The particular ennui of being a social media star is a microcosm of what’s happening to us all.
Earlier this month, the writer and English professor Barrett Swanson published a story in Harper’s about his five days at Clubhouse, the collective of dozens of college-aged social media hopefuls living in a smattering of content mansions in Los Angeles. He emerged with the sneaking suspicion that maybe all of this is bad, not only for the world but for the influencers themselves.
“For a moment, I cannot remember who I am or why I am sitting here amid this sea of beautiful young people, all of them desperate for recognition, their whole lives ahead of them, empty at the absolute center,” he writes in the closing paragraph. “TikTok is a sign of the future, which already feels like a thing of the past. It is the clock counting down our fifteen seconds of fame, the sound the world makes as time is running out.”
It’s easily the best and most depressing piece of journalism about famous TikTokers I’ve ever read, a “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” for influencers. Here are some things Swanson witnesses on his visit: a 19-year-old who just made $60,000 by filming a Lady and the Tramp-style kiss with his girlfriend as sponcon for a chicken-fingers joint; a list of video ideas which includes “pranks” and “tuxedos”; a kid who, out of nowhere, claimed that “Hitler invented sex dolls” based on a TikTok he just watched; an influencer manager who appears to be in the thrall of QAnon; pervasive neglect for the influencers on the part of their managers; and repeated offers to help Swanson become a TikTok influencer himself, as though the only reason for visiting at all was, of course, to take a little piece of their celebrity for his own.
Mostly, though, he sees the extreme precarity that courses through every person, every thought, every action that occurs in the house. “Several times throughout my trip, I think I can see the toll this takes on them, a kind of pallid desperation that flickers across their faces,” he writes. “At one point, Brandon [one of the influencers] comes over and says, ‘The scary thing is you never know how long this is going to last, and I think that’s what eats a lot of us at night. It’s like, What’s next? How long can we entertain everyone for? How long before no one cares, and what if your life was worth nothing?’”
It’s a topic I’ve discussed with almost every big TikToker I’ve interviewed, the question of what happens if and when it goes away. It’s a tough question to ask, but I’m always struck by the thoughtfulness of their answers: Whether they have 100,000 followers or a few million, all the TikTokers know that their fame will likely fade unless they work very, very hard to cultivate themselves into something solidly monetizable. They seamlessly toggle between their two identities — the real person and the online persona — and speak with a kind of cynicism about tying their livelihoods to a platform that could disappear in an instant. It all feels like stuff they shouldn’t have to think about, not yet.
What the piece doesn’t include are the other things that come with being a famous TikToker. Namely, that operations such as Clubhouse are often run by people who either have no clue what they’re doing thanks to the extremely low barrier to entry into such a field, or are actively harming the influencers they claim to help.
Clubhouse’s founder, Amir Ben-Yohanan, has been accused of bullying, sexism, and creating volatile atmospheres. Chase Zwernemann, the manager in Swanson’s story who shows him a QAnon video, has allegedly scammed other TikTokers at a previous content house. Many TikTokers are taken in by sketchy managers who sign them to predatory contracts because of the nature of how TikTok fame operates: When you get famous overnight, you’re not given time to learn the ropes.
And that’s only if you become famous enough to get lucrative brand deals. For the majority of kids who go viral on TikTok, the attention doesn’t last. “I wish I never got this sort of fame,” a 16-year-old former TikToker named Sam told me last year. He’d been creating delightfully bizarre videos that earned him a following of nearly 200,000, until suddenly the view counts started to drop and it felt like the audience didn’t like him anymore. He left the platform and sought therapy for the anxiety he’d developed due to TikTok.
Lots of TikTokers bring this up. They’re afraid of branching out from whatever the algorithm decides it likes for fear of becoming a has-been, and they’re burned out by the churn of endlessly creating content they barely even like. Some have public meltdowns, others quit for good, while even the app’s biggest star Charli D’Amelio said she often feels overwhelmed by the constant negative attention.
A few days ago, the 19-year-old TikToker Spencewuah tearfully announced he was taking a break from TikTok after backlash from a perceived gaffe. He has more than 9 million followers, but as Kate Lindsay pointed out on her Substack Embedded, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s navigating fame alone. “Tons of midsize creators burn out or take breaks or disappear completely because they’re popular enough to amass giant followings but not to earn the kind of money it takes to insulate themselves from those followings. TikTok, of course, relies on these midsize creators,” she wrote. Yet besides making them famous, TikTok the company doesn’t seem to do much to help them with its consequences.
