Don't get too close to my fantasy
One of the early clichés about social media was that it would fulfill the Warholian promise of "15 minutes of fame" for everyone. Optimists understood this as a kind of democratization of attention, but that hope could not survive into the metricized era of the algorithmic newsfeed. New media channels were capturing greater amounts of attention, but this attention was not distributed evenly; it was canalized in various ways to maximize its exploitation. Hence the variations on the theme: "In the future we'll all be famous to 15 people." "In the future we'll all have 15 minutes of privacy." And so on.
Commodifying attention flattens the distinctions between when it has been pursued and when it has been imposed. Rarely would one get their 15 minutes all at once, and besides that, the 15 minutes is more like a quota you must meet than a prize — you need to keep working away at the "personal brand" until you've gathered up enough clout. (No doubt the crypto world will provide the means for measuring how far you've come along.)
In being commodified, attention had its significance both inflated and watered down. It was a kind of capital that everyone was obliged to develop, but that made it a mode of distinction that was at the same time not distinctive at all: Conventional celebrities and ordinary people were caught up in the same mechanisms of "virality" and were being metered by the same systems, being served up as bait for the same sorts of ad exchanges. These systems for channeling attention produce more "fame" than people's accomplishments merit. Or to put that another way, the benefits of fame, which is a nice name for surveillance, mostly accrue to the systems that circulate it and arbitrate it. Whereas the costs of fame are borne by the object that has become famous.
Which leads to the subject of "Couch Guy" Robert McCoy, who wrote for Slate about what it is like to be "investigated"and condemned on TikTok by thousands, if not millions, of total strangers. If you don't know who "Couch Guy" is, he is someone who didn't act sufficiently excited when his girlfriend posted footage of her surprise visit, which led to a pile-on of comments and scrutiny. "While the Couch Guy meme was lighthearted on its surface," he writes, "it turned menacing as TikTok users obsessively invaded the lives of Lauren, our friends, and me — people with no previous desire for internet fame, let alone infamy." This is apparently not a case in which someone posts something hoping for notoriety and then later wants to back out of it. Instead it seems like a classic "context collapse" situation, where TikTok's algorithms took a post beyond the sort of audience that the original poster had expected for it and put it in front of people who treated it as pure entertainment fodder. They then "participated" in it as interactive media encourages, as though the scene came from a fictional universe and had been staged to provoke their response.
Couch Guy describes this as the "sleuthing trend sweeping TikTok" (though it is similar to the true-crime podcast fan communities parodied in Only Murders in the Building). Ryan Broderick details the trend a bit more here. It's presumably fun to pretend that you can see the "real truth" underneath the surface of a particular video; It's analogous to how the app's algorithm purports to see the "real you" through what you watch. TikTok always asks you to decode why it has recommended something, a circuit you can complete by posting something in response and "participating." The surface content is necessarily just a screen for what can be operationalized beyond it; what's "really going on" is a story of its metadata, of what circulates and how. To "participate" in media, you have to add to what's otherwise self-evident — you have to read against the grain or speculate or extend what is there. "During my tenure as Couch Guy," McCoy writes, "I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my 'bad vibes.'"
This makes for a particular definition of "bad vibes": It is the feeling that licenses your treating someone like a piece of content. Maybe the "vibes are off," so you start dissecting; maybe the chronology is flipped, and "bad vibes" is the rationalization we make once we've disregarded someone's privacy and humanity. "The vibes are off" marks a lack of information that you then feel free to invent, plugging in whatever ideological assumptions you are operating from within. The vibes are always off, at least momentarily, when you are looking at some recommended piece of content and trying to figure out why. Accidental scapegoats like Couch Guy become the ultimate receptacles for that confusion, for how TikTok manipulates our attention and sense of identity.