Crocker’s meltdown racked up more than 2 million views in the first 24 hours, and scored him appearances on CNN, MSNBC, The Today Show and the rest. It was in response to another, far more high-profile breakdown: the public psychiatric implosion of Britney Spears herself, whose forensically-documented mental health issues dominated celeb gossip for years, and culminated in the imposition of a “conservatorship” in early 2008.

Spears is now contesting the conservatorship, with another hearing scheduled for today. But it’s perhaps less a question of whether Britney can escape conservatorship, than of whether any of us can escape a culture and politics now dragging us all into a similar state.

Britney Spears first entered the public eye aged 11, as a star on the Disney Channel’s The Mickey Mouse Club alongside Justin Timberlake. She was 16, in 1998, when she donned a schoolgirl outfit straight out of a porno-flick for the video to Hit Me Baby One More Time. The song shot to no. 1 and catapulted Spears to megastar status, right at a hinge moment in our celebrity culture: the transition to the digital era.

But as the internet became a mass social phenomenon, the certainties that seemed so solid at the End of History began to melt away, even as the web sent the culture that promoted them roaring into overdrive. Britney’s megastardom and mental breakdown encapsulated that moment: a sweet, heady, fruit, perfectly ripe and moments from rotting.

Her Noughties videos drip with baroque, jaded eroticism: a pure End of History vibe. From XXX schoolgirl she blossomed to bondage-gear comic-book villainess; rubber-clad space vixen; dive-bar stripper. The images play with innocence violated, kink and commerce, class inequality and love and uncontrollable desire.

It’s all overlaid with a glossy knowingness that suggests for those who only know how to play the game, everything is within our grasp. We all have freedom, this imagery hints, to warp and disrupt every imaginable social and cultural norm. We can do so because we know liberal capitalist democracy has triumphed, history has ended, and the world has been flattened to a giant playground for freedom, sex, and shopping.

But even as the pre-internet music industry was manufacturing Britney Spears as a global megastar along well-trodden entertainment-industry lines, this entire approach to celebrity was under attack by something new: the attention economy.

Internet-dazzled futurists at the time pointed to the emerging landscape of social media and virality, the self-creating media stars of YouTube and the like, and extolled the promise of ‘disintermediation’ to give the whole world a voice. But if the digital revolution created new ways to find an audience, it did so in no small part by destroying and replacing the “legacy” media.

As reporters gave way to “citizen journalists” and vloggers, the once-clear boundary between celebrities and their audience wavered. Crocker himself epitomises this shift: he is one of the first individuals to become internet-famous, rather than having acquired fame offline. He initially went viral on MySpace, before his weeping YouTube defence of Britney took off.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of Britney Spears

By Sarah Ditum

The emergence of figures such as Crocker drove an appetite for intimate-feeling, rough-and-ready voyeuristic material. Meanwhile, the sheer endlessness of the internet drove a suddenly bottomless hunger for content, whether true or not, which put paid to any residual self-restraint or journalistic integrity in the brutal contest for eyeballs.

Though Spears had been famous for years, digital-age celebrity was something new. Publications such as Valleywag and Popbitch spawned a thousand imitators all fighting for clicks. Paris Hilton, who (along with Spears and another former child star, Lindsay Lohan) formed the Holy Trinity of Noughties celeb-gossip, describes the paparazzi in this era as “out of control”. “Fighting over getting the shot, pushing each other against my car, scratching it with their cameras. It was overwhelming and frightening.”

Many of the songs on Blackout, the 2007 album Spears released shortly before her breakdown, convey a sense of relentless exposure and — as in “Piece of Me” — of being devoured, bite by bite.

In February 2007, Spears appeared at a hair salon. As a mob of paparazzi hammered on the salon doors, Spears demanded the stylist shave her head. When the stylist demurred, Spears grabbed the clippers and did it herself. According to the hairdresser, she declared: “I’m sick of people touching my hair”: as though making herself ugly might stop people touching her, staring at her, wanting a piece of her.

It didn’t work. Later that year, another swarm of paparazzi photographed Spears strapped to a gurney, being wheeled away into an ambulance.