What’s happening to influencers is a microcosm of what’s happening to everyone. At Clubhouse, Swanson connects the stars to his own university students, kids who write increasingly about their anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, kids who appear in his office “sad in a way they cannot explain, desperate for something they don’t know how to have.”
Several of them, he says, dropped out to move to LA to chase the influencer dream for themselves, hoping to become famous in the same way all the other kids got famous: By getting their face to appear on millions of other people’s screens. Left unsaid is what happens when they do win the TikTok lottery, and how the unexplainable sadness doesn’t really go away.
We’re seeing this in workplaces, too, most visibly in media. Journalists are leaving staff positions to start their own Substacks or Patreons, hoping to cash in their followings on the creator economy, the professional adult version of dropping out of college and moving to LA. Low-wage workers, disillusioned by the failures of bosses and owners to treat them fairly, aren’t returning to traditional jobs, and many are surely turning to the gig or creator economies. The influencer industry is simply the logical endpoint of American individualism, which leaves all of us jostling for identity and attention but never getting enough.
What these anxious influencers need is help, help from people who are not also trying to squeeze every last dollar out of them. Lindsay proposed that TikTok and other social media platforms provide therapy for struggling creators, which seems like a viable and promising possibility, however dystopian the idea of a company creating so many mental health problems that they then must directly fix them.
They need community, and not the kind of faux community promised by toxic content houses or publicity-designed friendships. They need meaning beyond the numbers on the screen, and they need to find ways to make content that is meaningful to them outside of the oppressive blandness that the algorithm rewards. These are things we all aren’t getting in our current social and economic systems. Influencers, who for better or for worse are increasingly society’s role models, are only the most public examples.
This column first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.
Even if it could pass, McConnell and McCarthy likely won’t appoint commissioners who would work in good faith.
Days after the chaotic storming of the Capitol on January 6, some Republican members of Congress had an idea.
What the country needed, Reps. John Katko (R-NY), Rodney Davis (R-IL), and others decided, was a bipartisan commission, akin to the one established after 9/11, to sort through the facts and determine just how such a terrible breach of government security happened.
Now, though, the chances for such a commission are imperiled. A bill to establish it passed the House last Wednesday with support from every Democrat and 35 Republicans. But most others in the GOP, including party leaders, have come out strongly against the bill, with the party’s senators planning a filibuster.
Republicans have evidently calculated that such a commission’s findings would likely hurt their party’s electoral prospects. Some even admit this: “Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 election, I think, is a day lost on being able to draw contrast between us and the Democrats’ very radical left-wing agenda,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune told reporters last week.
But even if a deal does somehow come together, there are real reasons to doubt whether such a commission would achieve anything substantial.
There’s nothing magical about this proposed bipartisan commission — it would have the same formal powers as any ordinary congressional committee looking into the matter. In fact, its requirement for bipartisan support to issue subpoenas means it could well be less aggressive at unearthing new information than, say, a Democratic-only House committee investigation could be.
Its hoped-for advantage would instead be in the realm of messaging. The idea is that if such a body is deemed above politics, it could deliver an assessment of what happened that would be viewed as credible by both sides, shaping a national narrative.
This second aim is what supporters of a January 6 commission are really hoping to achieve. The hope is that, if the reasonable Republicans and Democrats could only get together, they could reach consensus and sagely explain how and why the Capitol was stormed, and how the US can stop something like it from happening again.
It’s a doomed hope.
How the 9/11 commission “succeeded,” and why a 1/6 commission probably wouldn’t
The bill passed by the House is deliberately modeled after the 9/11 commission — it calls for 10 commissioners, five from each party, who would be appointed by congressional leaders. So that earlier body is a useful comparison, with lessons for how such commissions can come to be deemed successful, and what they actually achieve.
The first lesson is about PR. The 9/11 Commission Report was published as a 567-page book which became a best-seller, and in the discourse, it was often treated as the definitive assessment on what had gone wrong. But this was not really because the commission discovered a ton of new information (a joint congressional committee had already finished a report with largely similar facts), or because everything went smoothly (there were many politicized disputes and much important information was withheld).
