement in class war. But is it? Are these conversations really about the redistribution of wealth and power, or are we upset at people that didn’t climb to the top the “right way”?
The “nepo baby” has a definite advantage. But doesn’t the son of the union shop steward have some level of advantage? Are we actually upset at the obscene amounts of wealth these people hoard as our lives become more precarious and resources become more scarce? Or are we trying to deem ourselves worthy to be a guest at this table of abundance? Does the proletariat strike a blow to the rich and powerful by posting hate-filled react videos? Or is it a feeble gasp that seeks to protect one's own piece of the pie as the fear of scarcity brought about by the failures of neoliberal capitalism sink in?
Zero the Hero: The Liberal Morality of Contempt
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"
-Once in a Lifetime, Talking Heads (1980)
This impulse to seek out and vilify those deemed unworthy of success doesn’t stop with celebrity children, either. It becomes normalized and filters down to impact how society at large treats the poor, or the working class, and anyone who make mistakes. The same binary that deems North a privileged “nepo baby” fuels the contempt for the poor and the criminalized. It’s the same callousness that led to bipartisan support for tough-on-crime policies that devastate marginalized communities. When society cultivates a culture of callousness, devoid of class analysis–it creates a framework where empathy erodes. So, punitive measures feel justified.
We’d be better off cultivating a more humane attitude toward human failings. That’s the only way to build a more equal world where there’s more tolerance for everyone to mess up. In this binary world of hero or villain, the real casualties are those who lack the privilege to be seen as anything but disposable. We should demand to live in a world where “every bastard deserves better”, as Amber A’Lee Frost said.
First and foremost, I hope you and your family are able to heal and recover, hold onto all the joy you can, and feel the love so many send. Second, Jason is fantastic, and I'm so glad he's coming back! When you're up to it, you must go on TIR—I'm a Patreon there now (is that what you'd call it?), so I'd love to see you there! I'm not on social media except for Substack, Patreon, and the TYT Discussion Boards (if those count), so my personal experience on such sites is limited at best. That said, I'm increasingly saddened as I start to understand the depth of cruelty one can find online. Seriously, I had no that fucking mean has become a fucking default setting! If social media is the cause of much of our descent into the growing callousness and maliciousness in society, and I agree it is (or at least it's exposing it), how do we alleviate this? Do you think it's possible to, in a sense, use it and its maniacal algorithms against itself to create something better? It's not going anywhere, so we'll have to create ways to better society, even with social media. Not for nothing, I'm with Robert Putnam; we would do well to have more bowling leagues.
Excellent points made in this thoughtful piece. My only question to Jason Myles is, does he think America can evolve into a more egalitarian society under the current capitalist system?
I don’t blame him for not doing social media. When Twitter first came out I just said, “Nah, don’t need it.” I’ve never had a Twitter account and I’m sure as hell not going to get one now.