Suggested reading

When dads own their daughters

By Sarah Ditum

But her longing to re-assert personal boundaries, and some measure of private existence, wasn’t in the interests of those around her. Following a similarly public breakdown over roughly the same period, Lindsay Lohan more or less abandoned celebrity, and has since largely disappeared from the limelight. But rather than allowing Spears to withdraw like Lohan did, the Britney-industrial complex sent her to rehab, then deprived her of personhood with the “conservatorship” legal arrangement — before putting her back to work as Britney Spears the celebrity.

Since she was deprived of control over her own affairs, Spears has released three albums and undertaken four stadium tours. We could debate whether or not this is an ethical thing to ask of someone who is deemed by the courts not to have capacity to manage her own affairs. But from the point of view of the fame machine, Spears’ inner life and personhood are largely beside the point. For there’s no money in privacy.

Lohan retreated into private life, and has been (by celebrity standards) skint ever since. Spears made, or was forced to make, the opposite trade – and the Britney-industrial complex has cashed in. Where she was reportedly down to her last few million at the point of breakdown, the New Yorker reports that she’s worth more than $60m now.

In the intervening years, the collapse between public and private that drove Spears and Lohan to breakdown has come for all of us. Every public social media post positions us as our own paparazzi: curators of our own micro-celebrity mythos, in exchange for the dopamine hit of one more “like” or “share”.

Suggested reading

We're living in a pornstar's world

By Mary Harrington

And in a world where privacy is increasingly meaningless, the fantasy-worlds of movie and music seem increasingly don’t cut it. Stronger, more intimate stuff is what garners the clicks. We’ve moved on from voyeuristically documenting the mental health difficulties of attractive young celebrities; now, it’s a race to give a platform to whatever is darkest and most baroque in the human psyche.

Chris Crocker’s own career trajectory epitomises the insubstantiality and sleaze of this new environment. Since 2007, he has cycled through every form of digital-era micro-celebrity imaginable, including attempts at reality TV and a music career, a stint in porn, and recent migration to — where else? — the intimate-seeming subscription porn website OnlyFans.

The hunt for dark, intimate, click-worthy curiosities has spawned a whole genre of (often female) confessional, including an entire sub-genre devoted to women losing things up their vaginas. If it’s not confessional, it’s grotesque: a Netflix dating show dresses contestants in given prosthetic makeup so a shark and a devil can go on a date. Drag queens read stories to children in public libraries. A male who identifies as a woman “breastfeeds” a real newborn baby on US television, and it’s treated not as child abuse but entertainment.

More subtly, every time we post, like, or share, we’re part of it. We’ve all acceded to the trade that was forced on Spears: hyper-visibility, at the expense of a private inner life. What does “privacy” even mean, in a world where hundreds of millions of people are happy for Google to index the content of their private emails in exchange for bottomless email storage?

It’s ironic, then, that Spears should have launched her legal campaign to end her conservatorship in 2020. For the pandemic has given us all a taste of the Britney lifestyle. Under Covid we were all suddenly in conservatorship: mediated, surveilled, shorn of autonomy, every movement controlled. And, also, pressured to go on working even as the norms of what we thought about citizenship dissolve around us, real-world social institutions collapse, and we transfer ever more of our inner lives into the attention economy.

The end of history, it turns out, actually was peak liberal democracy. We all laughed at Crocker, but he wasn’t just complicit in the new economy. He was also right about its tradeoffs. “All you people care about is making money off her,” he sobbed. “She’s a HUMAN!!!”. Crocker recognised the way Britney Spears’ personhood was already collateral damage, in the rush to transform her into a never-ending source of lucrative content.

Her song ‘Gimme More’ was fitting, Crocker declared, because “All you people want is more, more, more. Leave BRITNEY ALONE!!!” But instead of listening, we turned him into a meme. And now it’s too late: we’re all memes as well, passing figures in a parade of grotesques, our personhood discarded in exchange for free apps, hygiene theatre or a moment in the online limelight..