One reason is that, as Philip Shenon (author of a book on the commission) recently argued in an interview with Just Security, the report was “packaged” better — many remarked that it read more like a novel than a policy document. Additionally, the two savvy moderate retired politicians in charge, former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican, and former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, effectively became joined at the hip to tout the final product as truly bipartisan and credible.
But what’s crucial here is that, in the end, Kean and Hamilton wanted to tout a bipartisan product. This time around, from the start, Republicans oppose the very idea of the commission. Their appointees will be hand-picked by McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who are more likely to choose commissioners prone to obstruct and object, not to lend the eventual report a bipartisan halo.
The second lesson is about politics. The sunny view of bipartisan commissions is that members of both parties boldly manage to put politics aside and do the right thing for the country. The more cynical and probably more realistic way to look at them is that politics never truly leaves the process — especially when the issue has serious electoral implications for both parties.
The question of who in the US government deserved blame for the September 11, 2001 attacks had potentially monumental implications for both parties. Republicans had blamed Bill Clinton for failing to act against Osama bin Laden while he was president in the late 1990s, while Democrats had blamed George W. Bush for ignoring warnings in the advance of the attacks themselves. The report was crafted as Bush’s reelection was looming, and with widespread speculation that Hillary Clinton would run for president one day.
The 9/11 commissioners achieved bipartisan unanimity despite all this. But they did so essentially by ensuring the final report would be “balanced,” and wouldn’t single out either president for overmuch blame. Critics from either side would argue that the desire for bipartisanship resulted in something like a whitewash.
The storming of the Capitol is an issue with very different partisan dynamics, and it’s difficult to imagine what a “balanced” report on it could look like. Any broad and serious assessment of what happened only has a realistic chance of making one party — the party of Donald Trump — look bad. And Republicans have been very clear that, for electoral reasons, they don’t want to do this.
In practice, the commission would spotlight an issue that divides the GOP
Even though Republicans would likely be able to prevent a bipartisan 1/6 commission from achieving much of substance, they’d really prefer not to have one at all.
That’s because, as Thune admitted above and as Liz Cheney’s ouster shows, party strategists view any discussion of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election result as a harmful issue for their party at this point. They want to make the 2022 elections about Biden and Democrats, not Trump.
Parties prefer issues that unite their own members and put their opponents on the defensive. But on this topic, it’s clearly Republicans who are on the defensive. The GOP base is out of step with public opinion on this issue. So they’d really like it to just go away.
Democrats, meanwhile, have electoral incentives to try and keep the storming of the Capitol in the news however they can. “Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party,” political consultant James Carville recently told my colleague Sean Illing. (McConnell has reportedly been sharing that interview to argue that Democrats are motivated by politics here.)
So if electoral and messaging advantage is the true goal, the commission would still be worthwhile for Democrats. But feel-good bipartisanship isn’t in the cards, and fact-finding would probably be difficult too if the Republican commissioners agree to vote as a bloc against any controversial subpoenas.
Do Democrats have fallback options if the bill doesn’t pass?
In any event, theories of how such a commission would play out are probably moot, unless there’s a surprising sudden shift in Senate Republicans’ thinking.
Currently, there are a few Senate Republicans, like Susan Collins (R-ME) and Mitt Romney (R-UT), who sound open to supporting a changed version of the bill (Collins wants the staff to be bipartisan, and Romney wants to ensure that they’ll finish by their end-of-year deadline). Many others, though, are dug in firmly against the idea and seem immovable. So the current betting is that the 10 GOP votes needed to overcome a filibuster will not materialize.
What, then, can Democrats do instead?
It’s useful again to remember the two main things such a commission can do — fact-finding and narrative-shaping.
As far as formal fact-finding powers go, a congressional committee can do everything a bipartisan commission can do; namely, it can hold hearings and issue subpoenas. One advantage the commission might have is unified focus on one topic — but that could also be achieved by establishing a special “select committee” to investigate January 6, as House Republicans did for Benghazi.
In the House, Democrats have majorities on every committee, so they can issue whatever subpoenas they want. The story is more complicated in the Senate, where committees are evenly divided due to the chamber’s 50-50 split. According to an analysis from the law firm Covington & Burling LLP, the only senator who can unilaterally issue a subpoena without Republican support is Jon Ossoff (D-GA), who chairs an investigations subcommittee. It’s not entirely clear whether committees could potentially elevate blocked subpoenas to a full Senate vote, but it may be possible.