We need to reclaim a sense of what we won’t offer up to the entertainment machine: to find a way back to some measure of private life, as Lohan did. For it’s already becoming clear that a culture willing to replace private life with never-ending public carnival will be governed as Britney Spears is governed. It will be run as a therapeutic conservatorship by those who know best, whether we like it or not.

Crouch End. They live in Crouch End, where they just sort of… get on with life, while being dead. It’s when visiting the anonymous suburb while on business, that the hero of Self’s story runs into his own dead mother. It comes as quite a shock.

I imagine you might get a similar sensation when you sign up to Parler, a new social network. It’s Crouch End for the online Right. So, hello Milo Yiannopoulos (terrible infant; removed from Twitter July 2016), hello Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin (vlogger; banned August 2017). G’day Gavin McInnes (edgelord comedian, Proud Boys founder and ex-VICE editor; went to meet our digital Lord, August 2018). Wotcha Tommy Robinson (just a regular geezer; May 2018). Oh, and hello darkness my old friend: it’s Katie Hopkins (obverse churnalist; finally deleted from this life June 2020).

Parler is where the dead live — and right now, many of the living are weighing-up joining them there. The site has had a sharp spike in traffic since Hopkins’ one million follower account was banned by Twitter last month and she took her shtick there. Some are no doubt signing up simply because they cling on to Hopkins’ every word. For many more, though, the Hopkins defenestration has presented a place where they can escape the vast gravity of the progressive-run social media giants. We’re a community town square,” Parler co-founder John Matze told CNBC. “An open town square, with no censorship.” Matze’s heroes include Thomas Sowell and Ayn Rand.

suggested reading

The sinister bias of YouTube and Twitter

By Douglas Murray

So is this moment the real balkanisation starts? Could Parler be the Fox News of social media, to rival Twitter’s CNBC of social media? I suspect the makers of Parler, despite their claims of non-partisanship, would love it to become the ‘Right-wing Twitter’. The site already has tie-ins with Fox, Breitbart, and various Republican congressmen, including Ron Paul and Ted Cruz.

Parler’s timing is bang-on. Or more accurately, Parler’s time has finally arrived. All culture wars are a battle to frame our understanding of reality. But it’s only lately that the fact that the Left hold the commanding heights of most media has become The Story on the Right.

Since the BLM protests, as they have watched opposing narratives play out between their phones and their TV screens, many have increasingly lost faith in the public square. They no longer believe in the possibility of dialogue. Big corporations back Black Lives Matter; then say they aren’t talking about that Black Lives Matter. Hermetic lockdowns are vital; then they’re not. A mainly peaceful protest injures 27 cops; then a man pissing near a monument is jailed for a fortnight.

All of this cognitive dissonance has all led to a kind of mass demoralisation, a despondency which is well captured in the drift to Parler. It’s the same gust of frustrated energy that has fuelled the recent Defund The BBC campaign. The temptation is to take the toys back. After all, the first rule of any civil war is to build barricades across the major entry roads.

The dream would be to be to own the means of cultural production — and thereby, to reverse the biases of the progressive elite. But the dream is stupid.

There’s an old libertarian saw which says that you just have to “build a better mousetrap”, and the market will do the rest — yet every attempt so far to build an online space for the Right has proven why that isn’t the case. For a start, Parler itself is only the latest in a long line of attempts to create that. Depending on what year it was, the life raft might have been Gab, Telegram, Minds or Discord. None of those has reached critical mass because, first, critical mass is vast. Twitter has 300 million active monthly users. Second, because sitting in a digital room only with people who agree with you is boring, and sitting in a room with people who espouse a condensed, calcified view of your ideology is actively unpleasant.

suggested reading

Who dares resist the Thought Police?

By Paul Embery

Gab is the best warning of what happens when you concentrate a tendency. Once, it was billed as ‘free speech Twitter’. Its libertarian founders wished a hundred flowers to bloom. Soon, though, only those who needed the most free speech could stand to hang around in the speech swamp. It’s now better known as ‘Nazi Twitter’.

In the long run, it turned out that the Friendster and MySpace paradigm — the idea that the social networks would be subject to regular waves of Schumpeterian creative destruction — was a blip. The real answer was exactly what economists would have predicted: ‘network effects’, deeply embedded, would entrench a monopoly. The leading social networks at the start of the last decade were leading the race at the end. There is no reason they won’t lead us to the next decade.

Twitter, undoubtedly, has its head rammed up its own San Francisco filter bubble. It undoubtedly applies its ‘terms of service’ with cynical selectivity. But for the online Right to take this personally is to miss how much of the problem is mere economics. The big social media providers understand that certain strands of opinion just don’t prettify the place, and they must prune their garden to make it attractive to advertisers.

The most transparent illustration of this rule was in February 2017, with YouTube’s ‘Adpocalypse’. Then, The New York Times’ in-house offence archeologists dug up a puerile old gag from the world’s biggest vlogger, PewDiePie, Felix Kjellberg. A moral panic in corporate advertising circles ensued, at the end of which, YouTube had limited and demonetised a wide range of commentators, mainly on the Right, effectively ending the livelihoods of many who’d spent years building up an audience.

YouTube had made good ad money off hundreds of accounts for many years, yet they were happy to sacrifice the cash in the name of a broader goal. At heart, these platforms are advertising distributors — that’s their business model — and so, on the whole, they would prefer it if the foul stench of political combat went away altogether, so that the world could be made safe for the sale of Dove Go Fresh Aerosol Body Spray and Doritos Poppin’ Jalapeño.

Over the past couple of years, Facebook has consciously adopted building a low-conflict environment as their goal — deprecating posts about politics, and elevating cosier conversations. That still hasn’t stopped the CEO of Unilever imposing a moratorium on Facebook and Twitter ads until after the November US election, citing the toxicity of the online environment.

Which is why, as the political temperature has yet again risen in recent weeks, there has been both an imperative and an opportunity to send in the bodysnatchers. It’s obvious that certain people have been in the crosshairs for a long time. The present moment simply offers enough covering fire. When Tommy Robinson was disappeared from Facebook, it had been so long-telegraphed that it felt as though it had already happened years before.

Last week, YouTube deleted the channel of Stefan Molyneux, a libertarian and self-styled ‘philosopher’, also patently on their long-term kill list. Molyneux was an early adopter: he had been broadcasting for 13 years, amassing thousands of hours of content. The garden looks a bit brighter now. His livelihood is effectively over.

The naive might quibble at the distinction between Graham Linehan (RIP, last week), and Molyneux. One is the floppy-haired father of Father Ted whose views only skewed Right when it came to transgenderism. The other has a curious fixation on Islam and population replacement rates.

suggested reading

Don't give in to the bullying trans activists

By Graham Linehan

But from a commercial standpoint, the logic is consistent. Both can be answered by the question “What does the marketing director of Procter & Gamble think that public opinion looks like?”. The marketing director of Procter & Gamble thinks that the public thinks that transwomen are women and Islam is a religion of peace, because these are the low-conflict ‘inclusive’ views that cause the minimum of fuss, in the short term at least.

The hard reality is that the progressive Left controls the envelope of our digital public squares, and will do for the forseeable future. And, that’s at least a better option than the full dystopia of each tribe each retreating into their own balkanised echo chamber.

The first part of improving on that reality lies in recognising we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future. Because the thing we’ve learned over the past few years is that being banned isn’t simply a matter of setting up your stall elsewhere. Banning actually works. Milo Yiannopoulos’ fame died off spectacularly after he was expunged. Tommy Robinson has been reduced to a rump. Heard from Gavin McInnes lately? I suspect the same will happen to Hopkins, who has a broad but not deep fanbase — in that sense she’s a hard-Right version of Buzzfeed: click-farming gone malignant.

The irony is that this weakening of the dream of a digital public square available to all is driven as much by libertarianism’s red lines — the notion that any social media company has total purview over who it lets on — as it is is by the Left’s censoriousness. Parler is a Right-wing answer to a problem that can only involve crossing those red lines: acknowledging that some technically private things also have big public consequences. As such, it might be well a great mausoleum to internets past. But it can never be the internet’s future.