Still, as Norm Ornstein, at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, recently pointed out in an interview with the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, while “congressional subpoena power is theoretically extraordinarily powerful,” it’s clear that “practically it can be subverted fairly easily.” Ornstein added: “We’ve seen instance after instance of people defying subpoenas, taking it to court, and stretching it out for years.” In practice, as we saw with various hearings during the Trump years, congressional committees are most successful with willing witnesses who want to hand over documents or testify (often technically under subpoena for legal cover).
And when it comes to shaping the narrative, it does seem that congressional committees would, more likely, be deemed partisan by the media, as compared to a special bipartisan commission. But the hope to establish one consensus national narrative around the events of January 6 was always a pipe dream.
Most Republican voters now inhabit an information environment dominated by conservative media outlets like Fox and social media similarly designed to tell them what they want to hear. Acknowledging that reality, the most Democrats may be able to do is push on forward, trying to gather facts and make a public case to their best of their ability — on their own.
The vaccines are holding Covid-19 down in the US for now, but it could come back this fall.
You’ve heard it before, but it’s true: This summer in America is going to be so good. After a year of Covid-19-induced fear, the US vaccination campaign and warmer weather will give the country a much-needed reprieve from the coronavirus and all the horrors it brought.
But what comes after the summer?
Last year, we saw that the coronavirus spreads more easily in the fall and winter than it does in warmer months. More than 330,000 Americans died from Covid-19 over six months during the fall and winter — an unimaginable death toll, amounting to nearly nine times all car crash deaths in 2019 and more than 17 times all murders.
One cause was the country’s relaxed response to the coronavirus, as much of America dropped its guard and precautions. But experts also blame the seasonality of Covid-19, as falling temperatures pushed people indoors, where the virus has an easier time spreading, and families gathered for the holiday season.
America is in a much better place than it was last fall and winter. A combination of the vaccines and natural immunity from past Covid-19 infections is suppressing the virus. But the country isn’t totally in the clear yet: The majority of the US population still isn’t vaccinated, and the rate of daily vaccinations has dramatically slowed, now standing at about half of what it was at its peak in mid-April.
Then there are the coronavirus variants. The vaccines do a good job overpowering the known variants, based on the research, but at least some variants do seem to overcome some natural immunity. So people in the US who are unvaccinated but have had Covid-19 before might still be vulnerable. Some experts also worry that natural immunity from a previous infection might not be durable — perhaps fading over time, potentially in time for a fall wave. (There are similar concerns about the vaccines, but vaccine-induced immunity so far has proven to be better than natural immunity in research trials.)
There’s a risk, too, that the warmer weather and potential seasonality of the virus will in some sense give the country a false sense of security. By letting much of the US (though not all) safely socialize outside, while Covid-19 cases and deaths continue to decline, there’s a risk that people will move on from the virus too quickly — and the remaining unvaccinated will come to believe, if they don’t already, that they don’t really need to get the shot.
All of these factors — the holidays, colder weather, variants, and at least some immunity potentially dropping off — could combine to create a Covid-19 comeback this fall and winter. The experts I’ve talked to don’t believe this will be a huge, nationwide surge — too many will be vaccinated by the fall for that to happen. But particularly in parts of the country with low vaccination rates, there could be local or state-level spikes of the coronavirus.
“It could happen — if we really stall in our vaccination coverage,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “If we increase our vaccination coverage, I’m less worried about that.”
This isn’t a reason to despair. Especially if you’re vaccinated, you’re extremely safe from Covid-19. Rather, this is a call for more people to get vaccinated — it’s the one way the country can guarantee another fall or winter surge never comes.
We’re still not done with the pandemic
The news on Covid-19 in the US is genuinely incredible right now. Almost half the country has had at least one vaccine dose. Daily new coronavirus cases are less than a 10th of what they were during a January peak, and deaths are down more than 85 percent from January as well. The higher vaccination rates, decline in cases and deaths, and warmer weather will soon, if they haven’t already, let us safely engage in the kinds of social interactions that were dangerous just a year ago.
This is all genuinely fantastic, thrilling news. Personally, I’m planning trips and vacations that I would have been too scared to do a year ago. I no longer wear a mask unless it’s required by law or by the businesses I’m patronizing. I’ll very soon see friends and family that I haven’t seen in a long time. As someone who’s vaccinated, I just don’t worry about my own risk of Covid-19 at all anymore — and many experts share that view as well.
But this optimism can be taken a bit too far. As much as things have improved, they’re not completely back to normal yet. Covid-19 cases and deaths are still near or above levels that were considered fairly high last summer. More than 60 percent of the country still isn’t fully vaccinated, and more than half haven’t gotten at least one shot. In some states, rates of vaccination are even lower — with two-thirds of the population not getting one shot yet.
“It’s good to celebrate at this stage,” Mauricio Santillana, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. “But we cannot be fully confident that this is the end of it.”
That large unvaccinated population means a lot of people remain vulnerable to the virus. We don’t know what level of vaccination is needed for herd immunity (the level of immunity that ensures infections won’t spread within a community), but experts believe it will require at least 60 percent of the population vaccinated and perhaps as high as 85 or 90 percent, depending in part on the variants we’re dealing with.
The remaining vulnerabilities could grow, too. Natural immunity could fade over time, or more infectious variants could pop up. As fall arrives and the weather cools, people will shift activities back to poorly ventilated indoor environments where airborne viruses can more easily spread. People could drop their guard too much, especially if Covid-19 cases continue to decline over the summer.
“I do think in the fall and winter, things will be much better,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “But we may very well see a bump, and we may need to put in some mild public health restrictions for short periods of time if we see surges in cases.” He added, “We have to be ready.”
Imagine a potential scenario: Cases and deaths continue to drop. The summer brings a renewal of social activities. Covid-19 starts to look like a thing of the past. Covid-related precautions, legal and voluntary, are widely discarded. In this environment, people who have yet to get the vaccine decide maybe they don’t need to — after all, the virus isn’t really a present threat anymore. So cases and deaths drop, but so do vaccination rates.
Then the fall comes. More people move indoors, travel, and gather for the holidays. Maybe a new variant becomes the dominant form of the virus in the US. At the same time, perhaps natural immunity is weakened. In a few parts of the country, such as the South and Midwest, a lot of the population remains unvaccinated. Suddenly, the virus starts to pick up locally, or maybe even beyond that, especially if vaccination rates are low statewide. Local and state governments may be slow to react, resistant to reinstituting restrictions they had only recently celebrated the end of.
This scenario isn’t guaranteed. Maybe the vaccines are so great that it turns out America’s current vaccination rates, along with natural immunity that perhaps turns out more durable than previously thought, is enough to keep the coronavirus at bay.
But it’s a risk. And it’s an unnecessary one given that there is a good way to avoid it.
There’s a solution: Vaccinate more people
The vaccines are great. Evidence from clinical trials and the real world has found that they nearly eliminate the risk of serious illness, hospitalization, and death from Covid-19. In Israel, which has the world’s most advanced vaccination campaign, a vaccination rate of 60 percent has let the country remain nearly fully open and see daily Covid-19 deaths fall to the single digits or zero — a big improvement for a country that experienced some of the worst coronavirus surges in the world.
But the vaccines can only do their thing if more people get vaccinated. America is not at Israel’s 60 percent rate. And there’s a good chance the US will have to go higher than that — given that Israel’s reopening still involves mask mandates and vaccine passports, both of which Americans are increasingly rejecting.
As long as there are “pockets of people who choose not to vaccinate, you leave the door open for Covid to come back,” Santillana said. “We need to stay vigilant.”
For lawmakers and other leaders, that means doing more work to get people vaccinated. Experts have called for a three-tiered approach: improving access, providing incentives, and imposing some mandates if necessary. That could mean, at the state level, partnering with entertainment and transportation venues to offer shots on-site, providing financial or other material rewards to the vaccinated, and pushing schools, including colleges, to require vaccinations. It could also mean, on the private side, employers offering vaccines on-site, handing out pay bonuses to the vaccinated, and making vaccination required to come back to the office.
For the public, that means more people choosing to get vaccinated. One thing that could help here is vaccinated people sharing their stories, given that almost one in five people is in wait-and-see mode with the vaccines, largely standing by until the people around them get the shot.
America just got through a pandemic year with so much uncertainty. It has a chance to stamp out one of the last bits of uncertainty — and the risk of another fall and winter surge — if as many people as possible get vaccinated. But it’s on everyone to make that happen.